Jack Ross

A Pipeline for Gen­er­at­ing Syn­thetic Sab­o­tage Tra­jec­to­ries to Red-Team Monitors

• Jack Ross 15 May 2026 21:20 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: Stop Ap­ply­ing And Get To Work

  Oh stop it :D But yeah good advice, and I might add that people should join Equistamp! This was the “other opportunities” :)

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• Jack Ross 23 Jan 2025 4:12 UTC

  4 points

  2

  on: Why it’s so hard to talk about Consciousness

  Its worth mentioning that the majority of people are in camp #2. For example, in Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness, Frankish notes:

  Although it has powerful defenders — pre-eminently Daniel Dennett — illusionism remains a minority position, and it is often dismissed out of hand as failing to ‘take consciousness seriously’ (Chalmers, 1996).

  Further, in the 2020 PhillPapers Survey, 998 English-speaking philosophers were asked “Hard problem of consciousness (is there one?): no or yes?” and 62% said yes while only 29% said no.

  One other (more anecdotal) observation I have is that this distinction seems to often be at the crux of disagreement between moral realists and anti-realists. If you are in camp #2 and valenced qualia obviously exists, then it more naturally follows that qualia has inherent value and thus there is such thing as inherent value. However the r-value correlation between the two questions is only 0.21 so I may be missing something.

  

  (also if you are a moral realist, I think there are important implications for AI safety worth being aware of.)

• Jack Ross 18 Nov 2024 4:03 UTC

  9 points

  2

  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: What are Emo­tions?

  Wow, thank you so much. This is a lens I totally hadn’t considered.

  You can see in the post how I was confused how evolution played a part in “imbuing” material terminal goals into humans. I was like, “but kinetic sculptures were not in the ancestral environment?”

  It sounds like rather than imbuing humans with material goals, it has imbued a process by which humans create their own.

  I would still define material goals as simply terminal goals which are not defined by some qualia, but it is fascinating that this is what material goals look like in humans.

  This also, as you say, makes it harder to distinguish between emotional and material goals in humans, since our material goals are ultimately emotionally derived. In particular, it makes it difficult to distinguish between an instrumental goal to an emotional terminal goal, and a learned material goal created from reinforced prediction of its expected emotional reward.

  E.g. the difference between someone wanting a cookie because it will make them feel good, and someone wanting money as a terminal goal because their brain frequently predicted that money would lead to feeling good.

  I still make this distinction between material and emotional goals because this isn’t the only way that material goals play out among all agents. For example, my thermostat has simply been directly imbued with the goal of maintaining a temperature. I can also imagine this is how material goals play out in most insects.

  Other emotions, like fear, anger, etc. are different. They can be thought of as “tilts”′ to our cognitive landscape. Even learning that we’re experiencing them is tricky. That’s why emotional awareness is a subject to learn about, not just something we’re born knowing. We need to learn to “feel the tilt”. Elevated heart rate might signal fear, anger, or excitement; noticing it or finding other cues are necessary to understand how we’re tilted, and how to correct for it if we want to act rationally. Those sorts of emotions “tilt the landscape” of our cognition by making different thoughts and actions more likely, like thoughts of how someone’s actions were unfair or physical attacks when we’re angry.

  This makes a lot of sense. Yeah I was definitely simplifying all emotions to just their qualia effect, without considering their other physiological effects which define them. So I guess in this post when I say “emotion”, I really mean “qualia”.

  But I’m pretty sure that predicted reward is pretty synonymous with what we call “values”.

  Just to clarify, are you using “reward” here to also mean “positive (or a lack of negative) qualia”. Or is this reinforcement mechanism recursive by which we might learn to value something because of its predicted reward, but that reward is also a learned value.… and so on where the base case is an emotional reward. If so, how deep can it go?

• Jack Ross 16 Nov 2024 20:41 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Joe Rogero’s comment on: What are Emo­tions?

  There is no such thing as “inherent value”

  Does this also mean there is no such thing as “inherent good”? If so, then one cannot say, “X is good”, they would have to say “I think that X is good”, for “good” would be a fact of their mind, not the environment.

  This is what I thought the whole field of morality is about. Defining what is “good” in an objective fundamental sense.

  And if “inherent good” can exist but not “inherent value”, how would “good” be defined for it wouldn’t be allowed to use “value” in its definition.

• Jack Ross 16 Nov 2024 3:47 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Joe Rogero’s comment on: What are Emo­tions?

  “Values” happen to be a thing possessed by thinking entities

  What happens then when a non-thinking thing feels happy? Is that happiness valued? To whom? Or do you think this is impossible?

  I can imagine it possible for a fetus in the womb without any thoughts, sense of self, or an ability to move, to still be capable of feeling happiness. Now try to imagine a hypothetical person with a severe mental disability preventing them having any cohesive thoughts, sense of self, or an ability to move. Could they still feel happiness? What happens when the dopamine receptors get triggered?

  It is my hypothesis that the mechanism by which emotions are felt does not require a “thinking” agent. This could be false and I now see how this is an assumption which many of my arguments rely on. Thank you for catching that.

  It just seems so clear to me. When I feel pain or pleasure, I don’t need to “think” about it for the emotion to be felt. I just immediately feel the pain or pleasure.

  Anyway, if you assume that it is possible for a non-thinker to still be a feeler, then there is nothing logically inconceivable about a hypothetical happy rock. Then if you also say that happiness is good, and that good implies value, one must ask, who or what is valuing the happiness? The rock? The universe?

  Ok maybe not “the universe” as to mean the collection of all objects within the universe. I’m more trying to say “the fabric of reality”. Like there must be some physical process by which happiness is valued. Maybe a dimension by which emotional value is expressed?

  I also suspect that some of the things you’re calling “material terminal values” are actually better modeled as instrumental

  You are partly correct about this. When I said I terminally value the making of kinetic sculptures, I was definitely making a simplification. I don’t value the making of all kinetic sculptures, and I also value the making of things which aren’t kinetic sculptures. I don’t, however, do it because I think it is “fun”. I can’t formally define what the actual material terminal goal is but it is something more along the lines of, “something that is challenging, and requires a certain kind of problem solving, where the solution is beautiful in some way”.

  Anyway, it is often the case that the making of kinetic sculptures fits this description.

  It is not true that I “simply enjoy the process of building them”. Whatever the actual definition of my goal is, I don’t want it because it is an instrumental goal to some emotion. This precisely what I am defining a material terminal goal to be. Any terminal goal which is not an emotion.

  I also think you’re calling something universal to humans when it really isn’t.

  I should have clarified this better. I am not saying the intensity or valence direction of emotions is universal. I am simply saying that the emotions, in general, are universally valued. Thank you for correcting me on the way masochists work. I didn’t realize they were “genuinely wired differently”. I just assumed they had some conflicting goal which made pain worth it. This doesn’t break my argument however. I would say that the masochist is not feeling pain at that point. They would be feeling some other emotion for emotions are defined by the chemical and neural processes which make them happen. Similar to how my happiness and your happiness are not the same, but they are close enough to be grouped into a word. The key piece though is that regardless, as tslarm says, “emotions are accompanied by (or identical with, depending on definitions) valenced qualia”. They always have some value.

  I agree that there are good reasons to value the feelings of others. I’m not sure the Ship of Theseus argument is one of them, really, but I’m also not sure I fully understood your point there.

  Ahhh, yeah sorry that wasn’t the clearest, I was making the point that one should value the emotions of more than just other humans. Like pigs, cats, dogs, or feely blobs.

• Jack Ross 28 Apr 2024 1:09 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: AI Safety Sphere

  Sorry about that. I just tested it and it should be working fine. I deleted your account, so you can try signing up again. (also check spam)

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