EI

Karma: −36

EI 31 Oct 2021 6:10 UTC
0 points
on: Downvote stalkers: Driving members away from the LessWrong community?
The ones who matter wouldn’t care anyways.

EI 31 Oct 2021 6:01 UTC
1 point
on: Book Review: Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein
Language itself is part of the self-awareness program. The statements of a language don’t make sense unless it has a context of the speaker itself in relation to whatever it is speaking to. It’s a way to express the functions of one’s own algorithms. If you say speaking a language is a form of communication, then you might even argue that quantum superposition is a form of communication too if you break down language this way. What’s to say the difference between consciousness and physical phenomenon. One of the downsides to being human is that we don’t know how to think without language. Even if we do, we wouldn’t know how to express that type of thinking to people who share languages. When we say people share a language, there are still minuscule differences between the individuals and their own language model. The concept of consciousness thus breaks down even further when you take away the boundaries that separate things in our own language models.
A note on my presentation style: I’m rather concise and leave out too much explanation. I’m not as much trying to explain an idea as more of trying to provide one train of thoughts on the subjects that would possibly entertain exploration. When you write a book, you put all your ideas you have at the time down at once. When you engage in a discussion, the topics are always ongoing. It’s a different style of exploration and participation.

EI 31 Oct 2021 3:59 UTC
−1 points
in reply to: So8res’s comment on: I Really Don’t Understand Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Position on Consciousness
The mirror test seems to me like a decent proxy for at least one item on that list
This is merely a bias on our own part as humans. I think people are confusing consciousness with self-awareness. They are completely different things. Consciousness is the OS that runs on the meat machine. Self-awareness is an algorithm that runs on the OS. All meat machines that run this OS have different algorithms for different functions. Some may not have any self-awareness algorithm running, some may have something similar but not exactly the same as our own self-awareness algorithm. That’s where the mirror test fails. We can only observe the who-knows-how-many-levels of causality that lead to those animals to show or not show self-aware behaviors in front of a mirror. We can’t say anything consequential about the actual algorithm(s) running on their OS when they stand in front of a mirror. We are just running our own set of self-awareness algorithms when we stand in front of a mirror. It seems like these algorithms change according to evolution, just like other systems within the multicellular ecosystem that make up the individual organisms. We often see animals that demonstrate these “self-aware” traits because of similar evolutionary conditions, like cats and dogs have evolved to run a lot of socializing algorithms that mingle well with our own social algorithms.
Whether the self-reflective aspect of running these algorithms on our own OS makes one feel certain way about eating meat is in and of itself the result of the relationship between multi-threading the self-aware part and the self-preservation part in terms of labeling kins and such.
At this point we aren’t even conclusive about where to draw the boundary between hardware and software. We end up distinguishing between OS and simple firmware as conscious and unconscious. We mostly reduce the firmware down to simple physical reactions by the laws of physics while the OS exhibits something magical beyond those physical reactions in simpler systems. Is there something truly different that sets OS apart from firmware, or is it just our lack of understanding of the underlying mechanics? This of course touches upon the argument of determinism, which is just looking at the same systems differently.

EI 31 Oct 2021 3:42 UTC
2 points
in reply to: steven0461’s comment on: Tell the Truth
You don’t talk about because you want others to accept your position. You talk about it, so others have a chance to convince you to abandon that position, either for you to take theirs or something entirely different. How do you know that you’ve read everything to take up your position if you don’t bother giving others who have put into their own time and thoughts into this a chance to present their arguments? But at the end of the day, we just gotta what we gotta do that makes us happy.

EI 31 Oct 2021 3:02 UTC
−8 points
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Quick general thoughts on suffering and consciousness
I feel like people on here are just picking apart each other’s arguments without really dealing with the main arguments present. A lot of times it’s not very clear what the focus is on anyways. I think he’s just referring to a different perspective he’s read regarding one way to look at things. Your example of obsession is only used to discredit the legitimacy of that perspective instead of actually adding value to the conversation.

EI 31 Oct 2021 2:53 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Tell the Truth
In both cases of US local and global understanding of the word, it limits the scope of the discussion to be had. Once you start categorizing actions regarding specific issues in this way, you inadvertently start drawing boundaries in relations to other issues that are related to the issue at hand. It’s a failure of methods, not language. For instance, the issue of abortion is closely tied to the issue of personal beliefs, which is also tied to the beliefs and laws regarding the preservation of life. The method is merely a simplification for the political machinery that take actions on resolving these issues. US has its own local political climate, but it’s not to say that when other countries use the same rhetoric for the same functions, they would be much different other than the details.

EI 31 Oct 2021 1:14 UTC
−5 points
in reply to: Alex_Altair’s comment on: We Live in a Post-Scarcity Society
There is really no incentive to take care of these problems, else we would have solved them a long time ago if it were ever aligned with the goals of human civilization to minimize the suffering of the masses. We dream of these utopia as new technologies come to light and improve our lives a little bit at a time, but we focus so much on everything else that run counter to this dream, climate change is a good example, well it’s just such an easy example to use. I’m rather convinced that we have been operating on the evolution paradigm all this time, and it really doesn’t seem like it’s going to change any time soon based on how rigid the current structures are.
These utopias pacify people into complacency, just like dreams of the afterlife. Humans are resources after all. Even those who benefit from the system are resources to the system itself as well. The social hierarchy system is the computation that sprung out of evolution. Once we have the mental capacity to question the efficacy of the evolution paradigm itself, then we no longer constrained by the hierarchy of computation as we become a callback function to the parent caller.

EI 31 Oct 2021 1:09 UTC
−4 points
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: Quick general thoughts on suffering and consciousness
I think the the self-reflective part of evolution brought us the revelation of suffering to our understandings. The self-unaware computations simply operate on pain as a carrot/stick system as they were initially evolved to function as. Most of the laws of civilization is about reducing suffering in the populations. Such realization in evolution has introduced new concepts regarding the relationship between ourselves as an individual self-contained computation and these smaller chunks of functions/computations that exist within us. Because of the carrot/stick functionality, by minimizing suffering, we also achieve what the function was originally designed to do, to help us with our self-preservation. This is the first level of the self-referential loop.
In the second loop, we can now see that this type of harm reduction is mainly geared toward the preservation of our own genes as we owe our knowledge to the people who have found out about multicellular organism and genetic makeup of living things. We can then again reflect on this loop to see whether we should do anything different given our new knowledge.

EI 31 Oct 2021 0:42 UTC
1 point
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Tell the Truth
I’m sorry I wasn’t saying you personally. I don’t know who you are. I was referring to the writing I replied to. Maybe it was someone else who brought up the topic, I didn’t read enough up the thread, that’s my bad. I will try to be careful next time.

EI 31 Oct 2021 0:13 UTC
−6 points
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Tell the Truth
Your failure starts with summarizing everything under one single label, here we are dealing with the word “liberalism.” Most of us on this platform live in societies where such term have quite a ubiquitous understanding of the issues the word encompasses. The correct way to go about this is to stop grouping different issues under specific political policy memes. Instead of countering the social dynamics that has manifested on equal footings the word “conservatism,” we need to simply look at the issues themselves without associating any forms of political leaning into the discussion. Such social dynamic provides no productive values to actually discussing and solving the issues themselves.
Of course by public discourse, I can say that liberalism has applied more empirical reasoning methods because simply the demographics associated with those terms. It doesn’t mean that it’s not susceptible to the type of tribalism failures that you often see the other teams succumb to.
Political frameworks are simply the inefficiencies we have to deal with at this time. They are the social patterns that gets things done. We can continue to be trapped in this existing paradigm, or we could work toward a better one.

EI 30 Oct 2021 22:52 UTC
1 point
in reply to: cata’s comment on: Tell the Truth
The lack of recognition probably has to do with your own ability to keep things positive internally, so when you do talk about negative or depressing stuff, it has different type of emotional effect on you compared to most others. I don’t have as many “friends” as a result of this, but I’m able to find friends who I think matter for areas that others may not care much about for this as well. It’s really just a case of “even though you are reading this, it doesn’t mean it was written for you.”

EI 26 Oct 2021 18:23 UTC
1 point
in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
If you google “most valuable thing in the world,” it shows you a bunch of lists of fancy items covered with rare gems. I think civil engineering and infrastructural projects are much more valuable than these things when we talk about utility and how much value people can get out of them. It’s also useless if their utilitarian values aren’t being put to use. Efficiency and practicality also plays a huge part. A lot of those Middle East oil countries built a lot of skyscrapers in the middle of nowhere. They probably would’ve stretched their money a bit if they didn’t just copy existing civil engineering designs and came up with something that makes more sense given their own local ecosystem.

EI 21 Oct 2021 4:08 UTC
−5 points
on: EI’s Shortform
The reason why the surveillance dudes fucked with my call to the insurance company is because they know just how much I thought about it before while consciously making the decision to not to check up on the status just to see how things would play out. When you put threats of good times with this type of dynamics, you can’t help but not care anymore.
I don’t think those guys were aware of what they were doing. They were probably just trying to play games with me given that they have information that you guys don’t have. They are normal people bored of their jobs trying to do something that excite them. That’s why you can’t really trust an AI system to dumb fucks like them. Instead of punishing themselves for unnecessary interference, they punish me for speaking up about their bad behaviors. Sounds familiar?
When you are a piece of shit, everything you touch turns into shit too.
And then you see shit like this. Fucking idiots. They’ve investigated themselves and found no wrong doings. And then they go home and beat their wives and kids because they can’t stand not having authority over people they feel they should have authority over. Seems like my dad got into computer security. He’ll fit right in with these guys.

EI 21 Oct 2021 1:56 UTC
0 points
on: My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage)
I wouldn’t recommend psychedelics to anyone. If I had a choice to have never taken them, I would’ve chosen that than where I am today. You learn quite a bit about reality and your own life, but at the end of the day, it’s not really going to help you in terms of finding meaning in life that would ultimately be healthy for your own good as a mortal being. For me, things just seem quite meaningless. Before, life is still enjoyable in its own way. They threaten me with more good times, yet I can’t see how my life would be any different after that point. Oh maybe I get better sleep, maybe I get more human interactions, or just more choices in terms of which distractions I choose for the day. Before psychedelics I had my own preferences for the distractions, but now they all seem equally fine. When you lose yourself like that, it leads to depression. The easiest way to get out of it is to find meaning again, but that’s just easier said than done. The way people have constructed these scenarios for me have been on the basis of a normal person’s paradigm. They never worked because they can’t really measure just how far away from that norm I am at. Without psychedelics, I would probably still be able to find something to hold on to.
It’s like you meditate so you wouldn’t hit that dude who stepped on you. Sure, you don’t hit them anymore but is life still just as enjoyable or it’s different now? Life used to be much more flavorful, but now you’ve achieved more emotional stability/peace, life has become a lot more bland. They both have their pros and cons, which is why I think they have so much materials on the afterlife for people to focus on. Something to look forward to, no more good times.
I’ll probably just focus on developing empathy with my wife, something that I feel more worthwhile doing than anything else in the world. Meanwhile I was thinking of getting into Rust again, but it feels so pointless. The main difference between psychedelics and no psychedelics is whether I’m looking forward to it. Normally a person would look forward to something good happening in their lives, but if you feel like your life isn’t that bad at all, what difference does it make? That’s the key to the difference of having a flavorful life vs a bland life. I say this because it feels like something new since it hasn’t happened yet, but who knows how I’d feel a year down the road. I’ve always considered these in terms of time, compared to my own experiences I’ve had so far. Like when I was living with my wife, I had so much enthusiasm about so many different things. I think my day following the pattern of from the worst to the best has to do with how much I have to focus on. When you have nothing you feel strongly about, your days start off pretty badly, whereas you normally would just focus on things that you focused on the day before. Now everyday is a new day to me. I might focus on making music for a few days or whatever, but they never last longer than a month. That’s one thing I kept track of. When I look at other people who just usually do the same thing everyday without a hint of complaint, it makes me a bit jealous of how good of a life they are having instead of this bullshit of having to find something to do every single day. If I had a bit more emotional investment in things, then I would’ve been just like them, and I don’t have to look for shit everyday anymore. My wisdom tells me that having my wife in my life isn’t really going to change this very much. It’ll just be a hype for awhile and then the emotional investment will reach some baseline level. Hopefully regular physical and emotional intimacy can keep the baseline level rather high. Good thing for my wife that I don’t really feel like playing video games everyday anymore, but I’d rather have more flavor in my life than having to lick off the dried on food of a broken pot.
A good way to put it is that now I’m forced to look at the big picture regarding almost everything that I put any of my emotions toward. Before psychedelics, I could just stay in the small picture and get on with my life. Now I can’t help myself having to go through the whole process of looking at everything at all different levels. At first it seems exciting because it’s a new skill you’ve developed, but once it becomes a habit that you can’t get out of even when you know that you’d be better off not thinking too much, the usefulness becomes much more doubtful. The skill is still very useful if you just want to have a good way to analyze things, but when it encompasses your entire life, you just wish you can find some enjoyment of staying foolish for awhile. The psychedelics themselves won’t do this to you. You’d have to intentionally practice this, but the drugs definitely help in guiding you how you want to develop a new habit. I just didn’t know that by developing such habit, I would lose interest in everything. The only thing the drug does is to help you to be more self-aware while tripping. I believe I said this awhile ago: if you want the work you do while tripping to have any impact, you have to keep in mind/remember what it was like while tripping and carry on the same type of mental work while you aren’t tripping. I had a lot of time on my hands for the last couple of years, and I tried to follow the same pattern of thoughts I was having while tripping when I wasn’t tripping. Here I am today. I’ve had all kinds of ups and downs with different emotional investments as I recall different periods of my life. If you have things that you care about, little annoyances in life would quickly be forgotten about, but if you have nothing, you end up thinking too much about them. Whether they are worthwhile to think about or not, I have to consciously remove myself through self-awareness, which takes effort. Life just becomes so much more work than before where you just go about your day and let natural distractions guide you through life.
For awhile I got a lot of motivation from developing my skills and getting good at doing things, which is why I put so much time into music. Once you’ve reached a certain plateau of satisfactory, you look at how far you’ve come and how far there is still to go, you think what’s the point of climbing even higher. What difference would that make? If you have an ego, that’d probably be different, but I’m doing it purely for seeking out my own meaning. So I end up switching and find something else to get good at, and then you realize you are just gonna be doing the same thing again. Which is why I’ve stopped learning about quantum physics and Rust, knowing that there is quite a bit work to do there but feeling quite meaningless at the same time. Sometimes I take pleasure in knowing that I still suck at things that I’ve put a lot of work into. The idea of don’t use it lose it can still bring meaning into making progress. Now it’s just making progress for progress sake.

EI’s Shortform

EI21 Oct 2021 1:54 UTC

1 point

3 comments1 min readLW link

EI 21 Oct 2021 1:35 UTC
3 points
on: EI’s Shortform
Emotional investment is probably a more accurate form of currency than anything else. Probably the hardest thing to be self-aware of in terms of having control over your own life.