Nicolas Villarreal

Karma: −4

Nicolas Villarreal 17 Oct 2025 13:47 UTC
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in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Materialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia
If that’s how you want to define it then sure. But all the examples of camp 1 they gave in that piece were people who weren’t interested in a phenomenal analysis of qualia, only interested in explaining it using science in terms of physics. I think that trying to assert that science need not explain human negativity like experience, fiction, ideology or lies is itself slipping out of a materialist ontology.

Nicolas Villarreal 12 Oct 2025 13:57 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Materialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia
Yes I would agree that I’m trying to establish a theory of pure difference. That “they are all the same” in terms of only being differences is not a negative but a perk of the theory, its what makes it compatible with a monist materialism. As soon as you permit a positive meaning you must permit these different aspects or plains of existence.
Does pain really have no characteristic s other than being different from pleasure?
Pain is differentiated not just from pleasure but from all other experiences. Difference doesn’t all mean the same difference, I’m thinking of like neural net weights where each connection is some number between zero and one. When this becomes a many to many network of connections, the possible structural patterns can become quite complex. Its my hypothesis for example that pain has a unique structural pattern that comes from causing changes within many sensous input systems themselves, and is therefore characterized as “a mode of perceiving and subjective experience which is undesired”.
Obviously not, since humans have conditions in which qualia can go missing, or become hypertrophic, eg. colour blindness and synaesthesia.
Not sure I understand what the objection is here.
I don’t see why camp #1 requires dualism
Camp 1 is unable to account for self evident experience qua experience, it creates an outside to physical reality in saying “this isn’t worth addressing”, there’s what’s real and, perhaps uncharitably, what’s fiction. To create a truly material monist ontology you must create a material account of this fiction or belief or whatever experience. The failure to do this is a major error in analytic philosophy and the failure of people like Yudkowsky in my opinion.

Nicolas Villarreal 12 Oct 2025 1:22 UTC
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in reply to: mishka’s comment on: Materialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia
Right I’m arguing that the specific differences which fully enable the experience of a qualia are unconscious, and must necessarily be outside of consciousness awareness, that’s what I was talking about wrt to the patterns of qualia and their relations necessarily implying an external phenomenal substance which we are not always aware of.

Nicolas Villarreal 11 Oct 2025 22:05 UTC
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in reply to: mishka’s comment on: Materialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia
There’s also differentiation in time, and so long as you’re aware that it’s the presence or absence of your focus, then you’re aware it’s differentiated from the rest of your awareness/experience.

Nicolas Villarreal 11 Oct 2025 17:42 UTC
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in reply to: mishka’s comment on: Materialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia
No no, I’m not saying that I myself am actively aware of all difference in my experience, I feel the noise too, but whenever I investigate a phenomenon what I find is that it just gets broken into more difference that I didn’t notice originally. Since noise logically requires difference, you can’t get static without some variation in the signal, and when I investigate I only find more difference, never any positive thing in itself, I can only conclude that the difference extends down to the noise, the texture, and I’m simply not aware of the full extent of the differences.
If you’re speaking of /specific/ colors, sounds and smells, then you’re already acknowledging that you’re differentiating them from other experiences.

Nicolas Villarreal 11 Oct 2025 14:33 UTC
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in reply to: mishka’s comment on: Materialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia
I’m purposefully trying to avoid either camp as both camps require a type of dualism. What I’m trying to claim here is that any subjective feeling is only pure difference, even from a purely phenomenological analysis. If you pay attention to any specific sound or sight or smell, all you’re gonna notice are the differences to other such experiences. Any notion of positive, non-differential experience, I claim, is just an illusion created by the difficulty in specifically being aware of all the differences in experience at once. I used references to sense organs just as a means of mapping internal sensations, as well as explain where the noise is coming from. But noise itself is logically impossible without difference, and so if there is noise in our awareness of differences that just points to differences we’re not aware of but still experience.

Nicolas Villarreal 11 Oct 2025 11:52 UTC
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in reply to: mishka’s comment on: Materialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia
I think the texture of coffee smell is just the texture of smelling as such, and probably exists in the different overall type/pattern of noise that exists in olfactory sense compared to other senses. I think the texture of smelling coffee would basically be the same as smelling anything else except to the extent different smells actually activate different sense organs. For example I’m pretty sure that garbage smells are felt much more acutely in the back of the nose/throat than something like coffee but I haven’t done much research on the topic.

Nicolas Villarreal 11 Oct 2025 1:23 UTC
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in reply to: mishka’s comment on: Materialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia
I take the “texture” of qualia to be the noise inherent to the input senses, this noise is essentially the difference between the level of differentiation which exists within our own mind for making sense of things, and the smallest amount of differentiation in the world which our sense are capable of detecting. When you look at a painting, you’ll first get like a gestalt impression based on the largest structures you notice, the biggest shapes and largest color groups, etc. But your eye can detect smaller structures, down to whatever size. Until your brain creates active distinctions on that level, those smaller structures are just noise which /potentially/ can be understood. Without this really existing differentiation beyond comprehension, the texture would also be impossible.
I guess it’s obvious to me I have phenomenal experience but it is not intuitive to me that this is limited to the specific experiences I’m aware of. Furthermore, it’s very important to me that the functional structure exists /within/ phenomenal experience, I can observe internally how my mind differentiates between things and /learns/ how to differentiate. Given any specific, identifiable aspect of my internal state requires it to be differentiated, I assume this differentiation goes all the way down. Hence, this differentiation is not imposed from the outside by a scientific investigation of a physical system. Perhaps my mind is just too corrupted from thinking about semiotics too much, but I believe some of these internal observations should generalize to others experiences given they match neatly onto debates and descriptions of language acquisition.

Nicolas Villarreal 17 Aug 2025 23:49 UTC
6 points
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on: Underdog bias rules everything around me
When you’re budgeting resources, conflicts with adversaries are a little different than other sorts of categories of expense, which might be largely determined by your own consumption habits or, if put at risk by unexpected changes in nature or in the economy, don’t change in a way to actively thwart us, are more or less random. When in a conflict, you’re always going to want to be conservative in estimating the resources you need, which is something obvious in any book on military logistics, and being conservative requires overestimating what your opponent can do, and underestimating how far your current resources will actually go. If you weren’t conservative, you could put more resources towards other things (guns vs butter debates) but being conservative is probably more evolutionarily fit than being more accurate in that estimation, as the conservative planner will be more prepared in unexpected situations.

Nicolas Villarreal 1 Aug 2025 1:14 UTC
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in reply to: ceba’s comment on: Superintelligence isn’t Approximated by a Rational Agent
I dunno that arrows and set stuff makes even less sense to me, and if I can’t understand I can’t write it down. And as far as I’m concerned I did give what inputs each function takes and what outputs they produce.

Nicolas Villarreal 30 Jul 2025 18:31 UTC
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Superintelligence isn’t Approximated by a Rational Agent
In other words, one of the major points of this post is that you can’t reason across or order world states, nobody does or can, you only ever reason across symbolic representations of world states which are created via some particular process.

Nicolas Villarreal 30 Jul 2025 15:52 UTC
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Superintelligence isn’t Approximated by a Rational Agent
Recall that the neural net in function 1 is a classifier, not making predictions about the relationships between the variables. All function 1 does is take a domain of a large set of input signals and correlate them to a smaller range of internal variables. Technically you don’t need a neural net to do this, you can hard code it in various ways, but I like thinking of the original Perceptron diagram in my head for this.
The point of using this toy model rather than just assuming an ordering over world states is to show that any modeling of world state is produced by particular functions using real world data. This encoding itself is what generates the epistemic problems, because the encoding of a semantic meaning to a particular signifier always creates some uncertainty when using that encoding as a reference point. In the toy model, X can be arbitrarily complex phenomenal experience, it encompasses every observable state of the world, so even for phantom values of X all we’re doing is extrapolating to the experience we’d expect in a given situation. By creating a function which gives us the relationship between different values of X, we can make a plan on how to achieve a specific value of X that we want, so if you take current and expected conditions of X, the input, and a function Ω, you can have a plan to achieve a goal. The ordering function therefore orders these possible plans from best to worst based on whatever arbitrary criteria.

Nicolas Villarreal 26 Jul 2025 20:51 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Superintelligence isn’t Approximated by a Rational Agent
Undecidability is definitely a related but distinct problem. I felt that there were some objections to undecidability arguments based on bounded rationality solutions, so I decided to focus on the question of uncertainty about the inputs rather than uncertainty about halting (Godel assumed that we knew the inputs and functions perfectly), which I think applies to both unbounded and bounded rationality. You could definitely make an argument to that effect that the open ended nature of super intelligence specifically opens it up to undecidability problems for ranking it’s preferences though.
I haven’t seen those things you cited at the end but will check them out, thanks.

Nicolas Villarreal 24 Jul 2025 20:44 UTC
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Superintelligence isn’t Approximated by a Rational Agent
Whether the neural net in function 1 is already trained is up to interpretation, it could include the process of training, all that matters is that there are classified outputs at the end of the process.
Ω is the set of functions, whereas function 2 is the function which makes those functions.
“Input functions” isn’t a thing, function 3 is ordering input and function pairs.
Sorry if these questions seem like obsessing over details, but this is how I go about understanding any piece of obscure mathematics: going through it symbol by symbol asking “what exactly does this mean?”
No worries, I’m sorry if my writing isn’t as intelligible as I’d like. I’m glad someone is taking the time to understand it at all.

Nicolas Villarreal 24 Jul 2025 19:46 UTC
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Superintelligence isn’t Approximated by a Rational Agent
Sorry about mixing up the f and g notation I’m not particularly used to it.
Ω by creating some functions of A...Z means that in principle you can input arbitrary values for B,C...Z and get an expected value for A, so it is not necessarily any specific value. Ψ aren’t the weights of a neural net, they’re the classified outputs, detecting certain patterns in specific signals. Like how the original perceptron could identify a square from a picture of a square vs a circle, ect. So all function 1 is doing is cutting up the continuum of signals its receiving into discrete chunks.
Function three is some arbitrary sorting function.

Nicolas Villarreal 26 Jun 2025 15:23 UTC
2 points
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on: The Iceberg Theory of Meaning
I don’t believe that the points you make about internal context and the lack of that context necessarily means that “all meaning is subjective”, nor that contextual information is inherently meaningless. In order to impart information that modifies the meaning of a word, the context must have meaning. So to, because you can elaborate on your point of view, and those utterances can have a meaning that allows your interlocutor to have a greater understanding of your meaning by approximation, tells me that the meaning is not purely subjective or totally inaccessible, only hidden.
I suggest you check out some work of semiotics, such as Umberto Eco’s Theory of Semiotics, which goes into how words and utterances have meaning. I’ve previously argued that its impossible to speak of a semantically invalid statement. https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/higher-order-signs-hallucination

Nicolas Villarreal 27 Oct 2024 16:29 UTC
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in reply to: ProgramCrafter’s comment on: A Semiotic Critique of the Orthogonality Thesis
Thank you for the substantive response. I do think there’s a few misunderstandings here of what I’m saying.
There need not be one best world state, and a world state need not be distinguishable from all others—merely from some of them. (In fact, utility function yielding a real value compresses the world into a characteristic of things we care about in such a way.)
I’m not talking about world states which exist “out there” in the territory, which, is debatable whether they exist or not anyway, I’m talking about world states that exist within the agent, compressed however they like. Within the agent, each world state they consider as a possible goal is distinguished from the others in order for it to be meaningful in some way. The distinguishing characteristics can be decided by the agent in an arbitrary way.
Your series of posts also assume that signs have a fixed order. This is false. For instance, different fields of mathematics treat real number as either first order signs (atomic objects) or higher-order ones, defined as relations on rational numbers.
It is no coincidence that those definitions are identical; you cannot assume that if something is expressible using higher order signs, is not also expressible in lower order.
So when I’m talking about signs I’m talking about signifier/signified pairs, when we’re talking about real numbers for example, we’re taking about a signifier with two different signifieds, therefore two different signs. I talk about exactly this issue in my last post:
When your goal is to create something new, something novel, your goal is necessarily a higher order sign. Things which do not yet exist cannot be directly represented as a first order sign. And how do we know that this thing which doesn’t yet exist is the thing we seek? The only way is through reference to other signs, hence making it a higher order sign. For example, when we speak of a theory of quantum gravity, we are not speaking the name of an actual theory, but the theory which fulfills a role within the existing scientific framework of physics. This is different from known signs that are the output of an operation, for example a specific number that is the answer to a math question, in these cases sign function collapse is possible (we can think of 4 as either a proper name of a concept, or merely as the consequence as from a certain logical rule).
As I say, most signifiers do have both associated first order and higher order signs! But these are /not/ the same thing, they are not equivalent, as you say they are, from an information perspective. If you know the first order sign, there’s no reason you would automatically know the corresponding higher order sign, and the same for vice versa, as I show in my excerpt from my most recent blog.
My argument specifically hinges on whether it’s possible for an agent to have final goals without higher order signs: it’s not, precisely because first order and higher order signs do not contain the same information.
Engaging with the perspective of orthogonality thesis itself: rejecting it means that a change in intelligence will lead, in expectation, to change in final goals. Could you name the expected direction of such a change, like “more intelligent agents will act with less kindness”?
I couldn’t name a specific direction, but what I would say is that agents of similar intelligence and environment will tend towards similar final goals. Otherwise, I generally agree with this post on the topic. https://unstableontology.com/2024/09/19/the-obliqueness-thesis/

Nicolas Villarreal 9 Jun 2024 22:30 UTC
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on: Priors and Prejudice
I don’t think your dialectical reversion back to randomista logic makes much sense considering we can’t exactly do random control trials to figure out any of the major questions of the social sciences. If you want to promote social science research, I think the best thing you could do is collect consistent statistics over long periods of times. You can learn a lot about modern societies just by learning how national accounts work and looking back at them many different ways. Alternatively, building agent based simulations allows you to test in flexible ways how different types of behavior, both heterogenous and homogenous, might effect macroscopic social outcomes. These are the techniques that I use and they’ve proven very helpful.
If there’s one other thing you’re missing is this, epistemology isn’t something you can rely on others for, even trying to triangulate between different viewpoints. You always have to do your own epistemology, because every way of knowing you encounter in society is a part of someone’s ideological framework trying to adversarially draw you into it.

Nicolas Villarreal 7 Jun 2024 14:42 UTC
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in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: A Semiotic Critique of the Orthogonality Thesis
(The specifics of your postulated definition, especially that recursion->intelligence, seems like a not-very-useful way to define things, since Turing completeness probably means that once you clear a fairly low bar, your amount of possible recursion is just a measure of your hardware, when we usually want ‘intelligence’ to also capture something about your software. But the more standard information-theoretic notion of coding for a goal within a world-model would also say that bigger world models need (on average) bigger codes.)
So it might be a bit confusing, but by recursion here I did not mean like how many loops you do in a program, I meant what order of signs you can create and store, which is a statement of software. Basically, how many signs can you meaningfully connect to another. Not all hardware can represent higher order signs, easy example is a single layer vs multilevel perceptron. Perhaps recursion was the wrong word, but at the time I was thinking about how a sign can refer to another sign that refers to another sign and so on, creating a chain of signifiers which is still meaningful so long as the higher order signs refer to more than one lower order sign.
When we’re taking the human perspective, it’s fine to say “the smarter agent has such a richer and more complex conception of its goal,” without that implying that the smarter agent’s goal has to be different than the dumber agent’s goal.
The point of bringing semiotics into the mix here is to show that the meaning of a sign, such as a goal, is dependent on the things we associate with it. The human perspective is just a way of expressing that goal at one moment in time with our specific associations with it
a) Actions like exploration or “play” could be derived (instrumental) behaviors, rather than final goals. The fact that exploration is given as a final goal in many present-day AI systems is certainly interesting, but isn’t very relevant to the abstract theoretical argument.
In my follow up post I actually show the way in which it is relevant.
b) Even if you assume that every smart AI has “and also, explore and play” as part of its goals, doesn’t mean the other stuff can’t be alien.
The argument about alien values isn’t the logical one but the statistical one, any AI situated in human culture will have values that are likely to be related to the signs created and used by that culture, although we can expect outliers.

Nicolas Villarreal 6 Jun 2024 17:30 UTC
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in reply to: Nicolas Villarreal’s comment on: The Impossibility of a Rational Intelligence Optimizer
As for the orthogonality thesis, my first goal was to dispute its logic, but I think there are also some very practical lessons here. From what I can tell, the limit on intelligence created by an inability to create higher order values kicks in at a pretty basic level, and relate to the limits all current machine learning and LLM based AI that we see emerge on out of distribution tasks. Up till now, we’ve just found ways to procure more data to train on, but if machine agents can never be arbitrarily curious like humans are through making higher order signs our goals, then they’ll never be more generally intelligent than us.