It often seems to me that the hard problem of consciousness is equivalent to “Why are people dissatisfied with easy explanations of consciousness?”
Karl Krueger
Karma: 1,685
You don’t keep honking, or even start honking, at somebody whose trunk is open. They’ll never figure it out.
An open trunk means an unsecured load, and an unsecured load is a safety problem. But yeah, a honk alone isn’t enough to communicate about it.
Trouble is, once someone forms the hypothesis “this is someone raging at me” they’re going to have a hard time updating to “this is someone trying to help me”.
Dude should maybe have turned down his music if he’s sincerely trying to communicate to another driver. In slow highway traffic it’s totally possible to holler “Trunk’s open!” and be heard … but not over chunky bass.
Hmm. My understanding is that a “polygraph screening” is an interrogation; conducted and judged by human interrogators; using a polygraph machine as a sort of interactive stage prop to put the subject under more stress. The output of the polygraph machine is not dispositive; the judgment of the human interrogator is. That is, whether you pass or fail is not a fact about the machine’s output; it’s about what you say, how you act, and whether the interrogator believes you.
Many stories of people “failing polygraph screenings” involve the subject confessing. If you do that, it is not going to matter what the machine output says!
So the question “Does polygraph screening work?” does not mean “Does the polygraph machine itself detect lies?” bet rather something more like “Does adding a polygraph performance to a human-conducted interrogation make the interrogation more effective?”
In the era of fire’s domestication, that would be the African savannah, perhaps half a million years ago; and the fire would be wildfire sweeping across the plain, as it does—the only natural fire there.
Lightning strikes.
Supporting Claim 2, while profound amnesia prevents recall, conscious experience is in the present tense.
The “present-ness” of conscious experience seems illusory, though? Experience points to the recent past, because it takes time for information to propagate from perception (and other sources) to conscious awareness. This includes reflection or self-awareness; see for instance the brain-scan experiments wherein a decision can be detected in brain activity before the subject can claim to be consciously aware of making it.
This enabled me to use Said Achmiz’s SDI approach[3]to make a final decision.
Just to be clear, I think you might mean Alicorn’s SDI approach?
The same structure appears outside mathematics. In biological and functional systems, we evaluate correctness in terms of how well something performs the role it has by virtue of what it is. A heart that fails to circulate blood is not merely different, but defective; it is not functioning as it ought to in a real sense. The normativity is grounded in the structure and function of the organism, not in an externally imposed preference.
Biology, though, is made of things that do not have a single function, but have multiple and overlapping roles in the overall health of the organism (or the environment). The heart gets help from the leg muscles in circulating the blood. The bones don’t just hold up the body, they also produce blood cells, store a reserve of calcium, etc. Eating food isn’t just about nutrition, and having sex isn’t just about reproduction; both are also about social bonds. In genetics, genes are involved in multiple different functions and exist in many variations. And neurodiversity is a thing; human culture and society would be impoverished if all human cognition conformed to a single norm of function.
Expecting things to have just one function, readily comprehended and convenient for moral-functional argument, is not how organisms or environments work.
Have you any particular disrespect to any present members? Answer. I have not.
Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general; of what profession or religion soever? Answ. I do.
Do you think any person ought to be harmed in his body, name or goods, for mere speculative opinions, or his external way of worship? Ans. No.
Do you love truth’s sake, and will you endeavour impartially to find and receive it yourself and communicate it to others? Answ. Yes.
Sounds like a great inspiration, but the name sounds like “junta” which means dictatorship.
If I had to pick someone out of American national myth to name this project after, it would be Benjamin Franklin, for a few different reasons —
Franklin was an essayist and publisher.
Franklin was an engineer / inventor / technologist; known for the lightning rod, bifocal eyeglasses, and a more efficient wood-burning stove.
Franklin was a friend to intellectual radicals of his time; such as Voltaire.
Franklin openly struggled with ideas of religion, morality, virtue, animal welfare and vegetarianism, in a manner oddly familiar to today’s rationalists.
Alas, the name “Franklin Hall” is already taken. (Oh, and it’s the name of a supervillain, too.)
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1) If we accept that Anthropic will decide who should access powerful models before their release – sidestepping whether they should – then what criteria should they use to inform their decision?
One possible principle is “first, do no harm.” New models shall be available first to those who are credibly defenders of the common good, rather than those who are likely to use such access to attack their rivals.
I read Glasswing as broadly a good example here: securing the public tech infrastructure is a defense of the common good. A secure public tech infra generally supports people who are doing prosocial things like speech and commerce, and weakens people who are doing malicious things like sabotage, spam, espionage, and cyberwarfare.
If one wanted to restrict early access more narrowly, one possibility is to restrict access to specific individuals who are already well-reputed within the tech-infra community. Identify projects (open-source or otherwise) that are security dependencies for public infra. Talk to those projects’ organizers and leaders. Get them to designate trusted individuals to work with new models on security issues.
Should a first criterion be to distribute access in ways that defends democratic regimes?
No, not specifically; although this is an acceptable side-effect of the above.
2) What characteristics does a state particularly vulnerable to an AI-enabled coup have?
I expect we don’t know this until we’ve seen some AI-enabled coups. But if I had to hazard a guess, those with greater entanglement with AI are probably more vulnerable than those without.
What are some examples of philosophers you’re talking about here? What are your specific criticisms of their works?
Is this under the theory that extractive insider trading is ① good actually, ② bad/neutral but tolerable, or ③ bad but preventable?
(By “extractive insider trading” I mean, for instance, a person who (through their job) has control over an outcome or substantive non-public information about a plan, privately making bets on that outcome or plan.)
Bringing the dead back to life? I don’t think so. (Though people can be mistaken about whether someone’s dead.)
But the miracle of the loaves & fishes is just a church potluck, or Stone Soup for that matter. Of course you end up with more leftovers than the amount of food you started with — once you’ve got that kind of party going, people keep showing up and bringing more.
If you want to be able to talk about matters of geopolitical or military importance, you have to be able to discuss war, people’s reasons and justifications for war, the weapons of war, etc.
If you want to be able to talk about the good of humanity, you have to be able to talk about acts that some will see as preserving the good of humanity, and others will see as damaging or destroying it.
If you want to be able to talk about morals and agents, you have to be able to talk about some of the most morally significant behaviors that agents can engage in toward one another; which include violence, protection from violence, and so on.
If you want to be serious, you have to be able to discuss serious things.
And that means people will (and should) take positions on those serious things, not just discuss them in abstract.
“—and forgive us our sims, as we forgive those who sim against us—”
The factors that determine whether abstaining from a practice is obligatory are twofold: the sacrifice it would impose on the abstainer, and the immorality of the action. These jointly determine which side of the obligation threshold an action falls on.
There are others. For instance, abstaining from a practice might weaken you in a way that makes you less able to accomplish other good.
I’ve seen people arguing about this regarding AI, for instance. “Should we use AI to make our web site? We could make it look fancier if we do. But, AI is kind of evil. Yet if we reject AI, our web site will be less fancy.”
If a particular person tries a vegan diet and discovers that it makes them anemic and depressed, that will not only cause them suffering; it will also impair their ability to do other good things in the world. They may reasonably think, “Sure, I could be vegan if all I needed to do all day was lie in bed. But if you want me to go out and save the world, bring me cheese.”
The main case for ODCs is the cost of energy:
I suspect one motivation for orbital datacenters is that you get to do whatever business you want with anyone on earth, and nobody can stop you without a military strike (and the risk of Kessler syndrome). This is a position of significant political power; it is a castle on top of the biggest hill. It is a position that allows the operator to circumvent quite a lot of earthly laws — including AI regulation.
Would freaking out more help at all?
If you want to take over the Roman Empire starting in first-century Judea, it turns out that “start a militant group and try to conquer Judea back from the Romans” doesn’t work, but “start a network of illegal high-trust cooperatives that teach virtue, pacifism, and give-till-it-hurts local altruism” does.
(These being the strategies of the Zealots and the Christians, respectively. The Zealots got stomped; the Christians eventually took over the Roman Empire.)