I think there’s a pretty strong argument to be more wary about uploading. It’s been stated a few times on LW, originally by Wei Dai if I remember right, but maybe worth restating here.
Imagine the uploading goes according to plan, the map of your neurons and connections has been copied into a computer, and simulating it leads to a person who talks, walks in a simulated world, and answers questions about their consciousness. But imagine also that the upload is being run on a computer that can apply optimizations on the fly. For example, it could watch the input-output behavior of some NN fragment, learn a smaller and faster NN fragment with the same input-output behavior, and substitute it for the original. Or it could skip executing branches that don’t make a difference to behavior at a given time.
Where do we draw the line which optimizations to allow? It seems we cannot allow all behavior-preserving optimizations, because that might lead to a kind of LLM that dutifully says “I’m conscious” without actually being so. (The p-zombie argument doesn’t apply here, because there is indeed a causal chain from human consciousness to an LLM saying “I’m conscious”—which goes through the LLM’s training data.) But we must allow some optimizations, because today’s computers already apply many optimizations, and compilers even more so. For example, skipping unused branches is pretty standard. The company doing your uploading might not even tell you about the optimizations they use, given that the result will behave just like you anyway, and the 10x speedup is profitable. The result could be a kind of apocalypse by optimization, with nobody noticing. A bit unsettling, no?
The key point of this argument isn’t just that some optimizations are dangerous, but that we have no principled way of telling which ones are. We thought we had philosophical clarity with “just upload all my neurons and connections and then run them on a computer”, but that doesn’t seem enough to answer questions like this. I think it needs new ideas.
Yeah, at some point we’ll need a proper theory of consciousness regardless, since many humans will want to radically self-improve and it’s important to know which cognitive enhancements preserve consciousness.
Yeah. My point was, we can’t even be sure which behavior-preserving optimizations (of the kind done by optimizing compilers, say) will preserve consciousness. It’s worrying because these optimizations can happen innocuously, e.g. when your upload gets migrated to a newer CPU with fancier heuristics. And yeah, when self-modification comes into the picture, it gets even worse.
Such optimizations are a reason I believe we are not in a simulation. Optimizations are essential for a large sim. I expect them not to be consciousness preserving
I think there’s a pretty strong argument to be more wary about uploading. It’s been stated a few times on LW, originally by Wei Dai if I remember right, but maybe worth restating here.
Imagine the uploading goes according to plan, the map of your neurons and connections has been copied into a computer, and simulating it leads to a person who talks, walks in a simulated world, and answers questions about their consciousness. But imagine also that the upload is being run on a computer that can apply optimizations on the fly. For example, it could watch the input-output behavior of some NN fragment, learn a smaller and faster NN fragment with the same input-output behavior, and substitute it for the original. Or it could skip executing branches that don’t make a difference to behavior at a given time.
Where do we draw the line which optimizations to allow? It seems we cannot allow all behavior-preserving optimizations, because that might lead to a kind of LLM that dutifully says “I’m conscious” without actually being so. (The p-zombie argument doesn’t apply here, because there is indeed a causal chain from human consciousness to an LLM saying “I’m conscious”—which goes through the LLM’s training data.) But we must allow some optimizations, because today’s computers already apply many optimizations, and compilers even more so. For example, skipping unused branches is pretty standard. The company doing your uploading might not even tell you about the optimizations they use, given that the result will behave just like you anyway, and the 10x speedup is profitable. The result could be a kind of apocalypse by optimization, with nobody noticing. A bit unsettling, no?
The key point of this argument isn’t just that some optimizations are dangerous, but that we have no principled way of telling which ones are. We thought we had philosophical clarity with “just upload all my neurons and connections and then run them on a computer”, but that doesn’t seem enough to answer questions like this. I think it needs new ideas.
Yeah, at some point we’ll need a proper theory of consciousness regardless, since many humans will want to radically self-improve and it’s important to know which cognitive enhancements preserve consciousness.
Yeah. My point was, we can’t even be sure which behavior-preserving optimizations (of the kind done by optimizing compilers, say) will preserve consciousness. It’s worrying because these optimizations can happen innocuously, e.g. when your upload gets migrated to a newer CPU with fancier heuristics. And yeah, when self-modification comes into the picture, it gets even worse.
Such optimizations are a reason I believe we are not in a simulation. Optimizations are essential for a large sim. I expect them not to be consciousness preserving