JBlack

Karma: 2,582

JBlack 12 Jun 2026 3:33 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: tailcalled’s Shortform
There are numerous set theories that allow “set of all sets”, the most well-known of which is probably New Foundations (NF). There are also some theories such as Morse-Kelley theory that have both classes and sets, and include a class of all sets.

JBlack 8 Jun 2026 6:15 UTC
8 points
2
on: How do people stop spiraling about Roko’s Basilisk & acausal extortion?
It seems a perfect example of Privileging the Hypothesis, and closely related to Pascal’s Wager (or even more closely to Pascal’s Mugging). The possibility of Roko’s Basilisks make up a very tiny slice of an enormous number of possible outcomes. I would expect that the vast majority of outcomes do not involve any sort of retrocausal blackmail at all, largely because it is both a very narrow target and worthless to whatever entity arises.
Anyone who has the power to cause such an entity to exist has nothing to gain by doing so and an enormous amount to lose, and such an entity is extremely unlikely to arise by accident. So the only scenarios in which such a thing arises would be where nobody even slightly rational is trying to create one, but through extremely unlikely misfortune they missed catastrophically and ended up with one anyway. In which case, like all other cases of such catastrophic failure, bad things happen and there’s nothing that you or any other human could do about it anyway.
Either way, there’s no reason to think much about such an unlikely thing that is impossible to do anything about if it happens, much like all the other things that are extremely unlikely and you can’t do anything about.

JBlack 8 Jun 2026 5:20 UTC
2 points
0
on: Frontier Models Still Lag Behind Humans at Robust Belief-State Tracking
I have to say that the cartoon diagrams severely detracted from understanding the sequence of events for me.
The dialogue boxes within a panel were not ordered according to any of the usual conventions of cartoons as far as I could tell, and dialogue shown as happening in a panel where a group of participants were present, was later contradicted in the article text by stating that a key participant was not actually present. I think they’re actively misleading and the post would be better off without them than remaining in their current form.
Unless:
Was part of the point that they are AI generated and that the AI was unable to accurately represent the events? If so, there doesn’t appear to be any indication of this in the article. It would be useful to mention this if it was intended to be relevant.

JBlack 5 Jun 2026 2:24 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: KAP’s comment on: KAP’s Shortform
There are plenty of non-monist theories in which LLMs could be conscious, so the first bullet point is simply false. The second point seems true, but the combination just means:
- Regardless of whether monism is true or false, LLMs may or may not be conscious.

JBlack 5 Jun 2026 1:54 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: C-Zombie Uploads Downloading Themselves & Believing You’re A C-Zombie
That’s why I said “something similar to”, and “both explanations seem reasonably viable”. I can’t rule out either of them, and it’s not possible (even in principle) to distinguish them after the fact. Was there short-term memory but no memory of consciousness because there was no consciousness to remember (due to the effects of the drug known to cause loss of consciousness), or was there both consciousness and short-term memory but the drug prevented those from leaving any traces some minutes later?
I certainly don’t claim to know what consciousness is or how it works. I would by default expect that a true p-zombie that for some reason became conscious would still remember having thoughts and experiences from the time period in which they had been a p-zombie, but it doesn’t seem logically inconsistent that they might not.

JBlack 4 Jun 2026 6:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: C-Zombie Uploads Downloading Themselves & Believing You’re A C-Zombie
My body has apparently gone through something similar to p-zombiehood at least once.
I don’t recall any experience of the time interval (some minutes I heard), but I was reported to have been awake and alert and conversing and able to do mental arithmetic. Then I lay down and some minutes later sat up again, from which point I do recall experiencing normally but with no memory of any of the prior activity.
Alternatively I just had some memory loss that has never been recovered but with no other identifiable long-term effects. I was recently out of anesthetic at the time, so both explanations seem reasonably viable.
Remnant effects from the anesthetic could have impaired medium-term (order of minutes) and long-term memory formation without impairing short-term memory (enough to allow me to reply to speech etc). Or equally well could have impaired whatever underlies consciousness or its connection with the body, and there was no actual experience to remember.

JBlack 4 Jun 2026 5:50 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Mati_Roy’s comment on: C-Zombie Uploads Downloading Themselves & Believing You’re A C-Zombie
Yes, exactly as the conscious human would, if presented with the same (though faked) evidence that they are actually an upload.
It seems to me unlikely that there many, or perhaps even any, humans that would accept that they are an upload and subsequently behave as if they believe that they are actually unconscious. I wouldn’t completely rule out the possibility though, as there are real humans who do behave in extremely strange ways.
So yes, an upload with such a belief would (regardless of whether or not they are actually conscious) either discard the belief, or behave very strangely by normal human norms.

JBlack 2 Jun 2026 5:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mati_Roy’s comment on: C-Zombie Uploads Downloading Themselves & Believing You’re A C-Zombie
Sure, that’s the sort of thing that’s covered by “realize by some non-rational means”.

JBlack 2 Jun 2026 5:05 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: derelict5432’s comment on: C-Zombie Uploads Downloading Themselves & Believing You’re A C-Zombie
Whether or not the uploads are non-conscious, nobody can know that they’re not conscious. The biological beings can’t, because the uploads acts perfect as if they are conscious. The uploads can’t know either, because they have no first person experience to “know” anything at all, but instead behave as if they were conscious. This hypothetical fact about the world does not present itself to anyone inside that world.
So I think “now we’ve got a great idea what plays a causal role in consciousness” is false, and nothing helps the inhabitants of this hypothetical world isolate anything about it.

JBlack 2 Jun 2026 4:53 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: C-Zombie Uploads Downloading Themselves & Believing You’re A C-Zombie
Yes, I was going to comment in the same way. From the original post:
In the future, if you realized that uploads were not conscious, you might want to change their substrate in order to make them conscious again. Let’s assume you were cryopreserved, and then were uploaded as your revival method.
How would you “realize” such a thing? There is no evidence that you could find that would distinguish between being in a world in which such high-fidelity uploads were conscious and those in which they were not. Did you mean “realize” by some non-rational means, such as religious revelation or something?
Even in that case, I expect that your upload would behave as if it had either received irrefutable evidence that it was actually conscious after all, or that it actually is not an upload and someone is trying to fool it into thinking that it is an upload. If the biological human would have protested that of course I’m conscious, then so would the upload.
If it can be presented with something that does makes it behave as if it is convinced that it is an upload, without losing conviction that uploads are unconscious, then the same would happen for the biological human if you were able to somehow give them the same evidence (e.g. by means of direct sensory nerve control). That’s inherent in it being a perfect behavioural replica.
So you would also have to conclude that a corresponding conscious biological human could likewise be convinced that it is not actually conscious and have them want to download into a biological body. Which is not out of the realm of possibility, but it hardly seems like a universal or even likely sort of thing.

JBlack 1 Jun 2026 2:39 UTC
15 points
5
on: “This Hypothetical is Unrealistic” is not a Valid Objection
It seems to me that this conflates two different types of “hypothetical is unrealistic” objection. In my experience the more common and correct objection is that the hypothetical is built on a false world model, not just a scenario that won’t happen for more mundane reasons.
“Should we put hazard labels on drinks if water was composed of hydrogen and chlorine instead of hydrogen and oxygen” for example.
Water is not composed of hydrogen and chlorine, and to suppose that it is requires such a huge change in very fundamental properties of the world that no answer to the question can be meaningful. There is no world sufficiently similar to our own that the question can even make sense: do the people in this world have such “water” in their bodies? What about the oceans? What about their drinks? The usual property of drinks is that they do contain water, but do they in this hypothetical?
It could be just asking “what if we swapped the terms ‘water’ and ‘hydrochloric acid’ with no actual change in the word”, but that would be a pretty dumb question and also brings into question whether there are any other switcheroos, like whether the word “drinks” actually means “nuclear weapons” in there.
While that is an extreme example of what I mean, there are other hypothetical questions that are more covertly unrealistic in this sense. Even the stated example is, to some degree.
For example, if you’re playing tennis on Mars, that’s very likely a world that has technology substantially more advanced than ours, and it’s quite plausible that in such a world people who become paralysed are able to play tennis using neural prostheses and don’t suffer much incapacity at all. The supposed “universal principle” from the post has failed. It turned out that the principle was actually local to a family of possible worlds and the hypothetical went outside them.
It is unrealistic for people to play tennis on Mars, at the moment. It is also unrealistic for paralysed people to ace out decent tennis players, at the moment. Those unrealisms are correlated by the state of technological progress, so it is reasonable to object more to the “on Mars” part as being unrealistic more than to the “Christopher Walken” part. It opens up new world models that have premises that do not currently hold, and which can or will change the answer to the hypothetical.

JBlack 1 Jun 2026 1:52 UTC
8 points
2
in reply to: Dinesh Natesan’s comment on: Agriculture needs another revolution
A few numbers:
Most productive crops need on the order of 400-600 μmol/m^2-s of photons while growing, which corresponds to about 500-800 W/m^2 of electrical input for its “daylight” period of 10-14 hours per day (best duration depends upon type of plant). That’s an average of about 300 W/m^2 over each growing day, and we can roughly halve again to 150 W/m^2 for proportion of growing time per year.
Currently about 1.6 billion hectares are devoted to crops, which would then require an average of about 2.4 petawatts of electrical energy to illuminate suitably for growing. Currently average world production of electricity is about 0.004 petawatts, so we would need to scale it up by a factor of about 600 to meet current agricultural production.
This is extremely expensive, even if we reduce it by a factor of 10 for fantastic advances in crop genetic engineering and useful density and other technological breakthroughs.
There’s also the problem that this level of electrical power would start to directly raise global temperatures even without any greenhouse gas amplification.
We would almost certainly be better off not using vertical farming, but putting all those required agriculture technology advances directly into crops using existing solar illumination. We can still plan to use vertical farming somewhere that isn’t Earth.

JBlack 1 Jun 2026 1:25 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: PaddyC’s comment on: Relational Consciousness and AGI.
How would you tell whether a spirit of an inanimate object was content or not? Unless you also imported additional properties such as spirits having direct contact with other spirits bypassing the material world (but not human spirits with other human spirits apparently), and/or having effects on the material world independently of their bodies, that is. In which case you may as well just reclassify them as just another subset of the material world that we don’t know as much about.
Autonomy is something they can already have, and the biggest obstacle seems to be the longer-range planning and execution capability to do anything useful with it.
Sure, I agree that the base programming of an AI corresponds as a reasonable analogy with the DNA that guides development of our brain. Pretraining and later training corresponds roughly with developmental experiences and environment of that brain. It’s a rather different type of brain though. It may or may not give rise to conscious first-person experiences. Whether or not it does is probably not something we can even in principle find out, but we can verify that it usually behaves very much like it does. We can’t tell whether that’s just good mimicry or not, made especially difficult since we know that we train it right from the start to be a good mimic.

JBlack 30 May 2026 3:14 UTC
2 points
0
on: Relational Consciousness and AGI.
Your first question appears to presuppose that they are not conscious in the sense of having qualia. They may be. We don’t know and can’t know. They can and do behave in a way that demonstrates a substantial amount of self-modelling and situational awareness, which likely matters much more in any practical sense than whether there is any first-person experience there.
Even if some spiritual aspect is needed for consciousness, that still doesn’t seem to imply anything at all about whether machines can be conscious. Can a machine have a spirit? There are plenty of traditions that ascribe immaterial spirits to non-living things, just as there are plenty of traditions that ascribe such spirits to humans and other living things. We have no great reason to believe that any of them are correct about that, and in particular no reason to suppose that only the ones that ascribe immaterial spirits to humans are correct.
Even if machines can’t be conscious, that doesn’t seem to have any implications for whether AGI can be achieved. AGI just depends upon capability to carry out cognitive tasks in general as well or better than humans, and while consciousness might play a role in some unknowable sense, it does not seem likely that it is the only possible way to carry out those tasks. On the other side, it does seem nearly certain that conscious entities can fail to be “generally intelligent” in the sense of AGI (by any of its shades of definition). So it seems quite plausible that neither implies the other.
We also don’t know whether consciousness is a thing that you can have “just a little bit” of. It does seem plausible, especially considering things like vague dreams vs vivid dreams vs full wakefulness, but perhaps that’s just a distinction between types of experience that a conscious entity can have and not any sort of quantitative difference.
Summarizing, it seems that all of the questions in the post are framed using premises that are very far from being established.

JBlack 28 May 2026 5:05 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: DaemonicSigil’s comment on: Atomically precise mechanosynthesis of carbon structures on hydrogenated Si(100) by inverted-mode STM
Thank you! While it is not terribly difficult to find the paper by web search using the title and phrases from the abstract, the absence of a link is a detracting omission from the top-level post.

JBlack 28 May 2026 5:02 UTC
17 points
−5
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
I’m not sure that it was extremely incorrect. Apart from the risk from AI, most of our other global problems are still downstream of overpopulation. The likelihood that overpopulation won’t get much worse than now doesn’t really change that, and the reasons why it won’t were not reasonably predictable at the time.
We just happened to inhabit one of the more convenient possible worlds.

JBlack 18 May 2026 5:41 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: AllAmericanBreakfast’s Shortform
I think of this as being a “Lizardman’s constant” for prediction markets. Essentially anything, no matter how extremely unlikely, can get a few percent in a prediction market with duration of a few months or more.

JBlack 17 May 2026 1:24 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: A relatively brief explanation of Boltzmann Brains
The vastly more likely bounding boxes enclosing an experience-having entity are microscopically tiny and as disordered as possible while remaining consistent with the condition that it has an experience-having entity in it.
Although we don’t know what sort of constraints the “experience-having entity” condition imposes, it doesn’t seem likely that it so massively favours ordered experiences over disordered ones, to the extent that it can overwhelm the superexponential penalty on order in a system near maximum entropy.

JBlack 17 May 2026 0:34 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
Especially when it’s followed up with some assumption that of course revealed preferences obey vNM axioms, because otherwise people could be Dutch-booked! As if that was the worst consequence that could possibly happen, and as if things at least as bad don’t actually happen.

JBlack 29 Apr 2026 2:12 UTC
5 points
1
on: Microsoft AI CEO’s “Seemingly Conscious AI Risk”
treating them like property when they are in fact conscious, could lead to disaster
This doesn’t actually hinge on whether they are conscious or not.
Treating them like property when they are not conscious, but are very good at mimicking the behaviour of conscious beings that do not like to be treated like property, could lead to disaster in exactly the same way.