Just this guy, you know?
Dagon
Karma: 13,900
Humans (or at least I) have different feelings and perceptions of red and green. We have no idea how similar those feelings are between different humans. I have no basis for imagining what it would be like if my visual experience of red and green were swapped, but NOT my actual sensory inputs (same wavelength, same frontline receptor activations).
I can imagine related things, but they don’t tell me much about consciousness. I can imagine a universe where things I expect to be red are actually reflecting green light. I can imaging if English had evolved with different color words for things that parents point to as “red” and “green”, I can imagine calling a lime “red” and a ripe tomato “green”.
I guess I can imagine either of those things and call it “imagining different qualia”, but I don’t really think I’m doing that. I’m imagining something far simpler.
Hmm. I cannot imagine red and green being swapped. I mean I can imagine that any given red thing becomes green, but I think you’re proposing something different—that a rainbow is GOYRBIV or something and the color cube is just … different. I can pretend to imagine it, but it’s not coherent enough to tell me anything about the universe.
Given I have no clue if my actual internal perception of “red” is the same as anyone else’s, I’m not sure if there’s another kind of imagining you’re thinking of.
I am kind of confused about how we all collectively agreed to refer to the exact same feeling as “consciousness” while the details of it are in such great dispute.
I don’t think anyone’s really defined or measured the feelings to the point that we have ANY IDEA whether they’re the exact same, or even what “exact same” means. Most of us have agreed to refer to SOMETHING we each experience using this word, and some superficially-similar descriptions of “inner experience”, and “being there”.
Also, no, I don’t just feel it, man. Sorry about that.
You’re the first presumed-person I’ve encountered to claims not to feel it. Fascinating. Would you classify yourself as a P-Zombie, or do you have some other description of the thing that feels valence and preference over your experiences and behaviors?
(note: I’m very agnostic on free will—I suspect it’s illusion. But I definitely do experience something I call consciousness, and I find it easy to believe that other humans are rather similar in their experiences).
Seabright is also doing a bit of storytelling. A Claude fact-check:
The causality is softer than “textbook learning” implies. The Guiberts bought it as a country house, not a vineyard project — they didn’t yet know what they would plant. Enjalbert was a personal friend who discovered the soil’s potential on a visit. They didn’t commission a theoretical analysis and then buy; serendipity preceded science. Daumas Gassac
Enjalbert’s famous caveat — he reportedly said the site could produce a grand cru but it might take 200 years — is omitted. (Widely repeated in profiles of the estate; I haven’t verified the primary source of the quote.)
Irony worth knowing: Aimé Guibert later became the loudest terroir-mysticist in the business — he’s the “wine is dead” anti-globalization figure in Mondovino (2004) and led Aniane’s fight against Mondavi’s vineyard project in 2000–01. The poster child for science-over-tradition spent his later years arguing roughly the opposite.
It seems pretty obvious that metis and techne are better when used together than either one alone. Techne can accelerate the metis, and metis adapts techne to local nuanced specifics.
So, lend/invest nominal, borrow real, get rich on the spread?
Honor has many failure modes, but there are many elements of trust, altruism, and cooperation that don’t have very good alternative mechanisms. Let’s continue to seek alignment-in-depth and include this among the dimensions we track.
I mean, there’s never in the history of cranks been a good way to tell the crank that they’re cranky. Out of goodwill, you might point out the fundamental error if you see what it is, or that it pattern-matches very strongly to snake-oil. But mostly, just ignore them.
Note that there’s a major asymmetry—they have near-infinite time and energy compared to what you’re likely willing to put into it.
Many instances of this is just Goodhart’s Law—the thing that’s measurable (reading, degree, meditation) is divergent from the actual value (knowledge, wisdom, skills, emotional even-ness).
Great example! I wonder how similar this is to the automation over the last ~150 years of everything else. Not so much a disempowerment story (humans do keep control of the motivations and strategy), but of fragility caused by efficiency.
Like, say, farming and food transportation, there’s nothing machines can do that humans can’t, in theory. But unassisted humans can’t do it at the scale or precision that our civilization is based on.
Say more. Almost all of our models of reality, ourselves, and each other fall apart if you try to get more specificity or concreteness than their level of abstraction supports. The distinction between me and not-me seems more robust than most things in this domain.
Mind/body dualism seems very likely false (but not fully disproven until we can actually determine the source of decisions from prior measurements). Self/other dualism seems trivially true—the 4d bounding shape of my body is easily distinguished from others, and that distinction matters—I don’t’ experience sensations or emotions outside of myself.
What? Dualism is about a distinction between mind/soul and body, in the same individual. The ability/choice to distinguish different regions of space-time as distinct (even though boundaries can be a bit fuzzy, they’re quite measurable and experienced) is a different word.
The famous Bezos reaction to someone trying to remove duplication across teams, was to write
0 < 2 < 1
With the lesson being don’t deduplicate until at least one of the instances is actually successful.
edit: I got the sequence wrong: someone asserted that they should combine duplicative projects, or eliminate one to save costs, asserting “2 < 1” as a shorthand for “two is worse than one”. This is naively true, both for costs and to minimize customer confusion. Bezos added the “0 <” to make the point that there is risk of failure in new projects, and it’s often worth the expense in order to ensure that at least one succeeds.
The whole shift is that it questions what work “can’t be automated or accelerated”. Not denying Amdahl’s Law, but I think the primary unknown is how it applies.
I suspect the issue is fractal—it’s not about what percentage of tasks can be automated, it’s about what fraction of meta- and meta-meta- (and so on) tasks can be automated. How much human input and supervision is needed to come up with goals, break down into projects, sub-projects, tasks, sub-tasks, etc. And to supervise and deal with discoveries that the initial desire wasn’t quite what they want and adjustments are needed.
I have seen LLMs and their tooling move up the tree over the last few years VERY rapidly. I don’t have much faith in any prediction of future path—maybe there’re parts a LOT harder than we realize. Maybe it’s just context and speed.
I’m not sure I understand your model of individual autonomy and variance in susceptibility to different kinds of persuasion. Listening to the wrong humans is at least as bad as listening to an AI. And listening to nobody isn’t really an option in modern society.
as an example of my confusion/disagreement:people you’ve known for a long time are more trustworthy than people you’ve just met irl.
I mean, this depends entirely on which people you’ve known, and who you’re meeting now. Someone from a very dysfunctional childhood meeting a social worker is in the opposite situation.
In Bayesian statistics there’s the concept of the Uniform Prior—in the absence of evidence, assume all options are equally likely to be true. I often find myself using an alternative strategy, which I’ll dub “the masochistic prior”—in the absence of evidence, whichever option is most painful to believe is the best reflection of reality.
First, the only reason the Uniform Prior (or any other, really) is feasible is that there’s a shit-ton of evidence before you have to make any real decisions. For most things, any non-pathological prior is going to converge pretty quickly.
Second, the strategy of recognizing the benefit of preparing for worse events should be VERY DISTINCT from your probability estimates, or you risk double-counting things.
Hmm. I’m not sure I’m reading the words the same way you intend. To me:
You are somehow ultimately physical in nature. You are your body, or you are inside your body, or your body is inside you, or you possess a body.
As far as I can tell, this is a pretty simple truth. Are you saying that only misguided dualists avoid suffering?
You can avoid death.
What does “avoid” mean? I can spend MOST of my time avoiding thinking about the topic. So far, I’ve avoided experiencing it (though I suspect that won’t last). I’ve had people close to me die, so haven’t fully avoided it.
Please stop destroying what is sacred and precious.
And what is that, exactly? How is it destroyed by resisting death or denying physical embodiment?
Please be dissatisfied, and don’t forget the taste of dissatisfaction.
Wait, what? You just said NOT to fight these things. If I’m dissatisfied, why wouldn’t I try to change that? If I can’t or won’t change something, why would I be dissatisfied?
If there are tests, I’ll update my models and understanding. In the absence of such tests, I think “different substrate” is ALREADY one of the potential reasons people hypothesize p-zombies, and I don’t understand how c-zombies are any different.
Why do you think this was zombie hood, as opposed to “just” memory loss/alteration? It would seem just as reasonable to believe that you were experiencing qualia and consciousness during that time, but don’t remember it correctly.
Also, be careful to distinguish “you’re being naive” from “this argument naively ignores X and Y”. The second one is much more palatable (and useful, in case of actual truth-seeking).