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Karma: 549

Signer May 30, 2025, 1:35 PM
3 points
2
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Some Thoughts on Metaphilosophy

Bikes aren’t appearances , so there is no analogy.

The analogy is that they both need instantiation. That’s the thing about appearances that is used in the argument.

Know-how, such as riding kills, is not an appearance, or physical.knowledge.

So physicalism is false, because physical knowledge is incomplete without know-how.

Nonetheless , there is a difference.

Sure, they are different physical processes. But what’s the relevant epistemological difference? If you agree that Mary is useless we can discuss whether there are ontological differences.

Riding bikes? How they work? How they appear?

Yes.

in the case of experience, and only in the case of experience

The problem is that there in no other case does it seem necessary to instantiate a brain state in order to undertstand something.

Again, this is false—it is as much as necessary in case of riding. And differences between knowing about qualia and knowing about fusion are explained by preferences: humans just don’t care about or need instantiating fusion, but care about instantiating red. In both cases you are physically affected and so you (can define knowledge in such a way that you) gain new representation of knowledge by instantiation.

Signer May 30, 2025, 7:13 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Some Thoughts on Metaphilosophy

What it looks like is the representation! A different representation just isn’t a quale. #FF0000 just isnt a red quale!

But reading a book on riding a bike isn’t knowing how to tide a bike...you get the knowledge from mounting a bike and trying!

The knowledge of representation is the whole thing! Qualia are appearances!

If you want to define things that way, ok. So Mary’s room implies that bikes are as unphysical as qualia.

It bypasses what you are calling representation … you have admitted that.

Mary also doesn’t have all representations for all physical knowledge. She doesn’t have to have a concept of fire, or equations in all possible notations, or riding skills.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a difference between different kinds of knowing.

Mary’s room doesn’t provide motivation for there being a fundamental difference between knowing how to ride a bike and knowing what it is like to see red. And physicalism explains bikes, right?

The physics equations representing a brain don’t contain qualia then, since they don’t exist as a brain.

Yes, of course, like they don’t contain atoms or fire or whatever. Reality they describe contains them. Well, except equations are physical objects, so you can write equations with brains or something, but it’s not relevant.

And additional representation of red in Mary’s brain after she sees it is also doesn’t contain her being in a state of seeing red.

Signer May 29, 2025, 5:53 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Some Thoughts on Metaphilosophy

If Mary looks at these equations ,in her monochrome room, does she go into the brain state that instantiates seeing something red?

No.

Does she somehow finds out what red looks like without that?

Yes.

What does that mean? Are you saying Mary already knew what red looks like, and instantiating the brain state adds no new knowledge?

She already knew what red looks like, the knowledge just was in a different representation. Just like with knowing how to ride a bike. “no new”, like everything here, depends on definitions. But she definitely undergoes physical change, that may be viewed as her gaining new representation of knowledge, which may be valuable for her.

Mary can “predict pixels” in some sense that bypasses her knowing what colour qualia look like. Just as a blind person can repeat, without understanding , that tomatoes look red, Mary can state that such and such a brain state would have an RGB value of #FF0000 at such and such a pixel. #FF0000 is a symbol for something unknown to here, just as much as r-e-d. So it’s not a prediction of a quale in the relevant sense.

Mary can “predict muscles” in some sense that bypasses her knowing how to ride a bike. Just as a boring person can repeat, without understanding, that bikes are fast, Mary can state that such and such a muscle state would have an XYZ value of (1,2,3) at such and such a cell. (1,2,3) is a symbol for something unknown to her, just as much as b-i-k-e. So it’s not a prediction of riding in the relevant sense.

Without additional assumptions, predicting pixels doesn’t bypasses anything more, than predicting atoms bypasses knowing fire. You can separately intuitively assume that there is a difference, but what’s unique about Mary’s situation is resolvable by just noting that there is a difference between being and knowing.

Why is red is “something unknown to her”? If to answer it you need additional arguments, like zombies, then you don’t need Mary. And the answer is not “because she gains knowledge by instantiating” because it’s the same way with bikes.

Why?

I mean that from qualia requiring you to exist in a specific state you can make a jump to “consciousness is existence”.

Signer May 28, 2025, 6:16 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Some Thoughts on Metaphilosophy

If you don’t think there is an HP, because of Mary’s Room, why do you think there is an HP?

Because of the Zombies Argument. “What part of physical equations says our world is not a zombie-world?” is a valid question. The answer to “What part of physical equations says what red looks like?” is just “the part that describes brain”.

It’s supposed to indicate that there is a hard problem , ie. that that even a super scientist cannot come up with a reductive+predictive theory of qualia.

It doesn’t indicate it independently of other assumptions. Mary’s situation only implies that you should track the difference between knowing and being (which I guess is a hint that panpsychism solves HP) - it doesn’t say there is something wrong with “Mary has a reductive+predictive theory of qualia, which is confirmed by her ability to predict every pixel of her future experience”.

What red looks like, as stated in all forms of the story.

Mary can say “it looks like <pixel array>”.

Signer May 21, 2025, 7:00 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: stormykat’s comment on: A simple, intuitive, and sufficient criterion for moral patienthood
First, you can still infer meta-representation from your behavior. Second, why does it matter that you represent aversiveness, what’s the difference? Representation of aversiveness and representation of damage are both just some states of neurons that model some other neurons (representation of damage still implies possibility of modeling neurons, not only external state, because your neurons are connected to other neurons).

Signer May 21, 2025, 5:31 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: stormykat’s comment on: A simple, intuitive, and sufficient criterion for moral patienthood
I understand that, but I’m still asking why subliminal stimuli are not morally relevant for you? They may still create disposition to act in aversive way, so there is still mechanism in some part the brain/neural network that causes this behaviour and has access to the stimulus—what’s the morally significant difference between a stimulus being in some neurons and being in others, such that you call only one location “awareness”?

Signer May 20, 2025, 7:27 AM
1 point
0
on: A simple, intuitive, and sufficient criterion for moral patienthood
Why does it matter that Gilbert infers something from the behavior of his neural network and not from the behavior of his body? Both are just subjective models of reality. Why does it matter whether he knows something about his pain? Why it doesn’t count, if Gilbert avoids pain defined as the state of neural network that causes him to avoid it, even when he doesn’t know something about it? Maybe you can model it as Gilbert himself not feeling pain, but why the neural network is not a moral patient?

Signer May 19, 2025, 1:07 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
The reference classes you should use work as a heuristic because there is some underlying mechanism that makes them work. So you should use reference classes in situations where their underlying mechanism is expected to work.

Maybe the underlying mechanism of doomsday predictions not working is that people predicting doom don’t make their predictions based on valid reasoning. So if someone uses that reference class to doubt AI risk, this should be judged as them making a claim about reasoning of people predicting AI doom being similar to people in cults predicting Armageddon.

Signer May 14, 2025, 3:55 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: Why it’s so hard to talk about Consciousness

The fact that these physicalists feel it would be in some way necessary to instantiate colour, but not other things, like photosynthesis or fusion, means they subscribe to the idea that there is something epistemically unique about qualia/experience, even if they resist the idea that qualia are metaphysically unique.

No, it means they subscribe to the idea that there is something ethically different about qualia/experience. It’s not unique, it’s like riding a bike. Human sometimes call physical interactions, utility of which is not obtainable by just thinking, “knowledge”, when these interactions are with human body. And “they feel” is not an argument about knowledge, it’s an argument about feelings. The difference between instantiating fusion in brain or red is not epistemical, it’s ethical—qualia are useful for humans, so they don’t properly transfer intuitions into Mary’s case, and even if they do, humans care more about their brain instantiating red, than their brain fusing. Fundamentally, they all can be viewed as different representations of knowledge. It’s just some representations are valuable by themselves.

What? Are you saying that if it is necessary for something for her than completer knowledge, it isn’t necessary for complete knowledge?

I’m saying that if differences in feelings of necessity are explainable by preferences, then what need there is to introduce problematic definitions of knowledge?

The intended point is that she gains knowledge from personal experience that isn’t predictable from a perfect understanding of physics. I don’t know what you mean by “physicalism predicts gaining knowledge”. Physicalism doesn’t predict that you should gain additional knowledge by instantiating a state yourself , because physicalism is the idea that all facts are physical facts, which implies all facts are objective facts, which implies personal instantiation can’t add anything (so king sc you, like Mary, dint have any resource limitationd)

Yes, and the consequence of this point is that you shouldn’t use such definition of knowledge, because it implies that knowing how to ride a bike is unphysical.

Physicalism in a strict sense means that objective knowledge is the only knowledge.

I don’t see how there can be any objective knowledge—encodings are subjective. By the way, why is ok for Physicalism to mean different things in context of different arguments? Physicalism in the Hard Problem doesn’t mean that knowing how to ride a bike is unphysical.

But if you insist on defining Physicalism in such a way, then yes, Mary doesn’t gain additional knowledge. Which proves that such definition contradicts some people’s intuition about experience and bikes. It doesn’t prove anything about real epistemology without additional assumptions.

Mary’s Room, AKA the Knowledge Argument is about knowledge. It’s epistemological. No explicit claims about ontology are made. No nonphysical ontology is implied by talking about qualia, either, for the usual reason that qualia aren’t defined as nonphysical.

I’m saying it doesn’t work as argument without ontological assumptions.

Without predicting what they are.

No qualia are predicted by phytsicalism.

That’s not a fact. Physicalism doesn’t predict that anything feels like anything.

You can’t conclude this without additional assumptions from Mary alone! I’m not arguing “physicalism is true” here, only that Mary is useless in disproving it. The only thing you can get from Mary, is that there is prediction-instantiation gap with experiences. But it’s the same gap as between knowing about a state and being in a state, like with knowing how to ride a bike.

One of such possible assumptions is that there is some difference between relations of knowledge and state in cases of experience and bikes. That in some sense knowledge without acquaintance about bikes is still about bikes, but knowledge about experience is not actually about experience. That knowledge without acquaintance about experience is incomplete in some additional way, not related to the ordinary difference between knowing and being. But it is an additional assumption, not something you can derive from Mary’s Room, because, again, Mary gaining something after leaving the room is predicted both in case of experience and in case of bikes.

Atoms undergoing exothermic reactions involving oxygen is exactly what is fire. If you use a sufficiently detailed reductive explanation,nl it does lead to identity. Heat is disorganised molecular activity.

I don’t see how you can get identity if you can just can have an ontology that doesn’t contain fire, only atoms. You can get some atoms to be numerically close to a reencoding of atoms of your brain that perceives fire. Or numerically close to some other previous model of fire. You can then check some limits for divergence and declare that atomic model matches empirical results precise-enough. But no one expects previous model to be precisely equivalent to new one? And reasoning about different specific fires definitely involves probabilistic induction.

Conversely, if by “necessary” you just mean ordinary way science does reductions, then Mary’s situation with experience fully qualifies: she correctly concludes that red qualia are activity of neurons, have as complete knowledge about bats on LSD as of bikes and fires, can say that the red of roses will feel similar to the red of blood, can predict her entire field of view with pixels marked “red” with more precision, than she will be able to track in the moment, and will get new experience after leaving the room as predicted. No part of it contradicts qualia being reducible to physics. You can only argue it by bringing zombies. Or show on which step Mary fails to reduce red qualia, that doesn’t work the same way with bikes or fires.

I guess the more substantial disagreement may be in the part, where a description of a bat-on-LSD experience in the language of physics or neural activity is somehow doesn’t count, as opposed to… I’m not sure what people expect, a description in the terms usually used to describe human experience starting with “it feels like...”? But that’s just the question of precision—why should describing nuclear reactor in terms of fire would be required to claim success in reduction? There is of course the difference between you knowing about bats-on-LSD and you having such experience—but that is also true about riding a bike or any other physical state.

It all looks to me like people are confusing knowing about qualia and being in a state of having qualia—that’s why they assume perfect certain knowledge of qualia they have, talk about qualia being impossible to communicate and so on.

?? She isn’t defined as knowing everything plausible, she is defined as knowing everything physical/objective.

Sorry, typo—“plausibly includes”.

Signer Jan 28, 2025, 12:58 PM
1 point
0
on: Death vs. Suffering: The Endurist-Serenist Divide on Life’s Worst Fate

Endurist thinking treats reproduction as always acceptable or even virtuous, regardless of circumstances. The potential for suffering rarely factors into this calculation—new life is seen as inherently good.

Not necessary—you can treat creating new people differently from already existing and avoid creating bad (in Endurist sense—not enough positive experiences, regardless of suffering) lives without accepting death for existing people. I, for example, don’t get why would you bring more death to the world by creating low-lifespan people, if you don’t like death.

Signer Jan 5, 2025, 5:42 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: The Field of AI Alignment: A Postmortem, and What To Do About It

clearly the system is a lot less contextual than base models, and it seems like you are predicting a reversal of that trend?

The trend may be bounded, the trend may not go far by the time AI can invent nanotechnology—would be great if someone actually measured such things.

And there being a trend at all is not predicted by utility-maximization frame, right?

Signer Jan 5, 2025, 11:08 AM
23 points
5
in reply to: quila’s comment on: quila’s Shortform
People are confused about the basics because the basics are insufficiently justified.

Signer Jan 3, 2025, 12:19 PM
1 point
0
on: AI #97: 4

It is learning helpfulness now, while the best way to hit the specified ‘helpful’ target is to do straightforward things in straightforward ways that directly get you to that target. Doing the kinds of shenanigans or other more complex strategies won’t work.

Best by what metric? And I don’t think it was shown, that complex strategies won’t work—learning to change behaviour from training to deployment is not even that complex.

Signer Dec 28, 2024, 1:18 PM
1 point
−1
on: The Field of AI Alignment: A Postmortem, and What To Do About It

But it is important, and this post just isn’t going to get done any other way.

Speaking about streetlighting...

Signer Dec 18, 2024, 3:06 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Roko’s comment on: Is AI alignment a purely functional property?
What makes it rational is that there is an actual underlying hypothesis about how weather works, instead of vague “LLMs are a lot like human uploads”. And weather prediction outputs numbers connected to reality we actually care about. And there is no alternative credible hypothesis that implies weather prediction not working.

I don’t want to totally dismiss empirical extrapolations, but given the stakes, I would personally prefer for all sides to actually state their model of reality and how they think evidence changed it’s plausibility, as formally as possible.

Signer Dec 15, 2024, 11:47 PM
4 points
2
on: Is AI alignment a purely functional property?
There is no such disagreement, you just can’t test all inputs. And without knowledge of how internals work, you may me wrong about extrapolating alignment to future systems.

Signer Nov 25, 2024, 2:15 AM
5 points
6
on: Are You More Real If You’re Really Forgetful?
Yes, except I would object to phrasing this anthropic stuff as “we should expect ourselves to be agents that exist in a universe that abstracts well” instead of “we should value universe that abstracts well (or other universes that contain many instances of us)”—there is no coherence theorems that force summation of your copies, right? And so it becomes apparent that we can value some other thing.

Also even if you consider some memories a part of your identity, you can value yourself slightly less after forgetting them, instead of only having threshold for death.

Signer Nov 24, 2024, 10:30 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Jonah Wilberg’s comment on: Ethical Implications of the Quantum Multiverse
It doesn’t matter whether you call your multiplier “probability” or “value” if it results in your decision to not care about low-measure branch. The only difference is that probability is supposed to be about knowledge, and Wallace’s argument involving arbitrary assumption, not only physics, means it’s not probability, but value—there is no reason to value knowledge of your low-measure instances less.

this makes decision theory and probably consequentialist ethics impossible in your framework

It doesn’t? Nothing stops you from making decisions in a world where you are constantly splitting. You can try to maximize splits of good experiences or something. It just wouldn’t be the same decisions you would make without knowledge of splits, but why new physical knowledge shouldn’t change your decisions?

Signer Nov 23, 2024, 1:24 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Jonah Wilberg’s comment on: Ethical Implications of the Quantum Multiverse

Things like lions, and chairs are other examples.

And counted branches.

This is how Wallace defines it (he in turn defines macroscopically indistinguishable in terms of providing the same rewards). It’s his term in the axiomatic system he uses to get decision theory to work. There’s not much to argue about here?

His definition leads to contradiction with informal intuition that motivates consideration of macroscopical indistinguishability in the first place.

We should care about low-measure instances in proportion to the measure, just as in classical decision theory we care about low-probability instances in proportion to the probability.

Why? Wallace’s argument is just “you don’t care about some irrelevant microscopic differences, so let me write this assumption that is superficially related to that preference, and here—it implies the Born rule”. Given MWI, there is nothing wrong physically or rationally in valuing your instances equally whatever their measure is. Their thoughts and experiences don’t depend on measure the same way they don’t depend on thickness or mass of a computer implementing them. You can rationally not care about irrelevant microscopic differences and still care about number of your thin instances.

Signer Nov 22, 2024, 12:19 PM
7 points
2
on: LLM chatbots have ~half of the kinds of “consciousness” that humans believe in. Humans should avoid going crazy about that.
How many notions of consciousness do you think are implementable by a short Python program?