Signer

Karma: 439

Signer 20 Jul 2024 7:33 UTC
−1 points
−5
on: What are the actual arguments in favor of computationalism as a theory of identity?
Computationalism is an ethical theory, so it is fine for it to be based on high-level abstractions—ethics is arbitrary.

Signer 5 Jul 2024 14:39 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: The Potential Impossibility of Subjective Death

For (1) the multiverse needs to be immensely larger than our universe, by a factor of at least 10¹⁰6 or so “instances”. The exact double exponent depends upon how closely people have to match before it’s reasonable to consider them to be essentially the same person. Perhaps on the order of millions of data points is enough, maybe more are needed. Evidence for MWI is nowhere near strong enough to justify this level of granularity in the state space and it doesn’t generalize well to space-time quantization so this probably isn’t enough.

Why? Even without unphysically ordering arbitrary point-states, isn’t the whole splitting behavior creates at least all subjectively-distinguishable instances?

Signer 5 Jul 2024 14:21 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: The Potential Impossibility of Subjective Death
There is non-zero measure on a branch that starts with you terminally ill and gradually proceeds to you miraculously recovering. So if you consider normally recovered you to be you, nothing stops you from considering this low-measure you to also be you.

I have never heard of anyone going to sleep as one of a pair of twins and waking up as the other.

According to MWI everyone wakes up as multiple selves all the time.

Signer 5 Jul 2024 14:00 UTC
1 point
0
on: Doomsday Argument and the False Dilemma of Anthropic Reasoning
Still don’t get how souls would get you psychic powers. Otherwise randomness and causality don’t matter—you may as well simultaneously create people in numbered rooms and people in low-numbered rooms would have the same problems.

Signer 3 Jul 2024 15:15 UTC
−2 points
−3
on: Isomorphisms don’t preserve subjective experience… right?

conscious in the way that we are conscious

Whether it’s the same way is an ethical question, so you can decide however you want.

So there should be some sort of hardware-dependence to obtain subjective experience.

I certainly don’t believe in subjective experience without any hardware, but no, there is no much dependence except for your preferences for hardware.

As for generally accepted conclusions… I think it’s generally accepted that some preferences for hardware are useful in epistemic contexts, so you can be persuaded to say “rock is not conscious” for the same reason you say “rock is not calculator”.

Signer 21 Jun 2024 10:10 UTC
−1 points
−2
on: Enriched tab is now the default LW Frontpage experience for logged-in users
Not sure this qualifies, but I try to avoid instantiating complicated models for ethical reasons.

Signer 17 Jun 2024 13:45 UTC
1 point
−2
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Matthew Barnett’s Shortform
What does “dumb” mean? Corrigibility basically is being selectively dumb. You can give power to a LLM and it would likely still follow instructions.

Signer 1 Jun 2024 8:04 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Matthew Barnett’s comment on: MIRI 2024 Communications Strategy

Given a low prior probability of doom as apparent from the empirical track record of technological progress, I think we should generally be skeptical of purely theoretical arguments for doom, especially if they are vague and make no novel, verifiable predictions prior to doom.

And why such use of the empirical track record is valid? Like, what’s the actual hypothesis here? What law of nature says “if technological progress hasn’t caused doom yet, it won’t cause it tomorrow”?

MIRI’s arguments for doom are often difficult to pin down, given the informal nature of their arguments, and in part due to their heavy reliance on analogies, metaphors, and vague supporting claims instead of concrete empirically verifiable models.

And arguments against are based on concrete empirically verifiable models of metaphors.

If your model of reality has the power to make these sweeping claims with high confidence, then you should almost certainly be able to use your model of reality to make novel predictions about the state of the world prior to AI doom that would help others determine if your model is correct.

Doesn’t MIRI’s model predict some degree of the whole Shoggoth/actress thing in current system? Seems verifiable.

Signer 15 May 2024 18:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: notfnofn’s comment on: Quantized vs. continuous nature of qualia
There is a weaker and maybe shorter version by Chalmers: https://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf. The short version is that there is no way for you to non-accidently know about quantization state of your brain and for that quantization not be a part of an easy problem: pretty much by definition, if you can just physically measure it, it’s easy and not mysterious.

Signer 15 May 2024 15:47 UTC
1 point
−5
on: Quantized vs. continuous nature of qualia
Panpsychism is correct about genuineness and subjectivity of experiences, but you can quantize your caring about other differences between experiences of human and zygote however you want.

Signer 19 Apr 2024 13:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Vanessa Kosoy’s comment on: When is a mind me?

If we live in naive MWI, an IBP agent would not care for good reasons, because naive MWI is a “library of babel” where essentially every conceivable thing happens no matter what you do.

Isn’t the frequency of amplitude-patterns changes depending on what you do? So an agent can care about that instead of point-states.

Signer 18 Apr 2024 7:46 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: When is a mind me?

In the case of teleportation, I think teleportation-phobic people are mostly making an implicit error of the form “mistakenly modeling situations as though you are a Cartesian Ghost who is observing experiences from outside the universe”, not making a mistake about what their preferences are per se.

Why not both? I can imagine that someone would be persuaded to accept teleportation/uploading if they stopped believing in physical Cartesian Ghost. But it’s possible that if you remind them that continuity of experience, like table, is just a description of physical situation and not divinely blessed necessary value, that would be enough to tip the balance toward them valuing carbon or whatever. It’s bad to be wrong about Cartesian Ghosts, but it’s also bad to think that you don’t have a choice about how you value experience.

Signer 17 Apr 2024 18:36 UTC
9 points
1
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: When is a mind me?

Analogy: When you’re writing in your personal diary, you’re free to define “table” however you want. But in ordinary English-language discourse, if you call all penguins “tables” you’ll just be wrong. And this fact isn’t changed at all by the fact that “table” lacks a perfectly formal physics-level definition.

You’re also free to define “I” however you want in your values. You’re only wrong if your definitions imply wrong physical reality. But defining “I” and “experiences” in such a way that you will not experience anything after teleportation is possible without implying anything physically wrong.

You can be wrong about physical reality of teleportation. But even after you figured out that there is no additional physical process going on that kills your soul, except for the change of location, you still can move from “my soul crashes against an asteroid” to “soul-death in my values means sudden change in location” instead of to “my soul remains alive”.

It’s not like I even expect you specifically to mean “don’t liking teleportation is necessary irrational” much. It’s just that saying that there should be an actual answer to questions about “I” and “experiences” makes people moral-realist.

Signer 17 Apr 2024 15:23 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Any evidence or reason to expect a multiverse / Everett branches?
I’m asking how physicists in the laboratory know that their observation are sharp-valued and classical?

Signer 17 Apr 2024 7:34 UTC
3 points
3
on: When is a mind me?

If we were just talking about word definitions and nothing else, then sure, define “self” however you want. You have the universe’s permission to define yourself into dying as often or as rarely as you’d like, if word definitions alone are what concerns you.

But this post hasn’t been talking about word definitions. It’s been talking about substantive predictive questions like “What’s the very next thing I’m going to see? The other side of the teleporter? Or nothing at all?”

There should be an actual answer to this, at least to the same degree there’s an answer to “When I step through this doorway, will I have another experience? And if so, what will that experience be?”

Why? If “I” is arbitrary definition, then “When I step through this doorway, will I have another experience?” depends on this arbitrary definition and so is also arbitrary.

But I hope the arguments I’ve laid out above make it clear what the right answer has to be: You should anticipate having both experiences.

So you always anticipate all possible experiences, because of multiverse? And if they are weighted, than wouldn’t discovering that you are made of mini-yous will change your anticipation even without changing your brain state?

Signer 16 Apr 2024 18:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Any evidence or reason to expect a multiverse / Everett branches?
What’s the evidence for these “sharp-valued classical observations” being real things?

Signer 16 Apr 2024 18:23 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Any evidence or reason to expect a multiverse / Everett branches?

In particular, a.follower many worlder has to discard unobserved results in the same way as a Copenhagenist—it’s just that they interpret doing so as the unobserved results existing in another branch, rather than being snipped off by collapse.

A many-worlder doesn’t have to discard unobserved results—you may care about other branches.

Signer 16 Apr 2024 17:50 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gilch’s comment on: Any evidence or reason to expect a multiverse / Everett branches?
The wrong part is mostly in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.7577.pdf, but: indexical probabilities of being a copy are value-laden—seems like the derivation first assumes that branching happens globally and then assumes that you are forbidden to count different instantiations of yourself, that were created by this global process.

Signer 16 Apr 2024 17:22 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Ackshually, many worlds is wrong
“The” was just me being bad in English. What I mean is:
1. There is probably a way to mathematically model true stochasticity. Properly, not as many-worlds.
2. Math being deterministic shouldn’t be a problem, because the laws of truly stochastic world are not stochastic themselves.
3. I don’t expect any such model to be simpler than many-worlds model. And that’s why you shouldn’t believe in true stochasticity.
4. If 1 is wrong and it’s not possible to mathematically model true stochasticity, then it’s even worse and I would question your assertion of true stochasticity being coherent.
5. If you say that mathematical models turn out complex because deterministic math is unnatural language for true stochasticity, then how do you compare them without math? The program that outputs an array is also simpler than the one that outputs one sample from that array.
How would you formulate this axiom?

Ugh, I’m bad at math. Let’s say given the space of outcomes O and reality predicate R, the axiom would be $\exists x \in O : R (x)$ .

Signer 16 Apr 2024 16:41 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gilch’s comment on: Any evidence or reason to expect a multiverse / Everett branches?
Carroll’s additional assumptions are not relied on by the MWI.