The “All of these questions are deeply stupid” bit is what made me like the article and consider it worth reading, so mileage may vary if you smooth out all the stuff like that.
rsaarelm
Karma: 641
It sounds like Stapledon’s scenario still has grown-up humans able to work on some sort of cutting edge stuff for their civilization. This is very different from the Culture, where humans are basically stuck as housecats and any new stuff is complex enough that only the Minds can tackle it.
If you had a correct causal model of someone having a red experience and saying so, your model would include an actual red experience, and some reflective awareness of it, along with whatever other entities and causal relations are involved in producing the final act of speech.
The model would quite likely amount to a successful brain emulation which would have a conscious experience like a biological human does when run. Though you get into some conceptual hairiness with whether it’s a case that the model includes the experience qualia, or the execution of the model does. Which would be pretty interesting if it was something that could run on a classical computer.
I find it more constructive to try to figure out what those details might be, than to ponder a hypothetical completed neuroscience that vindicates illusionism.
That was the whole idea in my comment. I feel like the “no matter how much physical detail you add, it can’t add up to explaining consciousness” style of argument is exactly pondering hypothetical completed neuroscience, without doing the work. I don’t know what the completed neuroscience would vindicate because it hasn’t been done and understood yet.
The possibility of mastering some niche thing that has some genuine demand so that me doing it will be the best way to satisfy the demand. Even better if it involves coming up with something that hasn’t ever been done before.
I’ve been rolling around the general argument about physical descriptions and qualia around for a while. As far as I can figure, the argument is something like,
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Nothing in the current physical descriptions we understand seems to have anything resembling an explanation of qualia like “the feeling of seeing red”
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Future physical descriptions must be essentially “grammatical elaborations” of the current ones. Any written book is stuck in the modality of the alphabet, no matter how long or innovative it is.
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Since the elementary “alphabet” of physics doesn’t describe qualia, no theory of physics can either.
And my problem here is that this is an awfully confident argument that you get by doing absolutely none of the work you assure would be useless because of the argument. We haven’t done the physical modeling of the process where qualia should be involved, and I think there’s a coherent description of the experiment, even though we’re very far from being able to do it in practice. We have little idea what qualia themselves are, so they’re hard to approach directly, but we have lots of stuff on what humans are and we can do heterophenomenology. So, vast ethical and practical objections aside, the experiment would be simulating the physics of a live adult human from molecular biology up in a lit room with a red object being asked to describe what colors they see and expecting them to respond “I see red”. And then trawling through the full simulation log of just what goes on in the simulated brain.
I see two ways this can go. If the experiment actually succeeds, we should have some very interesting data. Since the modeling proceeds from cells up instead of behavior down, it’s very unlikely we have built a chatbot that mimics surface behavior. Either it’s actually successfully mirroring how humans in the physical world perceive color, or it won’t do anything because the copy of the human neuroarchitecture won’t make sense with whatever the missing secret sauce is. So you might go full mysterian and claim there must be a secret sauce and the model won’t work, but now you’re committed to a falsifiable prediction that the experiment won’t succeed. And the original argument about adding stuff not helping is a non sequitur in this case.
Or the simulation does work. And people do the further work of deciphering all the simulated neural processes. And then we have a readable physics-level explanation of all the stuff that goes on from the 700 nm wavelength light to “I see red”. We don’t know what’s going to be in there. We haven’t done the work, we don’t know what the details will look like if they were spelled out in physics, but the “physics won’t explain the important part” argument concedes this should be doable. And I’m really curious about being able to see this picture. Like, we’re making our judgments now based on the “how things work” schemas we have now. It looks like there’d need to be some structural “how things work” schema that’s unfamiliar to us in that description, so shouldn’t we try to figure it out first instead of going “eh, it’ll just be physics physics physics, who cares”. What if after doing the work people will instead go “Oh, that’s how it works! We had no idea,” and we currently indeed do have no idea?
I’m thinking this might be something like computers (or fractals, or game of life). There’s nothing novel about computers in terms of fundamental ontology, they’re just patterns made of simple physics. Yet there’s a whole discipline about studying what they can do and a huge package of brand new schemas and intuitions about “things doable with computers” completely unknown to top physicists and philosophers for hundreds of years, that people got by learning about a “just some more physics” description and thinking about it for many years.
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LessWrongers dream of an unhurried future without having to fear death.
https://carado.moe/everything-is-okay.html is a dead link. Seems that all of the website is gone and purged from the Wayback Machine.
Nowhere on the whole wide internet works like that! Clearly the vast majority of people do not think that authors shouldn’t moderate their own threads. Practically nowhere on the internet do you even have the option for anything else.
Where’s this coming from all of a sudden? Forums work like this, Less Wrong used to work like this. Data Secrets Lox still works like this. Most subreddits work like this. This whole thread is about how maybe the places that work like this have the right idea, so it’s a bit late in the game to open up with “they don’t exist and aren’t a thing anyone wants”.
It feels like there’s a confusion of different informal social systems with how LW 2.0 has been set up. Forums have traditionally had moderators distinct from posters, and even when moderators also participate in discussions on small forums, there are often informal conventions that a moderator should not put on a modhat if they are already participating in a dispute as a poster, and a second moderator should look at the post instead (you need more than one moderator for this of course).
The LW 2.0 author moderation system is what blog hosting platforms like Blogger and Substack use, and the bid seems to have been to entice people who got big enough to run their standalone successful blog back to Lesswrong. On these platforms the site administrators are very hands-off and usually only drop in to squash something actually illegal (and good luck getting anyone to talk to if they actually decide your blog needs to be wiped from the system), and the separate blogs are kept very distinct from each other with little shared site identity, so random very weird Blogger blogs don’t really create that much of an overall “there’s something off with Blogger” vibe. They just exist on their own domain and mostly don’t interact with the rest of the platform.
Meanwhile, LW is still very much in the forum mold, the posts exist in the same big pool and site moderators are very hands-on, give warnings and can be talked to. Standalone blog author tier people mostly don’t seem to have come back to post a large volume of LW threads, and the dynamics are still very forum-like, so basically now there’s just the chaotic extra element that any random person who started a forum thread can act as moderator and moderate other users as well as their individual comments on their threads, and this adds weird drama and dysfunction to the forum social dynamic. Most of the time it happens it’ll also violate the informal rule that a moderator should not start moderating the dispute they themselves got initially involved in as a non-modhat poster.
EDIT: The third system mixed in is Facebook/Twitter style social media that’s a “steppe” instead of a “valley”, meaning that you have a steady stream of complete strangers coming in and out instead of a pool of a few dozen to a few hundred people who might have been around for over a decade. You want a very low friction ban mechanism on a steppe site since a lot of first interactions will be bad and usually indicate the drive-by stranger they’re from is not worth interacting with. On a valley site the person interacting with you is much more likely to be tightly invested in the very local area, so blocking them is bigger drama generator.
Reddit and HN also get it wrong, but less wrong than LW: they show the comment and its subthread, but not the surrounding context.
You can click on the “context” link in a HN subthread view to switch to the one you want.
I used to subscribe to front page posts RSS feed but gave up on it years ago because the signal-to-noise ratio went too low. Now I subscribe to user RSS feeds of a handful of old-timer users who seem to consistently have interesting things to say and then learn about posts they interact with. https://www.greaterwrong.com/ all the way.
I zoned out pretty hard around the time they got deep into the korrigibility debate, and started entertaining myself by assuming that the ship’s approach was actually The Outer Dark from Warren Ellis’ Authority, told from a different viewpoint.
I’m having a hard time finding examples in that list that feel like they really match the idea. Most of them seem to be about people figuring out they’re in a Matrix and then punching the Matrix Lord in the face. One example I remember which does go directly from realization to nonexistence is Orqwith in Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. The idea that you can directly affect the physical universe, though not necessarily to the point of nonexistence, by messing with sufficiently complex calculations shows up pretty much as is in Greg Egan’s Luminous.
I’m pretty sure people drifted away because of a more complex set of dynamics and incentives than “Said might comment on their posts” and I don’t expect to see much of a reversal.
People dropping in on an unfamiliar website can have very hair-trigger reactions on any sort of AI art. I heard someone say they felt like immediately writing off a (good) Substack post as fake content they should ignore because of the AI art illustration at the top of the post. And I think the illustration generator is a built-in option on Substack because I see constant AI illustrations on Substacks of people who are purely writers who as far as I can tell who aren’t very interested in art or web design. But this person wasn’t familiar with Substack, so their brain just went “random AI slop site, ignore”.
Bad call. You don’t exactly have an unlimited supply of people who have a solid handle on the formative LW mindset and principles from 15 years ago and who are still actively participating on the forums, and latter-day LessWrong doesn’t have as much of a coherent and valuable identity to stand firmly on its own.
A key idea in the mindset that started LessWrong is that people can be wrong. Being wrong can exist as an abstract thing to begin with, it’s not just an euphemism for poor political positioning. And people in positions of authority can be wrong. Kind, well-meaning, likable people can be wrong. People who have considerate friendly conversations that are a joy to moderate can be wrong. It’s not always easy to figure out right and wrong, but it is possible, and it’s not always socially harmonious to point it out loud, but it used to be considered virtuous still.
A forum that has principles in its culture is going to have cases where moderation is annoying around something or someone who doggedly sticks to those principles. It’s then a decision for the moderators whether they want to work to keep the forum’s principles alive or to have a slightly easier time moderating in the future.
How did you connect the objects you see as glowing with UV light specifically? Couldn’t the glow be a hallucination or a perceptual rewiring like the persistent “breathing wallpaper” LSD users can start seeing, or some different physical property entirely? Can you see UV light emitted by machines that should be invisible like a person in the newscientist link claims he could after he got an artificial lens?
On leaving hospital, I decided I deserved a pint of bitter. Standing at the bar of my local pub, I noticed that their device for detecting counterfeit banknotes was emitting very bright bluish light. I mentioned this to the barman, who looked at me with a very quizzical expression but made no comment. I then realised that he couldn’t see the light: it was visible through my right eye alone.
Huh, apparently this is a thing. Retinas can see into UV, but UV light is normally filtered out by the lens.
Medical article about cataract surgeries and UV protection
No idea how you could start seeing UV by rewiring your brain if your eyeballs still have the original lenses though.
what do you mean by “psychic pain”?
As far as I’ve understood, a big idea with dukkha is that you have an intense desire for things to not be the way you perceive them to be, even though you might not have any concrete means of changing things, and the psychic pain is your constant awareness that reality isn’t the way you want. “Regret” and “yearning” both seem like good words to describe types of this, though you probably want to imagine the more extreme versions of both, not just mild wistfulness.
If you’ve looked into predictive processing, this sounds familiar. The low-level story might be something like being stuck with persistent predictive errors where you can neither update your model or act to change your circumstances.
Presumably we have the capacity to suffer because it facilitated our survival somehow. How are you so sure you don’t need to hear the message suffering was sending you?
We could try to figure this out by teaching lots of people to get rid of suffering and then watching them to see if it fucks them up.
This still has the time traveller doing the destructive thing using the made-up physics of the time machine that causes the doom. The idea from OP is a much more magical one where the impossibility has always been present but things were working fine until someone found out about it, even though no new physical action that could plausibly cause the destruction is involved with the finding out.