johnsonmx

Karma: 86

johnsonmx 8 Sep 2012 20:23 UTC
14 points
on: Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012)
I’m Mike Johnson. I’d estimate I come across a reference to LW from trustworthy sources every couple of weeks, and after working my way through the sequences it feels like the good outweighs the bad and it’s worth investing time into.

My background is in philosophy, evolution, and neural nets for market prediction; I presently write, consult, and am in an early-stage tech startup. Perhaps my highwater mark in community exposure has been a critique of the word Transhumanist at Accelerating Future. In the following years, my experience has been more mixed, but I appreciate the topics and tools being developed even if the community seems a tad insular. If I had to wear some established thinkers on my sleeve I’d choose Paul Graham, Lawrence Lessig, Steve Sailer, Gregory Cochran, Roy Baumeister, and Peter Thiel. (I originally had a comment here about having an irrational attraction toward humility, but on second thought, that might rule out Gregory “If I have seen farther than others, it’s because I’m knee-deep in dwarves” Cochran… Hmm.)

Cards-on-the-table, it’s my impression that

(1) Lesswrong and SIAI are doing cool things that aren’t being done anywhere else (this is not faint praise);

(2) The basic problem of FAI as stated by SIAI is genuine;

(3) SIAI is a lightning rod for trolls and cranks, which is really detrimental to the organization (the metaphor of autoimmune disease comes to mind) and seems partly its own fault;

(4) Much of the work being done by SIAI and LW will turn out to be a dead-end. Granted, this is true everywhere, but in particular I’m worried that axiomatic approaches to verifiable friendliness will prove brittle and inapplicable (I do not currently have an alternative);

(5) SIAI has an insufficient appreciation for realpolitik;

(6) SIAI and LW seem to have a certain distaste for research on biologically-inspired AGI, due in parts to safety concerns, an organizational lack of expertise in the area, and (in my view) ontological/metaphysical preference. I believe this distaste is overly limiting and also leads to incorrect conclusions.

Many of these impressions may be wrong. I aim to explore the site, learn, change my mind if I’m wrong, and hopefully contribute. I appreciate the opportunity, and I hope my unvarnished thoughts here haven’t soured my welcome. Hello!

johnsonmx 11 May 2013 4:16 UTC
9 points
in reply to: shminux’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
Tononi’s Phi theory seems somewhat relevant, though it only addresses consciousness and explicitly avoids valence. It does seem like something that could be adapted toward answering questions like this (somehow).

Current models of emotion based on brain architecture and neurochemicals (e.g., EMOCON) are relevant, though ultimately correlative and thus not applicable outside of the human brain.

There’s also a great deal of quality literature about specific correlates of pain and happiness- e.g., Building a neuroscience of pleasure and well-being and An fMRI-Based Neurologic Signature of Physical Pain.

In short, I’ve found plenty of plenty of research around the topic but nothing that’s particularly predictive outside of very constrained contexts. No generalized theories. There’s some interesting stuff happening around panpsychism (e.g., see these two pieces by Chalmers) but they focus on consciousness, not valence.

My intuition is valence will be encoded within frequency dynamics in a way that will be very amiable to mathematical analysis, but right now I’m seeking clarity about how to speak about the problem.

Edit: I’ll add this to the bottom of the post

johnsonmx 6 Dec 2012 23:35 UTC
6 points
on: Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant
Another view of Philosophy, which I believe Russell also subscribed to (but I can’t seem to find a reference for presently) is that philosophy was the ‘mother discipline’. It was generative. You developed your branch of Philosophy until you got your ontology and methodology sorted out, and then you stopped calling what you were doing philosophy. (This has the amusing side-effect of making anything philosophers say wrong by definition—sometimes useful, but always wrong.)

The Natural Sciences, Psychology, Logic, Mathematics, Linguistics—they all got their start this way.

That’s how Philosophy used to work. Nowadays, I think the people who can do that type of “mucking around with complex questions of ontology and methodology” thinking have largely moved on to other disciplines. If we define Philosophy as this messily complex discipline-generating process, it no longer happens in the discipline we call “Philosophy”.[1]

That said—while I would personally enjoy the “intro to philosophy” syllabus Luke proposes, I think it’s a stretch to label the course a philosophy course, much less [The One And True] Intro To Philosophy. It’s cool and a great idea, but the continuity with many models (be they aspirational or descriptive) of Philosophy is fairly tenuous, and without a lot of continuity I think it’d be hard to push into established departments.[2]

If we’re speaking more modestly, that philosophers should be steeped in modern science and logic and that when they’re not, what they do is often worse than useless, I can certainly agree with that.

[1] E.g., Axiology.

[2] Why not call it “introduction to scientific epistemology”?

johnsonmx 11 May 2013 5:46 UTC
5 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
We seem to be talking past each other, to some degree. To clarify, my six questions were chosen to illustrate how much we don’t know about the mathematics and science behind psychological valence. I tried to have all of them point at this concept, each from a slightly different angle. Perhaps you interpret them as ‘disguised queries’ because you thought my intent was other than to seek clarity about how to speak about this general topic of valence, particularly outside the narrow context of the human brain?

I am not trying to “Learn how to manipulate people? Learn how to torture? Become a pleasure delivery professional?”—my focus is entirely on speaking about psychological valence in clear terms, illustrating that there’s much we don’t know, and make the case that there are empirical questions about the topic that don’t seem to have empirical answers. Also, in very tentative terms, to express the personal belief that a clear theory on exactly what states of affairs are necessary and sufficient for creating pain and pleasure may have some applicability to FAI/AGI topics (e.g., under what conditions can simulated people feel pain?).

I did not find ‘necessary and sufficient’, or any permutation thereof, in the human’s guide to words. Perhaps you’d care to explicate why you didn’t care for my usage?

Re: (3) and (4), I’m certain we’re not speaking of the same things. I recall Eliezer writing about how creating pleasure isn’t as simple as defining a ‘pleasure variable’ and incrementing it:

int pleasure = 5; pleasure++

I can do that on my macbook pro; it does not create pleasure.

There exist AGIs in design space that have the capacity to (viscerally) feel pleasure, much like humans do. There exist AGIs in design space with a well-defined reward channel. I’m asking: what principles can we use to construct an AGI which feels visceral pleasure when (and only when) its reward channel is activated? If you believe this is trivial, we are not communicating successfully.

I’m afraid we may not share common understandings (or vocabulary) on many important concepts, and I’m picking up a rather aggressive and patronizing vibe, but a genuine thanks for taking the time to type out your comment, and especially the intent in linking that which you linked. I will try not to violate too many community norms here.

johnsonmx 30 Sep 2012 22:20 UTC
5 points
in reply to: rkyeun’s comment on: Awww, a Zebra
You probably get a much richer sensation of zebra-ness under some conditions (being there, touching the zebra, smelling the zebra, seeing it move) than just seeing a picture of one on flickr. Experiencing zebra-ness isn’t a binary value, and some types of exposures will tend to commandeer many more neurons than others.

johnsonmx 12 May 2013 7:19 UTC
4 points
in reply to: falenas108’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
On the first point—what you say is clearly right, but is also consistent with the notion that there are certain mathematical commonalities which hold across the various ‘flavors’ of pleasure, and different mathematical commonalities in pain states.

Squashing the richness of human emotion into a continuum of positive and negative valence sounds like a horribly lossy transform, but I’m okay with that in this context. I expect that experiences at the ‘pleasure’ end of the continuum will have important commonalities ‘under the hood’ with others at that same end. And those commonalities will vanish, and very possibly invert, when we look at the ‘agony’ end.

On the second point, the evidence points to physical and emotional pain sharing many of the same circuits, and indeed, drugs which reduce physical pain also reduce emotional pain. On the other hand, as you might expect, there are some differences in the precise circuitry each type of pain activates. But by and large, the differences are subtle.

johnsonmx 12 May 2013 2:06 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
I understand the type of criticism generally, but could you say more about this specific case?

I’m curious if the objection stems from some mismatch of abstraction layers, or just the habit of not speaking about certain topics in certain terms.

johnsonmx 27 Mar 2017 0:27 UTC
3 points
on: Unethical Human Behavior Incentivised by Existence of AGI and Mind-Uploading
We don’t live in a universe that’s nice or just all the time, so perhaps there are nightmare scenarios in our future. Not all traps have an escape. However, I think this one does, for two reasons.

(1) all the reasons that RobinHanson mentioned;

(2) we seem really confused about how consciousness works, which suggests there are large ‘unknown unknowns’ in play. It seems very likely that if we extrapolate our confused models of consciousness into extreme scenarios such as this, we’ll get even more confused results.

johnsonmx 27 Feb 2014 17:44 UTC
3 points
on: Innovation’s low-hanging fruits: on the demand or supply sides?
Very interesting. No objections to your main points, but a few comments on side points and conclusions:
- You say “it’s not like we know of a specific technological innovation that would solve poverty, if only someone would develop it.” I would identify Greg Cochran’s ‘genetic spellcheck’ as such a tech, along with what other people are suggesting. http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/typos/
- “We might have exhausted the low-hanging fruits in our desires.” I think this is right, but it’s complicated. I think the Robin Hanson way to frame this could be the following: innovation has been this rising technological tide that has made it a lot easier to meet most of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But now most of the ‘gains’ from innovation are made in positional goods and services, which aren’t the same sort of gains as, say, flush toilets, so they don’t feel “real”.

johnsonmx 24 Oct 2012 22:55 UTC
3 points
in reply to: joaolkf’s comment on: Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych
Yes, and I would say finding bunnies cuter than human babies isn’t a strong argument against Dennett’s hypothesis. Supernormal Stimuli are quite common in humans and non-humans.

I think this argument could be analogously phrased: “The reason why exercise makes us feel good can’t be to get us to exercise more, because cocaine feels even better than exercise.” Seems wrong when we put it that way.

johnsonmx 24 Sep 2012 2:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: The Apocalypse Bet
I would suggest that a breakdown in social order (without a singularity occurring) is another scenario that might be roughly as probable as the others you mentioned. In such case, it would seem the manner by which you invest in equities would matter. I.e.., the value of most abstract investments may vanish, and the value of equities held in trust by various institutions (or counterparties) may also vanish.

johnsonmx 5 Apr 2017 17:21 UTC
2 points
0
on: A Problem for the Simulation Hypothesis
I think the elephant in the room is the purpose of the simulation.

Bostrom takes it as a given that future intelligences will be interested in running ancestor simulations. Why is that? If some future posthuman civilization truly masters physics, consciousness, and technology, I don’t see them using it to play SimUniverse. That’s what we would do with limitless power; it’s taking our unextrapolated, 2017 volition and asking what we’d do if we were gods. But that’s like asking a 5-year-old what he wants to do when he grows up, then taking the answer seriously.

Ancestor simulations sound cool to us- heck, they sound amazingly interesting to me, but I strongly suspect posthumans would find better uses for their resources.

Instead, I think we should try to reason about the purpose of a simulation from first principles.

Here’s an excerpt from Principia Qualia, Appendix F:

Why simulate anything?

At any rate, let’s assume the simulation argument is viable- i.e., it’s possible we’re a simulation, and due to the anthropic math, that it’s plausible that we’re in one now.

Although it’s possible that we are being simulated but for no reason, let’s assume entities smart enough to simulate universes would have a good reason to do so. So- what possible good reason could there be to simulate a universe? Two options come to mind: (a) using the evolution of the physical world to compute something, or (b) something to do with qualia.

In theory, (a) could be tested by assuming that efficient computations will exhibit high degrees of Kolmogorov complexity (incompressibility) from certain viewpoints, and low Kolmogorov complexity from others. We could then formulate an anthropic-aware measure for this applicable from ‘within’ a computational system, and apply it to our observable universe. This is outside the scope of this work.

However, we can offer a suggestion about (b): if our universe is being simulated for some reason associated with qualia, it seems plausible that it has to do with producing a large amount of some kind of particularly interesting or morally relevant qualia.

johnsonmx 3 Mar 2015 1:01 UTC
2 points
in reply to: minusdash’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
I think we’re still not seeing eye-to-eye on the possibility that valence, i.e., whatever pattern within conscious systems innately feels good, can be described crisply.

If it’s clear a priori that it can’t, then yes, this whole question is necessarily confused. But I see no argument to that effect, just an assertion. From your perspective, my question takes the form: “what’s the thing that all dogs have in common?”- and you’re trying to tell me it’s misguided to look for some platonic ‘essence of dogness’. Concepts don’t work like that. I do get that, and I agree that most concepts are like that. But from my perspective, your assertion sounds like, “all concepts pertaining to this topic are necessarily vague, so it’s no use trying to even hypothesize that a crisp mathematical relationship could exist.” I.e., you’re assuming your conclusion. Now, we can point to other contexts where rather crisp mathematical models do exist: electromagnetism, for instance. How do you know the concept of valence is more like ‘dogness’ than electromagnetism?

Ultimately, the details, or mathematics, behind any ‘universal’ or ‘rigorous’ theory of valence would depend on having a well-supported, formal theory of consciousness to start from. It’s no use talking about patterns within conscious systems when we don’t have a clear idea of what constitutes a conscious system. A quantitative approach to valence needs a clear ontology, which we don’t have yet (Tononi’s IIT is a good start, but hardly a final answer). But let’s not mistake the difficulty in answering these questions with them being inherently unanswerable.

We can imagine someone making similar critiques a few centuries ago regarding whether electromagnetism was a sharply-defined concept, or whether understanding it matters. It turned out electromagnetism was a relatively sharply-defined concept: there was something to get, and getting it did matter. I suspect a similar relationship holds with valence in conscious systems. I’m not sure it does, but I think it’s more reasonable to accept the possibility than not at this point.

johnsonmx 11 May 2013 19:04 UTC
2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
It does, and thank you for the reply.

How should we define “pleasure”? -- A difficult question. As you mention, it is a cloud of concepts, not a single one. It’s even more difficult because there appears to be precious little driving the standardization of the word—e.g., if I use the word ‘chair’ differently than others, it’s obvious, people will correct me, and our usages will converge. If I use the word ‘pleasure’ differently than others, that won’t be as obvious because it’s a subjective experience, and there’ll be much less convergence toward a common usage.

But I’d say that in practice, these problems tend to work themselves out, at least enough for my purposes. E.g., if I say “think of pure, unadulterated agony” to a room of 10000 people, I think the vast majority would arrive at fairly similar thoughts. Likewise, if I asked 10000 people to think of “pure, unadulterated bliss… the happiest moment in your life”, I think most would arrive at thoughts which share certain attributes, and none (<.01%) would invert answers to these two questions.

I find this “we know it when we see it” definitional approach completely philosophically unsatisfying, but it seems to work well enough for my purposes, which is to find mathematical commonalities across brain-states people identify as ‘pleasurable’, and different mathematical commonalities across brain-states people identify as ‘painful’.

I see what you mean by “the meaning of a word is hardly ever accurately given by any necessary-and-sufficient conditions that can be stated explicitly in a reasonable amount of space, because that just isn’t the way human minds work.” On the other hand, all words are imperfect and we need to talk about this somehow. How about this: (1) what are the characteristic mathematics of (i.e., found disproportionally in) self-identified pleasurable brain states?

johnsonmx 28 Jun 2015 1:20 UTC
1 point
in reply to: cosmicvoyager’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
Right, absolutely. These are all things that we don’t know, but should.

Are you familiar with David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative movement? He makes a lot of the same points and arguments, basically outlining that it doesn’t seem impossible that we could (and should) radically reduce, and eventually eliminate, suffering via technology.

But the problem is, we don’t know what suffering is. So we have to figure that out before we can make much radical progress on this sort of work. I.e., I think a rigorous definition of suffering will be an information-theoretic one—that it’s a certain sort of pattern within conscious systems—but we know basically nothing about what sort of pattern it is.

(I like the word “valence” instead of pain/pleasure, joy/suffering, eudaimonia, hedonic tone, etc. It’s a term from psychology that just means ‘the pleasantness or unpleasantness attached to any experience’ and seems to involve less baggage than these other terms.)

I hope to have a formal paper on this out by this winter. In the meantime, if you’re in the Bay Area, feel free to ping me and I can share some thoughts. You may also enjoy a recent blog post: Effective Altruism, and building a better QALY.

johnsonmx 2 Mar 2015 20:56 UTC
1 point
in reply to: minusdash’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure

Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It’s deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc

It seems like you’re making two very distinct assertions here: first, that valence is not a ‘natural kind’, that it doesn’t ‘carve reality at the joints’, and is impossible to form a crisp, physical definition of; and second, that valence is highly connected to drives that have been evolutionarily advantageous to have. The second is clearly correct; the first just seems to be an assertion (one that I understand, and I think reasonable people can hold at this point, but that I disagree with).

johnsonmx 2 Mar 2015 8:12 UTC
1 point
in reply to: 27chaos’s comment on: The mystery of pain and pleasure
Surely neurological processes are “arrangements of particles” too, though.

I think your question gets to the heart of the matter- is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel good, or isn’t there? It would seem very surprising to me if there wasn’t.

johnsonmx 28 Sep 2015 22:14 UTC
0 points
in reply to: cameroncowan’s comment on: FAI and the Information Theory of Pleasure
A rigorous theory of valence wouldn’t involve cultural context, much as a rigorous theory of electromagnetism doesn’t involve cultural context.

Cultural context may matter a great deal in terms of how to build a friendly AGI that preserves what’s valuable about human civilization—or this may mostly boil down to the axioms that ‘pleasure is good’ and ‘suffering is bad’. I’m officially agnostic on whether value is simple or complex in this way.

One framework for dealing with the stuff you mention is Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV)- it’s not the last word on anything but it seems like a good intuition pump.

johnsonmx 19 Sep 2015 21:32 UTC
0 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: FAI and the Information Theory of Pleasure
We’re not on the same page. Let’s try this again.
- The assertion I originally put forth is AI safety; it is not about reverse-engineering qualia. I’m willing to briefly discuss some intuitions on how one may make meaningful progress on reverse-engineering qualia as a courtesy to you, my anonymous conversation partner here, but since this isn’t what I originally posted about I don’t have a lot of time to address radical skepticism, especially when it seems like you want to argue against some strawman version of IIT.
- You ask for references (in a somewhat rude monosyllabic manner) on “some of the empirical work on coma patients IIT has made possible” and I give you exactly that. You then ignore it as “not really qualia research”- which is fine. But I’m really not sure how you can think that this is completely irrelevant to supporting or refuting IIT: IIT made a prediction, Casali et al. tested the prediction, the prediction seemed to hold up. No qualiometer needed. (Granted, this would be a lot easier if we did have them.)
This apparently leads to you say,

You are taking a problem we don;t know how to make a start on, and turning it into a smaller problem we also don’t know how to make a start on.

More precisely, I’m taking a problem you don’t know how to make a start on, and am turning it into a smaller problem that you also don’t seem to know how to make a start on. Which is fine, and I don’t wish to be a jerk about it, and not merely because Tononi/Tegmark/Griffith could be wrong in how they’re approaching consciousness, and I could be wrong in how I’m adapting their stuff to try to explain some specific things about qualia. But you seem to just want to give up, to put this topic beyond the reach of science, and criticize anyone trying to find clever indirect approaches. Needless to say I vehemently disagree with the productiveness of that attitude.

I think we are in agreement that valence could be a fairly simple property. I also agree that the brain is Vastly Complex, and that qualia research has some excruciatingly difficult methodological hurdles to overcome, and I agree that IIT is still a very speculative hypothesis which shouldn’t be taken on faith. I think we differ radically on our understandings of IIT and related research. I guess it’ll be an empirical question whether IIT morphs into something that can substantially address questions of qualia- based on my understandings and intuitions, I’m pretty optimistic about this.

johnsonmx 18 Sep 2015 20:38 UTC
0 points
in reply to: TheAncientGeek’s comment on: FAI and the Information Theory of Pleasure
If you’re looking for a Full, Complete Data-Driven And Validated Solution to the Qualia Problem, I fear we’ll have to wait a long, long time. This seems squarely in the ‘AI complete’ realm of difficulty.

But if you’re looking for clever ways of chipping away at the problem, then yes, Casali’s Perturbational Complexity Index should be interesting. It doesn’t directly say anything about qualia, but it does indirectly support Tononi’s approach, which says much about qualia. (Of course, we don’t yet know how to interpret most of what it says, nor can we validate IIT directly yet, but I’d just note that this is such a hard, multi-part problem that any interesting/predictive results are valuable, and will make the other parts of the problem easier down the line.)