I operate by Crocker’s rules. All LLM output is explicitely designated as such. I have made no self-hiding agreements. I add LLMs who gave feedback to/were involved in the creation of projects/the writing of blogposts in the same way I’d add humans as co-authors.
niplav
Karma: 6,163
This post should make it clear. In short: MV-algebras are the semantics for Łukasiewicz logic, which is in turn usually defined either as a trinary logic or over the reals. Demski & Garriga-Alonso find that this doesn’t resolve some paradoxes, and thus define it over the hyperreals, which they suspect resolves all the paradoxes one can find.
epistemic status: shooting the shit [1] . Least certain about the quantum part. As of now, I can find six distinct types of (incommensurable?) belief strength:
Empirical/adversarial ((infra-)Bayesianism/whatever imprecise probability theory)
Self-referential/semantic ((hyperfinite) Łukasiewicz degree)
Quantum state credences (non-commuting observables, Born rule?)
Normative (choiceworthiness, decision-theoretic/¿aesthetic?)
Possibly commensurable:
Self-referential/semantic→logical (Garrabrant inductors oscillate around p(Liar’s paradox)=0.5, possibly solving it as well for Restall’s paradox-type sentences, converging to (but never reaching) 0?)
Indexical→quantum (afaiu, from the Gleason theorem/Kochen-Specker theorem we know we can’t collapse quantum states into probabilities without losing information, but maybe indexcal uncertainty, at the end of the day, just is best represented as quantum states?)
Indexical uncertainty→empirical uncertainty: Perhaps indexical uncertainty is just a spicier version of empirical uncertainty, and we can see different anthropic updating rules as hidden variants of empirical reasoning.
Possibly disambiguable:
Normative uncertainty: Many in one bucket, maybe this becomes philosophical uncertainty if expanded? Not clear to me that decision-theoretic uncertainty/aesthetic/normative/metanormative uncertainty &c follow the same update rule.
Attempt at a table:
Type of belief-strength Formal object Update rule Empirical Probability distribution/credal set/infradistribution &c Bayes rule/imprecise update rule/the infra-Bayesian equivalent Logical Logical induction Self-referential MV-algebra over the hyperreal (in Łukasiewicz logic) ??? maybe an ongoing process of expanding the hyperreal tree to deal with novel paradoxes? None? Indexical Measure over observer-moments SSA/SIA Quantum Density matrix ? maybe the Quantum Liouville equation? Normative Probability distribution over normative statements (or a fixed point in infinite meta-regress) Philosophical argument, reflective equilibrium - ↩︎
Thanks to several AFFINE & EAG participants for talking with me about this, if you see this you can tell me to credit you. Also thanks Claude, your criticisms are a pain in the ass. (None of this is Claude-written, don’t worry.)
It might also be that qualiagnosics have qualia but don’t know it, similarly to how aphantasiacs actually have various forms of imagination, largely similar to non-aphantasiacs’, except mostly running in the background.
Yeah, I considered this and alluded to it (“and people who have qualia but say they don’t have them”). In general, my prior is to follow people’s self-reports, since in this area there’s no shared ground on whose self-reports are more accurate (the illusionists say that the qualiagnosics are right, non-eliminativists say the qualiagnosics are mistaken, et sic ad infinitum repetitur).
From my understanding Tomasik is both an eliminativist and a hardcore negative utilitarian, so I’d guess he has some takes on this, although they might mostly reduce to something like: suffering defined as a computational pattern similar to whatever we call suffering in humans.
Yup, I elided this. It’s a coherent position, though I don’t find it very intuitive.
(I also find discussions of consciousness very frustrating, this one seemed different because self-reporting and plausibly empirics? I’m not that interested in having Yet Another Discussion on The Hard Problem, and more in people’s reports. Is the notion of “qualia” intuitive to them?)
Huh, I found the claims by Carl & Sky to be more introspection-related, as opposed to verbal/philosophical. I guess I’m less on a neuroscience train here, and more on the introspective-psychology wagon; the risk of simply being dragged along by different introspection abilities/tendencies is a risk I’m willing to accept. (Though: Maybe humanity knows some stuff here, already? I shall take a look.)
Extreme anecdata: An acquaintance of my partner is a translator who was let gone from her previous job, to be mostly replaced by AI.
Oh, nice! Both I & Claude failed to find that one. Interesting. I may want to do Hurlburt-style interview questions on the two findable qualiagnosics, or set up a google survey to find more.
TL;DR: There are people who report that they don’t have qualia and are often confused what others mean by the term, this is an interesting ground for some empirical (!) psychology/applied philosophy.
Lots of illusions (e.g. optical illusions) can be dispelled through inspecting them enough; people who claim that e.g. free will or the self are illusions also say that those illusions can be seen through and/or dispelled. (Often the method is (copious amounts of) meditation.)
Similarly, illusionism in philosophy of consciousness claims that phenomenal consciousness (i.e. the dreaded “qualia”) are an illusion, too. I was thus curious if there were any people who reported absence of qualia/not understanding what other people mean with “qualia”, similar how aphantasics report not being able to visualize things in their mind.
We may call such people “qualia agnosics”, or short “qualiagnosics”. (Not p-zombies, since such people don’t claim to have qualia while lacking them.)
If “qualia” are an illusion, surely one should find people who are either “congenital” qualiagnosics, or, have seen through the illusion? The philosophy literature has some speculation on how the illusion of qualia could be adaptive, but I find that speculation to be mostly just-so, and among all the properties of human minds surely there must be some who have the ¿fortune? to not have the illusion anymore.
At first I had difficulty locating any qualiagnosics. Many philosophers say they understand, on a cognitive level, that qualia aren’t a thing, but still feel the intuitive pull of the notion. E.g.:
Despite the seeming confidence with which I wrote ‘Dissolving Confusion about Consciousness’ and other essays on subjective experience, I still feel confused about consciousness at an emotional level. Rationally I think my reductionist viewpoint is likely to be right, but there has always occasionally still been a weird feeling I have when I ask myself the ‘hard problem’… I sometimes lie awake in bed asking it to myself over and over. It feels similar to bumping my head against an insoluble math problem. While I feel like I do know the ‘answer’ — it’s the reductive physicalist answer I discuss in other essays — the answer doesn’t quite feel intuitive when looked at from a certain perspective.
—Brian Tomasik, “My Confusions about the Hard Problem of Consciousness”, 2015
The analogy with visual illusions also holds with respect to cognitive penetrability. Forming the theoretical belief that phenomenal properties are illusory does not change one’s introspective representations, and one remains strongly disposed to make all usual phenomenal judgments (and perhaps does still make them at some level). As with perceptual illusions, this may indicate that the phenomenal illusion is an adaptive one, which has been hardwired into our psychology.
—Keith Frankish, “Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness”, 2016
“Weird illusion,” I thought to myself, “that is exceptionlessly universal”.
But it’s not! There are at least two people who have openly said they are deeply confused when they hear others talk about “phenomenal consciousness”, “qualia” &c. One is Carl Feynman, as he explains here on LessWrong, user Sky S joins in and later jokingly speculates that it might be genetic.
I think the apparent existence of qualiagnosics brings up a bunch of interesting questions:
How common is qualiagnosia?
Is qualiagnosia always from birth, or has it ever been induced?
Are there any correlates? Aphantasia, of course, but others? Sex? Neurotype, OCEAN variables, intelligence?
Is congenital qualiagnosia heritable or even genetic?
I suspect Sky S’ joke is not actually that implausible: If qualiagnosia would be learned/induceable, then we may hear of people who have switched from claiming qualia to qualiagnosia, or back; but I know of no such reports.
The apparent existence of qualiagnosia has made me update positively on eliminativism/illusionism. But, a possible rejoinder could be that there are genuine qualia-havers, and genuine qualiagnosics (the two other options are p-zombies, and people who have qualia but say they don’t have them).
If it ends up that there is a biological foundation of qualia-reporting/qualiagnosia, there’s some interesting ethics. Not that one shouldn’t treat qualiagnosics as moral patients (and most moral theories agree, though how exactly hedonic utilitarianism would justify that is unclear). Tbc I think we should treat qualiagnosics as moral patients.
But e.g. genetically modifying people to be/not be qualiagnosics would be an interesting debate, dispelling the illusion on one side and creating qualialess humans on the other side of the equation.
(I don’t have much interest in discussing the hard problem here, instead thoughts about the implication of the existence of qualiagnosics and/or more psychological pointers/case reports are welcome :-)
The illusion of qualia (if they are indeed an illusion) could be a spandrel which is not subject to selection, only drift; it seems incredibly difficult to dispel on purpose (unlike e.g. the illusions of the self or free will, which both can be dispelled through enough meditation), so it’s not implausible that it’s actually genetic, which would be wild. I might decide to research more on this topic in the future, if so could I contact you?
I guess that was my thread? If so: happy to, uh, help, and wonderful to find people with this unusual condition!
My guess would’ve been that you’d name Puyi.
There are the accounts Claude+ and chatgptopenai, which one could make co-authors on posts to indicate idea/feedback/whatever-involvement. In general, I’m happy to support developing norms about AI involvement, as to give people an out if they’re worried about memetic plagues.
I like to make the distinction of altruism-as-social-rewards-hooking-into percepts and altruism-as-social-rewards-hooking-into-worldmodel. One can get warm fuzzies in either, would be my guess?
Like, I’m EA, and I’ve also taken some unusually selfish actions over the years.
I wasn’t around for the first LW PUA wars, though I “experienced” them in reading the threads in retrospect.
What’s your sense of why one side won, and the other didn’t, back then? I’m curious how the consensus was reached.
Examples of written infields here, here/here, here, here and here. Generally these match my experiences and I’d softly vouch for them in terms of realism, if not accuracy, though some are by guys who are much more skilled than I am/was. (Selection bias of course applies here, a ton)
In general the infields I’ve seen on e.g. YouTube match my experience of ~1k approaches, though I haven’t done any nightgame.
I expect that when we look back in a few years, there will be a pretty strong feeling that this was the wrong call & that this should’ve been more apparent even without the benefit of hindsight.
Prescient.
generated a Youtube promotional video (consider watching this with sound, it’s hilarious)
The link says “video unavailable” for me.
Induction doesn’t apply perfectly here, instead we’d like to know how well/badly conditioned our methods are. This is probably over and above the conditioning of the training process per se.
I looked into transfer learning a while ago, resulting in this post, it contains some pointers to further literature. I was not particularly impressed by the literature, but it’s a thing that’s hard to study. Open loops were investigating error-based learning, video/audio self modeling, self-explanation (talking to oneself (an LLM?) and explaining something while learning/thinking). Some thoughts about feedback loops here.
Another example of the claim is here. I guess to really settle it a longer Hurlburt-style interview would be useful.