JavierCC

• JavierCC 2 Apr 2023 21:49 UTC

  11 points

  9

  in reply to: Archimedes’s comment on: Some thought ex­per­i­ments on digi­tal consciousness

  The cognitive system embedded within the body that is writing now (‘me’) sometimes registers certain things (‘feelings’) and sometimes doesn’t, I call the first “being conscious” and the second “not being conscious”. Then I notice that not all of the things that my body’s sensory systems register are registered as ‘conscious feelings’ all of the time (even while conscious), and that some people even report not being aware of their own sensorial perception of things like vision.

  Whatever thing causes that difference in which things get recorded is what I call ‘consciousness’. Now I ask how that works.

  Supposing each scenario could be definitively classified as conscious or not, would that help you make any predictions about the world?

  Presumably, that it has the type of cognitive structures that allow an entity to feel (and maybe report) consistently feelings about the same sensory inputs in similar contexts.

  I don’t know how well our intuition about ‘consciousness’ tracks any natural phenomenon, but the consistent shifting of attention (conscious VS subconscious) is a fact as empirically-proven as any can be.

• JavierCC 15 May 2023 9:00 UTC

  8 points

  3

  in reply to: PashaKamyshev’s comment on: Uploads are Impossible

  Even if you maintain that the brain is the “sole” source of cognition, the brain is still an organ and is heavily affected by the operation of other organs.

  Sure but if all of the cognition is within the brain, the rest can be conceivably simulated as inputs to the brain, we might also have to simulate an environment for it.

  Yours is ultimately a thesis about embodied cognition, as I understand it. If cognition is strongly embodied, then a functional human brain will need to have a very accurately simulated/​emulated human body. If cognition is weakly embodied, and the brain’s digitalised neuroplasticity is flexible enough, we can get away with not simulating an actual human body.

  I don’t think the debate is settled.

• JavierCC 2 Jan 2023 14:37 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: The Thing­ness of Things

  I don’t think we know to what extent abstract objects need to share isomorphic neural structures that represent them in different individuals.

  To present an extreme example, imagine a human and a hypothetical alien, the human and the alien both share an emotion that we can categorise behaviourally as “love”, but their neural structures are unrelated. In both cases we can use the same concept of “love” to make predictions and inductive reasoning. The concept of “love” applies to both.

  Should we think they share the same relevant neural structures to share the concept of “love”? I would not expect that, entirely different neural structures could conceivably produce ‘things’ that are clearly analogous, we could say that here there’s no one ‘love’, but two different emotions, but we can say the same thing about many other ‘things’ that we consider one thing or their own, like different designs of table.

  This might be the case for mental representations in humans. To what extent should we think that two humans represent things by having the same neural structures? I don’t know.

[Question] How much of a con­cern are open-source LLMs in the short, medium and long terms?

• JavierCC 7 Sep 2023 23:40 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: AI#28: Watch­ing and Waiting

  People turn these things into agents easily already, and they already contain goal-driven subagent processes.

  Sorry, what is this referring to exactly?

• JavierCC 9 Apr 2023 9:36 UTC

  4 points

  1

  in reply to: RomanHauksson’s comment on: Agen­tized LLMs will change the al­ign­ment landscape

  AutoGPT-N hacks into a supercomputer cluster or social-engineers IT workers over email or whatever in the pursuit of some other goal, but ultimately gets shut down by OpenAI simply banning the agent from using their API.

  Could we even identify who did it to know that it was an instance of AutoGPT?

• JavierCC 16 Mar 2023 12:55 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Donald Hobson’s comment on: Mo­ti­vated Cog­ni­tion and the Mul­ti­verse of Truth

  I know all of that, believe me.

  A halting oracle doesn’t seem to contain magic “free will” stuff

  I know, although that’s really what libertarian FW entails in physicalist terms. In fact, funnily enough, I read yesterday Turing’s paper Computer Machinery and Intelligence (mostly just to be amused at his theological and ESP counter-arguments) and he literally said that some people describe machines with randomness oracles as having ‘free will’.

  Regardless, a major point of Penrose’s theory is that the mind works as a cohesive whole thanks to a quantum superposition of the brain, it’s a much more remarkable feature than just having any form of LFW. I don’t even get the appealing of LFW anymore.

[Question] Help to find a blog I don’t re­mem­ber the name of

• JavierCC 24 Aug 2023 23:06 UTC

  3 points

  5

  in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: AI #26: Fine Tun­ing Time

  The video in the link is not available.

• JavierCC 12 Jul 2023 1:36 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Bridgett Kay’s comment on: My Weirdest Experience

  Who knows, maybe it was your right hemisphere.

  Shout-outs to them, if so. Almost definitely the first time someone has directly referred to them, that’s got to be very exciting.

  Even if you are not literally their right hemisphere (not like you would know of course), but if you are there and if you have access to high-level knowledge of the world: hi, good job all of these years!

• JavierCC 13 May 2023 23:44 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Real­ity and re­al­ity-boxes

  OP is primarily describing different things that people mean by “existing”, not prescribing them.

• JavierCC 11 May 2023 20:56 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: AI #11: In Search of a Moat

  Judea Pearl is also Turing-awarded, and because of contributions to AI.

• JavierCC 25 Apr 2023 6:47 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Men­tal Models Of Peo­ple Can Be People

  why do we care if an imagined thing inside our mind is a person or not?

  This is a hypothetical (I’m not sure at all if it follows) but, if you think that a digital algorithm that feels like a person should count as a person, that is already some ground to think your simulations are people.

• JavierCC 19 Apr 2023 21:25 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: trevor’s comment on: How could you pos­si­bly choose what an AI wants?

  I imagine that it can be summed up as the AI always actively choosing to do what is best for civilization and never what is bad, for any arbitrary amount of time.

• JavierCC 24 Mar 2023 12:29 UTC

  3 points

  2

  in reply to: ShadowMan’s comment on: Op­ti­miza­tion and the In­tel­li­gence Explosion

  This is what natural selection entails in principle, and natural selection has been tested and vindicated experimentally, and the speed at which it works, and these are basic conclusions to draw from those tests. The amount of time it has taken for the cat to evolve through natural selection is also been experimentally vindicated.

  if you can’t even conceive this level of deduction, you can’t discuss anything.

[Question] how do short-timelin­ers rea­son about the differ­ences be­tween brain and AI?

[Question] What do “at­trac­tor dy­nam­ics” re­fer to in the con­text of so­cial struc­tures?

• JavierCC 18 Oct 2023 20:15 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Tamsin Leake’s comment on: Labs should be ex­plicit about why they are build­ing AGI

  Which are those labs? OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind maybe?, what else?

• JavierCC 23 Aug 2023 12:24 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: quetzal_rainbow’s comment on: Seth Ex­plains Consciousness

  I don’t like the word “illusionism” here because people just get caught on the obvious semantic ‘contradiction’ and always complain about it.

  The arguments based on perceptual illusions in general are meant to show that our perception is highly constructed by the brain, it’s not something ‘simple’. The point of illusionism is just to say that we are confused about what the phenomenological properties of qualia really are qua qualia because of wrong ideas that come from introspection.

• JavierCC 28 Jun 2023 10:34 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Arturo Macias’s comment on: Free­dom un­der Nat­u­ral­is­tic Dualism

  But conscious states are strongly determined by brain states as far as we can check. The argument that people use to argue against fully identifying the two comes down to deriving the metaphysical nature of qualia from their phenomenological properties. It seems to me that is epistemically problematic to argue against objective claims with intuition about something that we cannot even contrast with anything. We just have our intuition about phenomenology, no conceivable way to track the processes behind the phenomenon from that intuition. This is the reason why people imagine qualia to be individual entities and then think they can remove them ceteris paribus, or that they can’t be tracked by Laplace’s demons.

  Consciousness doesn’t need to be fundamentally distinct from non-consciousness. Rocks can’t monitor their own states at all, but computers can, that doesn’t mean that a fundamentally new property was added when you turn a rock into a computer. If we stop trying to derive metaphysics from phenomenology, the same account can be applied to consciousness. Then whatever processes track with what we feel consciousness to be will be trackable by a Laplace demon.