I find myself strongly disagreeing with what is being said in your post. Let me preface by saying that I’m mostly agnostic with respect to the possible “explanations” of consciousness etc, but I think I fall squarely within camp 2. I say mostly because I lean moderately towards physicalism.
First, an attempt to describe my model of your ontology:
You implicitly assume that consciousness / subjective experience can be reduced to a physical description of the brain, which presumably you model as a classical (as opposed to quantum) biological electronic circuit. Physically, to specify some “brain-state” (which I assume is essentially the equivalent of a “software snapshot” in a classical computer) you just need to specify a circuit connectivity for the brain, along with the currents and voltages between the various parts of the circuit (between the neurons let’s say). This would track with your mentions of reductionism and physicalism and the general “vibe” of your arguments. In this case I assume you treat conscious experience roughly as “what it feels like” to be software that is self-referential on top of taking in external stimuli from sensors. This software is instantiated on a biological classical computer instead of a silicon-based one.
With this in mind, we can revisit the teleporter scenario. Actually, let’s consider a copier instead of a teleporter, in the sense that you dont destroy the original after finishing the procedure. Then, once a copy is made, you have two physical brains that have the same connectivity, the same currents and the same voltages between all appropriate positions. Therefore, based on the above ontology, the brains are physically the same in all the ways that matter and thus the software / the experience is also the same. (Since software is just an abstract “grouping” which we use to refer to the current physical state of the hardware)
Assuming this captures your view, let me move on to my disagreements:
My first issue with your post is that this initial ontological assumption is neither mentioned explicitly nor motivated. Nothing in your post can be used as proof of this initial assumption. On the contrary, the teleporter argument, for example, becomes simply a tautology if you start from your premise—it cannot be used to convince someone that doesn’t already subscribe to your views on the topic. Even worse, it seems to me that your initial assumption forces you to contort (potential) empirical observation to your ontology, instead of doing the opposite.
To illustrate, let’s assume we have the copier—say it’s a room you walk into, you get scanned and then a copy is reconstructed in some other room far away. Since you make no mention of quantum, I guess this can be a classical copy, in the sense that it can copy essentially all of the high-level structure, but it cannot literally copy the positions of specific electrons, as this is physically impossible anyways. Nevertheless, this copier can be considered “powerful” enough to copy the connectivity of the brain and the associated currents and voltages. Now, what would be the experience of getting copied, seen from a first-person, “internal”, perspective? I am pretty sure it would be something like: you walk into the room, you sit there, you hear say the scanner working for some time, it stops, you walk out. From my agnostic perspective, if I were the one to be scanned it seems like nothing special would have happened to me in this procedure. I didnt feel anything weird, I didnt feel my “consciousness split into two” or something. Namely, if I consider this procedure as an empirical experiment, from my first person perspective I dont get any new / unexpected observation compared to say just sitting in an ordinary room. Even if I were to go and find my copy, my experience would again be like meeting a different person which just happens to look like me and which claims to have similar memories up to the point when I entered the copying room. There would be no way to verify or to view things from their first person perspective.
At this point, we can declare by fiat that me and my copy are the same person / have the same consciousness because our brains, seen as classical computers, have the same structure, but this experiment will not have provided any more evidence to me that this should be true. On the contrary, I would be wary to, say, kill myself or to be destroyed after the copying procedure, since no change will have occured to my first person perspective, and it would thus seem less likely that my “experience” would somehow survive because of my copy.
Now you can insist that philosophically it is preferable to assume that brains are classical computers etc, in order to retain physicalism which is preferable to souls and cartesian dualism and other such things. Personally, I prefer to remain undecided, especially since making the assumption brain= classical hardware, consciousness=experience as software leads to weird results. It would force me to conclude that the copy is me even though I cannot access their first person perspective (which defeats the purpose) and it would also force me to accept that even a copy where the “circuit” is made of water pipes and pumps, or gears and levers also have an actual, first person experience as “me”, as long as the appropriate computations are being carried out.
One curious case where physicalism could be saved and all these weird conclusions could be avoided would be if somehow there is some part of the brain which does something quantum, and this quantum part is the essential ingredient for having a first person experience. The essence would be that, because of the no-cloning theorem, a quantum-based consciousness would be physically impossible to copy, even in theory. This would get around all the problems which come with the copyability implicit in classical structures. The brain would then be a hybrid of classical and quantum parts, with the classical parts doing most of the work (since neural networks which can already replicate a large part of human abilities are classical) with some quantum computation mixed in, presumably offering some yet unspecified fitness advantage. Still, the consensus is that it is improbable that quantum computation is taking place in the brain, since quantum states are extremely “fragile” and would decohere extremely rapidly in the environment of the brain...
Thank you for taking the time to clarify! With this new info I think I can now give a stronger outline of my argument.
First, let me say that I do agree to a high degree with what Eliezer is saying in his tweet. Based on this, I can see why your prior for specifically “Aliens with visible craft” is so low. However, I strongly believe that his argument is focusing too much on a specific case, namely of “extraterrestrials with advanced technology coming from far far away”, which is why I also think he is overconfident in his bet. My point is similar to what you are saying about the breadth of Something Else but this time applied to your priors. Notice that I have been trying to refer to non-human intelligence and not aliens, exactly because I believe we have to be careful with our assumptions. For example, I could argue that what we are observing are malfunctioning Von Neumann probes from a long-extinct civilization, or glitches in the simulation, or aliens that are not actually super advanced, they just happened to invent warp drives early in their development and are now clumsily trying to observe other civilizations. I could even go as far as to suggest that our reality is created by our collective consciousness and UAPs are observed because some of us believe in them. I am not saying all this because I believe one such option is true, I am just trying to illustrate that in such topics, our priors should be selected carefully because there are many options that we could argue as likely using rhetorical arguments. Now my reading of what Eliezer is doing is that he is taking the most probable “incredible” explanation, namely “aliens with visible craft” and then he is giving strong counterarguments. However, the unspoken assumption is that this “most probable” explanation stems from our current ontology. If this ontology is wrong, for example, if consciousness is the fundamental substrate of our reality, then all these assumptions go out the window. What I am trying to say with all this is that, when we are trying to reason about events that would challenge our ontology if they were true and especially when there is credible evidence for such events, it is a bit of a shaky move to choose priors based on our current ontology and to hold on to them too strongly.
Another way to say this is that if you notice some evidence A,B, C and P(A|non-human intelligence (NHI)) is high, P(B|NHI) is high, P(C|NHI) is high but in the end you get that the probability of NHI given A,B and C is really low because your prior for P(NHI) is absurdly low, then maybe your choice of prior should be reconsidered. This is the crux of my disagreement. Because it seems to me that the community is doing the opposite, in that a low prior is used to subconsciously dismiss evidence which I believe to be strong and which, if considered carefully by itself, would indicate that maybe said priors should be reconsidered.
I would argue that two pieces of strong evidence exist in the current situation:
The stronger one is the (imo highly) probable existence of high quality evidence of objects displaying the behaviours given in the definition of UAP, namely “instantaneous acceleration without apparent inertia”,”transmedium travel”, “hypersonic velocity without sonic booms” etc. I am quite confident that this evidence would take the form of recordings on various types of sensors, say radar, optical / infrared video and possibly human testimony. I am fairly certain that such footage exists because:
The existence of multisensor data is confirmed for approximately 60% of unidentified aerial phenomena as mentioned in the 2021 UAP report. While this is not about objects with confirmed anomalous behaviour, I think this indicates that the US has the capabilities to track unknown objects with multiple sensors and this should extend to anomalous objects.
The wording of the definitions in the UAP disclosure act is extremely specific and care is taken to define UAPs as positively anomalous as opposed to “temporarily non-attributed”
Section 2 (4) of the same document explicitly says that credible evidence exists for the existence of UAP records (with the explicitly anomalous definition) .
Rubio and Schumer are in the Gang of Eight. The fact that they are sponsoring a document with such strong language makes me believe that they have seen clear footage, as this would make them confident enough to move forward with the UAP disclosure act.
Obama says so (To be fair, we should also take into account the previous statement about not having aliens in labs)
The Nimitz encounter (This is a video by Lemmino describing the whole incident. The summary version is that the encounter(s), if the witnesses are to be believed, have been captured in radar, infrared and directly seen by the pilots. The Nimitz encounter was described as unresolved during the 2022 UAP Hearing (see page 48))
Cases where UAPs exhibit exactly such behaviour exist in the unresolved incidents from Project Blue Book (see Lemmino link in main text)
Of the above, I think the first four are the strongest arguments for the existence of such data. Now, if such clear, multisensor data showing clearly anomalous behaviour does exist, then I think this is a strong indication that either a foreign government has made a technology breakthrough or that something even weirder is going on.
Again, the focus of the UAP disclosure act is clearly not on foreign countries. Also, if foreign governments had such technologies, I would expect they would be using it already.
The second one is the existence of the UAP Disclosure Act and the extraordinary wording encountered therein. The document is cosponsored by a bipartisan group of high ranking politicians. Additionally, Rubio alludes to there being multiple witnesses with high clearances. I admit that the whistleblower parts are shaky evidence for me too. But the existence of the amendment is imo a strong signal of something going on.