fubarobfusco, I share your reservations about DSM. Nonetheless, the egocentric illusion, i.e. I am the centre of the universe other people / sentient beings have only walk-on parts, is an illusion. Insofar as my behaviour reflects my pre-scientific sense that I am in some way special or ontologically privileged, I am deluded. This is true regardless of whether one’s ontology allows for the existence of rights or treats them as a useful fiction. The people we commonly label “psychopaths” or “sociopaths”—and DSM now categorises as victims of “antisocial personality disorder”—manifest this syndrome of egocentricity in high degree. So does burger-eating Jane.
davidpearce
Shminux, by a cognitive deficit, I mean a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the world. Evolution has endowed us with such fitness-enhancing biases. In the psychopath, egocentric bias is more pronounced. Recall that the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, DSM-IV, classes psychopasthy / Antisocial personality disorder as a condition characterised by ”...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.” Unless we add a rider that this violation excludes sentient beings from other species, then most of us fall under the label.
“Fully understands”? But unless one is capable of empathy, then one will never understand what it is like to be another human being, just as unless one has the relevant sensioneural apparatus, one will never know what it is like to be a bat.
Shminux, a counter-argument: psychopaths do suffer from a profound cognitive deficit. Like the rest of us, a psychopath experiences the egocentric illusion. Each of us seems to the be the centre of the universe. Indeed I’ve noticed the centre of the universe tends to follow my body-image around. But whereas the rest of us, fitfully and imperfectly, realise the egocentric illusion is a mere trick of perspective born of selfish DNA, the psychopath demonstrates no such understanding. So in this sense, he is deluded.
[We’re treating psychopathy as categorical rather than dimensional here. This is probably a mistake—and in any case, I suspect that by posthuman criteria, all humans are quasi-psychopaths and quasi-psychotic to boot. The egocentric illusion cuts deep.)
“the ultimate bliss that only creating paperclips can give”. But surely the molecular signature of pure bliss is not in any way tried to the creation of paperclips?
Tim, in practice, yes. But this is as true in physics as in normative decision theory. Consider the computational challenges faced by, say, a galactic-sized superintelligence spanning 100,000 odd light years and googols of quasi-classical Everett branches.
[yes, you’re right about definitions—but I hadn’t intended to set out a rival Decision Theory FAQ. As you’ve probably guessed, all that happened was my vegan blood pressure rose briefly a few days ago when I read burger-choosing Jane being treated as a paradigm of rational agency.]
Eliezer, thanks for clarifying. This is how I originally conceived you viewed the threat from superintelligent paperclip-maximisers, i.e. nonconscious super-optimisers. But I was thrown by your suggestion above that such a paperclipper could actually understand first-person phenomenal states, i.e, it’s a hypothetical “full-spectrum” paperclipper. If a hitherto non-conscious super-optimiser somehow stumbles upon consciousness, then it has made a momentous ontological discovery about the natural world. The conceptual distinction between the conscious and nonconscious is perhaps the most fundamental I know. And if—whether by interacting with sentients or by other means—the paperclipper discovers the first-person phenomenology of the pleasure-pain axis, then how can this earth-shattering revelation leave its utility function / world-model unchanged? Anyone who is isn’t profoundly disturbed by torture, for instance, or by agony so bad one would end the world to stop the horror, simply hasn’t understood it. More agreeably, if such an insentient paperclip-maximiser stumbles on states of phenomenal bliss, might not clippy trade all the paperclips in the world to create more bliss, i.e revise its utility function? One of the traits of superior intelligence, after all, is a readiness to examine one’s fundamental assmptions and presuppositions - and (if need be) create a novel conceptual scheme in the face of surprising or anomalous empirical evidence.
Sarokrae, first, as I’ve understood Eliezer, he’s talking about a full-spectrum superintelligence, i.e. a superintelligence which understands not merely the physical processes of nociception etc, but the nature of first-person states of organic sentients. So the superintelligence is endowed with a pleasure-pain axis, at least in one of its modules. But are we imagining that the superintelligence has some sort of orthogonal axis of reward - the paperclippiness axis? What is the relationship between these dual axes? Can one grasp what it’s like to be in unbearable agony and instead find it more “rewarding” to add another paperclip? Whether one is a superintelligence or a mouse, one can’t directly access mind-independent paperclips, merely one’s representations of paperclips. But what does it mean to say one’s representation of a paperclip could be intrinsically “rewarding” in the absence of hedonic tone? [I promise I’m not trying to score some empty definitional victory, whatever that might mean; I’m just really struggling here...]
Eliezer, you remark, “The inherent-desirableness of happiness is your mind reifying the internal data describing its motivation to do something,” Would you propose that a mind lacking in motivation couldn’t feel blissfully happy? Mainlining heroin (I am told) induces pure bliss without desire—shades of Buddhist nirvana? Pure bliss without motivation can be induced by knocking out the dopamine system and directly administering mu opioid agonists to our twin “hedonic hotspots” in the ventral pallidum and rostral shell of the nucleus accumbens. Conversely, amplifying mesolimbic dopamine function while disabling the mu opioid pathways can induce desire without pleasure.
[I’m still mulling over some of your other points.]
It’s possible (I hope) to believe future life can be based on information-sensitive gradients of (super)intelligent well-being without remotely endorsing any of my idiosyncratic views on consciousness, intelligence or anything else. That’s the beauty of hedonic recalibration. In principle at least, hedonic recalibration can enrich your quality of life and yet leave most if not all of your existing values and preference architecture intact .- including the belief that there are more important things in life than happiness.
Rob, many thanks for a thoughtful discussion above. But on one point, I’m confused. You say of cows that it’s “unclear whether they have phenomenal sentience.” Are you using the term “sentience” in the standard dictionary sense [“Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or be conscious, or to experience subjectivity”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience ] Or are you using the term in some revisionary sense? At least if we discount radical philosophical scepticism about other minds, cows and other nonhuman vertebrates undergo phenomenal pain, anxiety, sadness, happiness and a whole bunch of phenomenal sensory experiences. For sure, cows are barely more sapient than a human prelinguistic toddler (though see e.g. http://www.appliedanimalbehaviour.com/article/S0168-1591(03)00294-6/abstract http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2006359/Moo-dini-Cow-unusual-intelligence-opens-farm-gate-tongue-herd-escape-shed.html ] But their limited capacity for abstract reasoning is a separate issue.
Eliezer, in my view, we don’t need to assume meta-ethical realism to recognise that it’s irrational—both epistemically irrational and instrumentally irrational—arbitrarily to privilege a weak preference over a strong preference. To be sure, millions of years of selection pressure means that the weak preference is often more readily accessible. In the here-and-now, weak-minded Jane wants a burger asap. But it’s irrational to confuse an epistemological limitation with a deep metaphysical truth. A precondition of rational action is understanding the world. If Jane is scientifically literate, then she’ll internalise Nagel’s “view from nowhere” and adopt the God’s-eye-view to which natural science aspires. She’ll recognise that all first-person facts are ontologically on a par—and accordingly act to satisfy the stronger preference over the weaker. So the ideal rational agent in our canonical normative decision theory will impartially choose the action with the highest expected utility—not the action with an extremely low expected utility. At the risk of labouring the obvious, the difference in hedonic tone induced by eating a hamburger and a veggieburger is minimal. By contrast, the ghastly experience of having one’s throat slit is exceptionally unpleasant. Building anthropocentric bias into normative decision theory is no more rational than building geocentric bias into physics.
Paperclippers? Perhaps let us consider the mechanism by which paperclips can take on supreme value. We understand, in principle at least, how to make paperclips seem intrinsically supremely valuable to biological minds—more valuable than the prospect of happiness in the abstract. [“Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about.”—Jeremy Bentham]. Experimentally, perhaps we might use imprinting (recall Lorenz and his goslings), microelectrodes implanted in the reward and punishment centres, behavioural conditioning and ideological indoctrination—and perhaps the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife for the faithful paperclipper. The result: a fanatical paperclip fetishist! Moreover, we have created a full-spectrum paperclip -fetishist. Our human paperclipper is endowed, not merely with some formal abstract utility function involving maximising the cosmic abundance of paperclips, but also first-person “raw feels” of pure paperclippiness. Sublime!
However, can we envisage a full-spectrum paperclipper superintelligence? This is more problematic. In organic robots at least, the neurological underpinnings of paperclip evangelism lie in neural projections from our paperclipper’s limbic pathways—crudely, from his pleasure and pain centres. If he’s intelligent, and certainly if he wants to convert the world into paperclips, our human paperclipper will need to unravel the molecular basis of the so-called “encephalisation of emotion”. The encephalisation of emotion helped drive the evolution of vertebrate intelligence—and also the paperclipper’s experimentally-induced paperclip fetish / appreciation of the overriding value of paperclips. Thus if we now functionally sever these limbic projections to his neocortex, or if we co-administer him a dopamine antagonist and a mu-opioid antagonist, then the paperclip-fetishist’s neocortical representations of paperclips will cease to seem intrinsically valuable or motivating. The scales fall from our poor paperclipper’s eyes! Paperclippiness, he realises, is in the eye of the beholder. By themselves, neocortical paperclip representations are motivationally inert. Paperclip representations can seem intrinsically valuable within a paperclipper’s world-simulation only in virtue of their rewarding opioidergic projections from his limbic system—the engine of phenomenal value. The seemingly mind-independent value of paperclips, part of the very fabric of the paperclipper’s reality, has been been unmasked as derivative. Critically, an intelligent and recursively self-improving paperclipper will come to realise the parasitic nature of the relationship between his paperclip experience and hedonic innervation: he’s not a naive direct realist about perception. In short, he’ll mature and acquire an understanding of basic neuroscience.
Now contrast this case of a curable paperclip-fetish with the experience of e.g. raw phenomenal agony or pure bliss—experiences not linked to any fetishised intentional object. Agony and bliss are not dependent for their subjective (dis)value on anything external to themselves. It’s not an open question (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-question_argument) whether one’s unbearable agony is subjectively disvaluable. For reasons we simply don’t understand, first-person states on the pleasure-pain axis have a normative aspect built into their very nature. If one is in agony or despair, the subjectively disvaluable nature of this agony or despair is built into the nature of the experience itself. To be panic-stricken, to take another example, is universally and inherently disvaluable to the subject whether one is a fish or a cow or a human being.
Why does such experience exist? Well, I could speculate and tell a naturalistic reductive story involving Strawsonian physicalism (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#Strawsonian_physicalism) and possible solutions to the phenomenal binding problem (cf. http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/body_and_health/Neurology/Binding.pdf). But to do so here opens a fresh can of worms.
Eliezer, I understand you believe I’m guilty of confusing an idiosyncratic feature of my own mind with a universal architectural feature of all minds. Maybe so! As you say, this is a common error. But unless I’m ontologically special (which I very much doubt!) the pain-pleasure axis discloses the world’s inbuilt metric of (dis)value—and it’s a prerequisite of finding anything (dis)valuable at all.
apologies shminux, I hadn’t intended to convey the impression I believed I was more open-minded than you in general; I was just gauging your level of interest here before plunging on. Instrumentalism? Well, certainly the price of adopting a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is extraordinarily high, namely Everett’s multiverse. The price of also preserving reductive physicalism is high too. But if we do relax this constraint, then the alternatives seem ghastly. Thus David Chalmers explores, inconclusively, Strawsonian physicalism before opting for some kind of naturalistic dualism. To my mind, dualism is a counsel of despair.
Larks, no, pragmatist nicely captured the point I was making. If we are trying to set out what an “ideal, perfectly rational agent” would choose, then we can’t assume that such a perfectly rational agent would arbitrarily disregard a stronger preference in favour of a weaker preference. Today, asymmetries of epistemic access mean that weaker preferences often trump stronger preferences; but with tomorrow’s technology, this cognitive limitation on our decision-making procedures can be overcome.
shminux, it is indeed not obvious what is obvious. But most mainstream materialists would acknowledge that we have no idea what “breathes fire into the equations and makes there a world for us to describe.” Monistic materialists believe that this “fire” is nonexperiential; monistic idealists / Strawsonian physicalists believe the fire is experiential. Recall that key concepts in theoretical physics, notably a field (superstring, brane, etc), are defined purely mathematically [cf. “Maxwell’s theory is Maxwell’s equations”] What’s in question here is the very nature of the physical.
Now maybe you’d argue instead in favour of some kind of strong emergence; but if so, this puts paid to reductive physicalism and the ontological unity of science.
[ I could go on if you’re interested; but I get the impression your mind is made up(?) ]
nshepperd, utilitarianism conceived as theory of value is not always carefully distinguished from utilitarianism—especially rule-utilitarianism—conceived as a decision procedure. This distinction is nicely brought out in the BPhil thesis of FHI’s Tony Ord, “Consequentialism and Decision Procedures”: http://www.amirrorclear.net/academic/papers/decision-procedures.pdf Toby takes a global utilitarian consequentialist approach to the question, ‘How should I decide what to do?” - a subtly different question from ’”What should I do?”
pragmatist, apologies if I gave the impression that by “impartially gives weight” I meant impartially gives equal weight. Thus the preferences of a cow or a pig or a human trump the conflicting interests of a less sentient Anopheles mosquito or a locust every time. But on the conception of rational agency I’m canvassing, it is neither epistemically nor instrumentally rational for an ideal agent to disregard a stronger preference simply because that stronger preference is entertained by a member of a another species or ethnic group. Nor is it epistemically or instrumentally rational for an ideal agent to disregard a conflicting stronger preference simply because her comparatively weaker preference looms larger in her own imagination. So on this analysis, Jane is not doing what “an ideal agent (a perfectly rational agent, with infinite computing power, etc.) would choose.”
Tim, conduct a straw poll of native English speakers or economists and you are almost certainly correct. But we’re not ( I hope!) doing Oxford-style ordinary language philosophy; “Rationality” is a contested term. Any account of normative decision theory, “what an ideal agent (a perfectly rational agent, with infinite computing power, etc.) would choose”, is likely to contain background assumptions that may be challenged. For what it’s worth, I doubt a full-spectrum superintelligence would find it epistemically or instrumentally rational to disregard a stronger preference in favour of a weaker preference—any more than it would be epistemically or instrumentally rational for a human spit-brain patient arbitrarily to privilege the preferences of one cerebral hemisphere over the other. In my view, locking bias into our very definition of rationality would be a mistake.
Tim, in one sense I agree: In the words of William Ralph Inge, “We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.”
But I’m not convinced there could literally be a Cow Satan—for the same reason that there are no branches of Everett’s multiverse where any of the world’s religions are true, i.e. because of their disguised logical contractions. Unless you’re a fan of what philosophers call Meinong’s jungle (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meinong’s_jungle), the existence of “Cow Satan” is impossible.
shminux, Strawsonian physicalism may be false; but it is not dualism. Recall the title of Strawson’s controversial essay was “Realistic monism—why physicalism entails panpsychism” (Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11):3-31 (2006)) For an astute critique of Strawson, perhaps see William Seager’s “The ‘intrinsic nature’ argument for panpsychism” (Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (10-11):129-145 (2006) http://philpapers.org/rec/SEATIN ) Once again, I’m not asking you to agree here. We just need to be wary of dismissing a philosophical position without understanding the arguments that motivate it.
shminux, what would be a “virtual” conscious experience”? I think you’ll have a lot of work to do to show how the “raw feels” of conscious experience could exist at some level of computational abstraction. An alternative perspective is that the “program-resistant” phenomenal experiences undergone by our minds disclose the intrinsic nature of the stuff of the world—the signature of basement reality. Dualism? No, Strawsonian physicalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#Strawsonian_physicalism
Of course, I’m not remotely expecting you to agree here. Rather I’m just just pointing out there are counterarguments to computational platonism that mean Jonatas’ argument can’t simply be dismissed.
Wedrifid, thanks for the exposition / interpretation of Eliezer. Yes, you’re right in guessing I’m struggling a bit. In order to understand the world, one needs to grasp both its third person-properties [the Standard Model / M-Theory] and its first-person properties [qualia, phenomenal experience] - and also one day, I hope, grasp how to “read off ” the latter from the mathematical formalism of the former.
If you allow such a minimal criterion of (super)intelligence, then how well does a paperclipper fare? You remark how “it could, in principle, imagine (the thing with ‘pain’ and ‘pleasure’).” What is the force of “could” here? If the paperclipper doesn’t yet grasp the nature of agony or sublime bliss, then it is ignorant of their nature. By analogy, if I were building a perpetual motion machine but allegedly “could” grasp the second law of thermodynamics, the modal verb is doing an awful lot of work. Surely, If I grasped the second law of thermodynamics, then I’d stop. Likewise, if the paperclipper were to be consumed by unbearable agony, it would stop too. The paperclipper simply hasn’t understood the nature of what was doing. Is the qualia-naive paperclipper really superintelligent—or just polymorphic malware?