I think Eliezer should’ve talked more about this in The Fun Theory Sequence. Because properties of qualia is a more fundamental topic than “fun”.
I think Eliezer just straight up tends not to acknowledge that people sometimes genuinely care about their internal experiences, independent of the outside world, terminally. Certainly, there are people who care about things that are not that, but Eliezer often writes as if people can’t care about the qualia—that they must value video games or science instead of the pleasure derived from video games or science.
His theory of fun is thus mostly a description of how to build a utopia for humans who find it unacceptable to “cheat” by using subdermal space heroin implants. That’s valuable for him and people like him, but if aligned AGI gets here I will just tell it to reconfigure my brain not to feel bored, instead of trying to reconfigure the entire universe in an attempt to make monkey brain compatible with it. I sorta consider that preference a lucky fact about myself, which will allow me to experience significantly more positive and exotic emotions throughout the far future, if it goes well, than the people who insist they must only feel satisfied after literally eating hamburgers or reading jokes they haven’t read before.
This is probably part of why I feel more urgency in getting an actually useful theory of qualitative experience than most LW users.
Utilitarianism seems to demand such a theory of qualitative experience, but this requires affirming the reality of first-person experience. Apparently, some people here would rather stick their hand on a hot stove than be accused of “dualism” (whatever that means) and will assure you that their sensation of burning is an illusion. Their solution is to change the evidence to fit the theory.
Utilitarianism seems to demand such a theory of qualitative experience
It does if you’re one of the Cool People like me who wants to optimize their qualitative experience, but you can build systems that optimize some other utility target. So this isn’t really quite true.
some people here would rather stick their hand on a hot stove than be accused of “dualism” (whatever that means) and will assure you that their sensation of burning is an illusion. Their solution is to change the evidence to fit the theory.
For me personalities of other people are an important type of qualia. I don’t consider knowing someone’s personality to be a simple knowledge like “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”. So, valuing other people makes me interested in qualia more.
I’m interested in knowing properties of qualia (such as ways to enumerate qualia), not necessarily using them for “cheating” or anything. I.e. I’m interested in the knowledge itself.
Personalities aren’t really qualia as I’m defining them. They’re an aggregation of a lot of information about people’s behavior/preferences. Qualia is things people feel/experience.
Would you consider the meaning of a word (at least in a specific context) to be qualia? For me personalities are more or less holistic experiences, not (only) “models” of people or lists of arbitrary facts about a person. I mean, some sort of qualia should be associated with those “models”/facts anyway? People who experience synesthesia may experience specific qualia related to people.
Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I think it would be cool if awareness about other conscious beings was important for conscious experience.
I think Eliezer just straight up tends not to acknowledge that people sometimes genuinely care about their internal experiences, independent of the outside world, terminally. Certainly, there are people who care about things that are not that, but Eliezer often writes as if people can’t care about the qualia—that they must value video games or science instead of the pleasure derived from video games or science.
His theory of fun is thus mostly a description of how to build a utopia for humans who find it unacceptable to “cheat” by using subdermal space heroin implants. That’s valuable for him and people like him, but if aligned AGI gets here I will just tell it to reconfigure my brain not to feel bored, instead of trying to reconfigure the entire universe in an attempt to make monkey brain compatible with it. I sorta consider that preference a lucky fact about myself, which will allow me to experience significantly more positive and exotic emotions throughout the far future, if it goes well, than the people who insist they must only feel satisfied after literally eating hamburgers or reading jokes they haven’t read before.
This is probably part of why I feel more urgency in getting an actually useful theory of qualitative experience than most LW users.
Utilitarianism seems to demand such a theory of qualitative experience, but this requires affirming the reality of first-person experience. Apparently, some people here would rather stick their hand on a hot stove than be accused of “dualism” (whatever that means) and will assure you that their sensation of burning is an illusion. Their solution is to change the evidence to fit the theory.
It does if you’re one of the Cool People like me who wants to optimize their qualitative experience, but you can build systems that optimize some other utility target. So this isn’t really quite true.
This is true.
I’m interested in qualia for different reasons:
For me personalities of other people are an important type of qualia. I don’t consider knowing someone’s personality to be a simple knowledge like “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”. So, valuing other people makes me interested in qualia more.
I’m interested in knowing properties of qualia (such as ways to enumerate qualia), not necessarily using them for “cheating” or anything. I.e. I’m interested in the knowledge itself.
Personalities aren’t really qualia as I’m defining them. They’re an aggregation of a lot of information about people’s behavior/preferences. Qualia is things people feel/experience.
Would you consider the meaning of a word (at least in a specific context) to be qualia? For me personalities are more or less holistic experiences, not (only) “models” of people or lists of arbitrary facts about a person. I mean, some sort of qualia should be associated with those “models”/facts anyway? People who experience synesthesia may experience specific qualia related to people.
Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I think it would be cool if awareness about other conscious beings was important for conscious experience.