1. This is, as has been remarked in another comment, pretty much Dust theory. See also Moravec’s concise take on the topic, referenced in the Dust theory FAQ. Doing a search for it on LW might also prove helpful for previous discussions.
2. “that was already there”? What do you mean by this? Would you prefer to use the term ‘magical reality fluid’ instead of “exists”/”extant”/”real”/”there” etc, to mark your confusion about this? If you instead feel like you aren’t confused about these terms, please provide (a link to) a solution. You can find the problem statement in The Anthropic Trilemma.
3. Eliezer deals with this using average utilitarianism, depending on whether or not you agree with rescuability (see below).
4. GAZP vs GLUT talks about the difference between a cellphone transmitting information of consciousness vs the actual conscious brain on the other end, and generalizes it to arbitrary “interpretations”. That is, there are parts of the computation that are merely “interpreting”, informing you about consciousness and others that are “actually” instantiating. It may not be clear what exactly the crucial difference is yet, but I think it might be possible to rescue the difference, even if you can construct continuums to mess with the notion. This is of course deeply tied to 2.
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It may seem that my takeaway from your post is mostly negative, this is not the case. I appreciate this post, it was very well organized despite tackling some very hairy issues, which made it easier to respond to. I do feel like LW could solve this somewhat satisfactorily, perhaps some people already have and don’t bother pointing the rest of us/are lost in the noise?
To further elaborate 4: your example of the string “1” being a conscious agent because you can “unpack” it into an agent really feels like it shouldn’t count: you’re just throwing away the “1” and replaying a separate recording of something that was conscious. This sounds about as much of a non-sequitur as “I am next to this pen, so this pen is conscious”.
We could, however, make it more interesting by making the computation depend “crucially” on the input. But what counts?
Suppose I have a program that turns noise into a conscious agent (much like generative models can turn a noise vector into a face, say). If we now seed this with a waterfall, is the waterfall now a part of the computation, enough to be granted some sentience/moral patienthood? I think the usual answer is “all the non-trivial work is being done by the program, not the random seed”, as Scott Aaronson seems to say here. (He also makes the interesting claim of “has to participate fully in the arrow of time to be conscious”, which would disqualify caching and replaying.)
But this can be made a little more confusing, because it’s hard to tell which bit is non-trivial from the outside: suppose I save and encrypt the conscious-generating-program. This looks like random noise from the outside, and will pass all randomness tests. Now I have another program with the stored key decrypt it and run it. From the outside, you might disregard the random-seed-looking-thingy and instead try to analyze the decryption program, thinking that’s where the magic is.
I’d love to hear about ideas to pin down the difference between Seeding and Decrypting in general, for arbitrary interpretations. It seems within reach, and like a good first step, since the two lie on roughly opposite ends of a spectrum of “cruciality” when the system breaks down into two or more modules.
Responses to your four final notes:
1. This is, as has been remarked in another comment, pretty much Dust theory. See also Moravec’s concise take on the topic, referenced in the Dust theory FAQ. Doing a search for it on LW might also prove helpful for previous discussions.
2. “that was already there”? What do you mean by this? Would you prefer to use the term ‘magical reality fluid’ instead of “exists”/”extant”/”real”/”there” etc, to mark your confusion about this? If you instead feel like you aren’t confused about these terms, please provide (a link to) a solution. You can find the problem statement in The Anthropic Trilemma.
3. Eliezer deals with this using average utilitarianism, depending on whether or not you agree with rescuability (see below).
4. GAZP vs GLUT talks about the difference between a cellphone transmitting information of consciousness vs the actual conscious brain on the other end, and generalizes it to arbitrary “interpretations”. That is, there are parts of the computation that are merely “interpreting”, informing you about consciousness and others that are “actually” instantiating. It may not be clear what exactly the crucial difference is yet, but I think it might be possible to rescue the difference, even if you can construct continuums to mess with the notion. This is of course deeply tied to 2.
----
It may seem that my takeaway from your post is mostly negative, this is not the case. I appreciate this post, it was very well organized despite tackling some very hairy issues, which made it easier to respond to. I do feel like LW could solve this somewhat satisfactorily, perhaps some people already have and don’t bother pointing the rest of us/are lost in the noise?
To further elaborate 4: your example of the string “1” being a conscious agent because you can “unpack” it into an agent really feels like it shouldn’t count: you’re just throwing away the “1” and replaying a separate recording of something that was conscious. This sounds about as much of a non-sequitur as “I am next to this pen, so this pen is conscious”.
We could, however, make it more interesting by making the computation depend “crucially” on the input. But what counts?
Suppose I have a program that turns noise into a conscious agent (much like generative models can turn a noise vector into a face, say). If we now seed this with a waterfall, is the waterfall now a part of the computation, enough to be granted some sentience/moral patienthood? I think the usual answer is “all the non-trivial work is being done by the program, not the random seed”, as Scott Aaronson seems to say here. (He also makes the interesting claim of “has to participate fully in the arrow of time to be conscious”, which would disqualify caching and replaying.)
But this can be made a little more confusing, because it’s hard to tell which bit is non-trivial from the outside: suppose I save and encrypt the conscious-generating-program. This looks like random noise from the outside, and will pass all randomness tests. Now I have another program with the stored key decrypt it and run it. From the outside, you might disregard the random-seed-looking-thingy and instead try to analyze the decryption program, thinking that’s where the magic is.
I’d love to hear about ideas to pin down the difference between Seeding and Decrypting in general, for arbitrary interpretations. It seems within reach, and like a good first step, since the two lie on roughly opposite ends of a spectrum of “cruciality” when the system breaks down into two or more modules.