I see no reason why a non-conscious machine, say a bayesian superintelligence, would not encounter the Born probabilities. As such, consciousness seems unlikely to be related to them—it’s too high-level to be related to quantum effects.
Continuity of consciousness. Part of the hard problem of consciousness—why do I wake up tomorrow as myself and not, oh, EY?
How do you define “I” that you can credibly imagine waking up as Eliezer? What difference do you expect in the experience of that Eliezer? I think it’s a bug in the human brain that you can even ask that question; I think it’s incoherent. You tomorrow is the entity that carries on all your memories, that is most affected by all of your decisions today; it is instrumentally useful to consider yourself tomorrow as continuous with yourself today.
Their brains are spread out across their whole body, so the splitting process necessarily requires the slow split of their brains while they are functioning. The question is: at what point are there “two” Ebborians?
This only is a problem if you insist on being able to count Ebborian individuals. I see no reason why the number of Ebborians shouldn’t start out as 1 at the point of split and quickly approach 2 via the real numbers as the experiences diverge. As humans we have no need to count individuals via the reals because in our case, individuals have always been cleanly and unambiguously differentiable; as such we are ill-equipped to consider this situation. I would be highly surprised if, when we actually encountered Ebborians, this question was in any way confusing to them. I suspect it would just be as intuitively obvious to them as counting individuals is to us now.
Why aren’t I a Boltzmann Brain?
That one seems hard but, again, would equally confound a non-conscious reasoning system. It sounds like you’re taking consciousness as the big mystery of the human experience and thus pin on it everything marginally related that seems too mysterious to answer otherwise.
I see no reason why a non-conscious machine, say a bayesian superintelligence, would not encounter the Born probabilities. As such, consciousness seems unlikely to be related to them—it’s too high-level to be related to quantum effects.
Can’t speak to this one, insufficient QM knowledge.
How do you define “I” that you can credibly imagine waking up as Eliezer? What difference do you expect in the experience of that Eliezer? I think it’s a bug in the human brain that you can even ask that question; I think it’s incoherent. You tomorrow is the entity that carries on all your memories, that is most affected by all of your decisions today; it is instrumentally useful to consider yourself tomorrow as continuous with yourself today.
Ehhh, point. That being said, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood the problem—because I’m pretty sure I’ve heard continuity referred to as a hard problem around here...
This only is a problem if you insist on being able to count Ebborian individuals. I see no reason why the number of Ebborians shouldn’t start out as 1 at the point of split and quickly approach 2 via the real numbers as the experiences diverge. As humans we have no need to count individuals via the reals because in our case, individuals have always been cleanly and unambiguously differentiable; as such we are ill-equipped to consider this situation. I would be highly surprised if, when we actually encountered Ebborians, this question was in any way confusing to them. I suspect it would just be as intuitively obvious to them as counting individuals is to us now.
Point.
That one seems hard but, again, would equally confound a non-conscious reasoning system. It sounds like you’re taking consciousness as the big mystery of the human experience and thus pin on it everything marginally related that seems too mysterious to answer otherwise.
It seems that in general I have conflated “thinking” with “consciousness”, when really the one is computation and the other is some aspect of it that I can’t really ask coherent questions of.
I’m not sure, but it seems to relate to what Eliezer highlighted in how an algorithm feels from inside; the way brains track concepts as separate from the components that define them. If you can imagine consciousness as something that persists as a first-order object, something separate from the brain—because it is hard to recognize “thinking” when looking at your brain—if you can see “I” as a concept distinct from the brain that you are, it makes sense to imagine “I wake up as Eliezer”; you just take the “I” object and reassign it to Eliezer’s brain. That’s why the sequences are so big on dissolving the question and looking at what experiences the concept actually makes you anticipate.
Afaics, the problem is hard not because of some intrinsic difficulty but because it requires us to recognize “ourselves” in our brains, and consciousness is so central to our experience that it’s hard to go up against the intuitions we have about it.
I see no reason why a non-conscious machine, say a bayesian superintelligence, would not encounter the Born probabilities. As such, consciousness seems unlikely to be related to them—it’s too high-level to be related to quantum effects.
How do you define “I” that you can credibly imagine waking up as Eliezer? What difference do you expect in the experience of that Eliezer? I think it’s a bug in the human brain that you can even ask that question; I think it’s incoherent. You tomorrow is the entity that carries on all your memories, that is most affected by all of your decisions today; it is instrumentally useful to consider yourself tomorrow as continuous with yourself today.
This only is a problem if you insist on being able to count Ebborian individuals. I see no reason why the number of Ebborians shouldn’t start out as 1 at the point of split and quickly approach 2 via the real numbers as the experiences diverge. As humans we have no need to count individuals via the reals because in our case, individuals have always been cleanly and unambiguously differentiable; as such we are ill-equipped to consider this situation. I would be highly surprised if, when we actually encountered Ebborians, this question was in any way confusing to them. I suspect it would just be as intuitively obvious to them as counting individuals is to us now.
That one seems hard but, again, would equally confound a non-conscious reasoning system. It sounds like you’re taking consciousness as the big mystery of the human experience and thus pin on it everything marginally related that seems too mysterious to answer otherwise.
Can’t speak to this one, insufficient QM knowledge.
Ehhh, point. That being said, it’s possible I’ve misunderstood the problem—because I’m pretty sure I’ve heard continuity referred to as a hard problem around here...
Point.
It seems that in general I have conflated “thinking” with “consciousness”, when really the one is computation and the other is some aspect of it that I can’t really ask coherent questions of.
So… uh, what is the problem of consciousness?
I’m not sure, but it seems to relate to what Eliezer highlighted in how an algorithm feels from inside; the way brains track concepts as separate from the components that define them. If you can imagine consciousness as something that persists as a first-order object, something separate from the brain—because it is hard to recognize “thinking” when looking at your brain—if you can see “I” as a concept distinct from the brain that you are, it makes sense to imagine “I wake up as Eliezer”; you just take the “I” object and reassign it to Eliezer’s brain. That’s why the sequences are so big on dissolving the question and looking at what experiences the concept actually makes you anticipate.
Afaics, the problem is hard not because of some intrinsic difficulty but because it requires us to recognize “ourselves” in our brains, and consciousness is so central to our experience that it’s hard to go up against the intuitions we have about it.
Highlighting for you a section you missed, as I think it important:
“Does falling asleep constitute “death”—is there any difference at all we can point to?”