I don’t really know anything about anything.
Avery Lea-Smith
Karma: 3
passing the Turing test of a conscious being guarantees the presence of the pattern-which-is-consciousness
I don’t agree with this. The Turing Test was designed to try to determine whether “machines can think,” but that doesn’t mean that’s what it’s actually measuring. I think we agree that it’s not feasible to directly test for consciousness, especially since it’s not entirely clear what qualifies anyway. (I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on e.g. whether the Chinese Room counts as conscious. I’m very undecided in that area myself.)
That being said, the Turing test is a test of acting-like-a-human, which is not the most reasonable proxy for consciousness by really any definition. Do you think all conscious agents have an innate sense for whether the entity they’re interacting with is conscious? (Why would we even need this kind of test or discussion in that world?) And it’s also human-centric. I’d say it’s highly unlikely that our experience of consciousness is the only one out there. If you asked me to complete a Turing test in, say, Spanish, I’d probably sound rather stilted and unnatural due to my non-native, textbook-register Spanish. Put me, four AI models, and five native Spanish speakers in a line, and I have my doubts as to whether I’d pass. But obviously I’m still conscious, incluso cuando hablo español ou falo português 还是我说中文. I personally prefer the Lovelace test to the Turing test, but I don’t consider either of them a real measure of consciousness, and of course the Lovelace test only works with at least a degree of communication capability anyway.
It depends. We don’t really get much of an actual depiction of what life in the hedonium shockwave will be like. If we take Raemon’s theory that it was some aliens’ paperclips, well, we can hope they designed it with Fun Theory in mind, but I don’t think that’s likely given the tone of the story.
This puts into words very well an idea I’ve toyed with that, as much faith as much of the mainstream places in evolution, nature, the market, etc., they fundamentally optimize for genetic fitness, reproduction, creation, and so on, rather than for actual happiness or wellbeing. Amazingly well-written; I can see why this post is so famous.
Edited to add: I just noticed what I’m pretty sure is a typo here (emphasis and brackets mine):
The creationism “debate” and global warming “debate” and a host of similar “debates” in today’s society suggest that memes [that can propagate independent of their truth value] has a pretty strong influence on the political process.
[...] we should expect the world’s memeplex to evolve in a manner maximally incompatible with Xhosa survival.
Forgive me if this should be obvious, but why would it be maximally incompatible, rather than merely indifferent? Just because their brains aren’t necessary for reproduction doesn’t mean that there’s any evolutionary incentive to actively kill them, either.
Also, for a belief originating in a region dominated by the Xhosa, Xhosa brains are pretty necessary, since they make up a good majority of potential hosts. It’d be different if some random person from, say, Venezuela received the prophecy.
I think this is exactly what was being referred to in the following sentence:
Skilled use of language is a really weird and somewhat self-centered criteria for moral worth.
The Turing test essentially measures the capacity for human-like language. If that’s your criteria for what entities are owed moral consideration, well, that does sound self-centered.
which will turn out to be much more prevalent than it seems
Duncan Sabien’s recent post on “social dark matter” is relevant, and a good read. A decrease in privacy will, by Sabien’s principles, most likely lead to a societal reckoning with quite a lot of social dark matter. This paints a rather hopeful picture of growing intelligence ultimately leading to growing acceptance, but the road there will probably be rather rocky.
they can (and sometimes are!) used
I would correct this to “they can be (and sometimes are!) used.” I imagine this is a typo.
I did something similar, but in reverse—I hugely cut down how much I used apps like Reddit or Discord by deleting the apps and accessing them only through Safari on mobile. The slight reduction in convenience of access was huge, apparently.