I’m an independent researcher currently working on a sequence of posts about consciousness. You can send me anonymous feedback here: https://www.admonymous.co/rafaelharth.
Rafael Harth
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I definitely think developing equanimity without meditation is a thing. The description checks out.
About the applicability, maybe you could extend it to other types of injuries (and positive sensations!) with a higher skill level? I doubt there are different types that work differently.
I’ll read it (& comment if I have anything to say). But man the definition for the concept your post is about is pretty important, even if it’s “semantics”. Specifically, if this post were actually just about self-awareness (which does not seem to be the case, from a first skim), then I wouldn’t even be interested in reading it because I don’t think self-awareness is particularly related to consciousness, and it’s not a topic I’m separately interested in. Maybe edit it? If you’re not just talking about X, then no reason to open the post by saying that you are.
Edit: actually I gave up reading it (but this has nothing to do with the opening paragraph), I find it very difficult to follow/understand where you’re trying to go with it. I think you have to motivate this better to keep people interested. (Why is the time gap important? Why is the pathway important? What exactly is this post even about?) I didn’t downvote though.
Apologies for commenting without reading the entire post, but I’m just going to give my rant about this particular aspect of the topic. It’s about the opening definition of your post, so it’s kinda central.
Consciousness is the state of being aware of one’s existence, sensations and thoughts
I think defining consciousness as self-awareness is just such a non-starter. It’s not what realists mean by consciousness, and even if you’re taking an illusionist point of view, it doesn’t capture most of what consciousness-the-fuzzy-high-level-category does in the brain.
As David Pearce has pointed out, a lot of the most intense conscious experiences don’t include any self-awareness/reflection at all, just as being in a state of panic running away from a fire. Or taking psychedelics. Or being in intense pain. Or intense pleasure. Conversely, it’s not that difficult to include some degree of elementary self-awareness in a machine, and I don’t think that would make it conscious. (Again, neither in the realist sense, nor in the consciousness-as-a-fuzzy-category sense. There are just so many functions that consciousness does for humans that don’t have anything to do with self-awareness.)
The highest entropy input channel, as far as conscious content is concerned, is undoubtedly vision. The conscious aspect is continuously present, and it’s pretty difficult to explain (how can we perceive an entire image at the same time? What does that even mean?), and there’s evidence that it’s a separate thing from template-based visual processing (-> blindsight). Imho people talk way too much about self-reference when it comes to consciousness, and way too little about vision.
I mean of course it’s true today, right? It would be weird to make a prediction “AI can’t do XX in the future” (and that’s most of the predictions here) if that isn’t true today.
(Have read the post.) I disagree. I think overall habryka has gone through much greater pains than I think he should have to, but I don’t think this post is a part he should have skimped on. I would feel pretty negative about it if habryka had banned Said without an extensive explanation for why (modulo past discussions already kinda providing an explanation). I’d expect less transparency/effort for banning less important users.
I think Sam Harris had the right idea when he said (don’t have the link unfortunately) that asking about the meaning of life is just bad philosophy. No one who is genuinely content asks about the meaning of life. No one is like “well I feel genuine fulfillment and don’t crave anything, but I just gotta know, what’s the meaning of everything?” Meaning is a thing you ask about if you feel dissatisfied. (And tbqh that’s kinda apparent from your OP.)
So at the real risk of annoying you (by being paternalizing/not-actually-aswering-your-question), I think asking about meaning is the wrong approach altogether. The thing that, if you had it, would make it feel like you’ve solved your problem, is fulfillment. (Which I’m using in a technical way but it’s essentially happiness + absence of craving.) I’d look into meditation, especially equanimity practice.
That said, I think re-framing your life as feeling like it has more of a purpose isn’t generally pointless (even though it’s not really well-defined or attacking the root of the problem). But seems difficult in your case since your object-level beliefs about where we’re headed seem genuinely grim.
I feel like even accepting that actual model welfare is not a thing (as in, the model isn’t conscious) this might still be a reasonable feature just based on feedback to the user? Like if people are going to train social interactions based on LLM chats to whatever extent, then it’s probably better if they’ll face consequences. It can’t be too difficult to work around this.
The implication is valid in your formulation, but then Y doesn’t imply anything because it says nothing about the distribution. I’m saying that if you change Y to actually support your conclusion, then fails. Either way the entire argument doesn’t seem to work.
Fair enough. I’m mostly on board with that, my one gripe is that the definition only sounds similar to people who are into the Buddhist stuff. “Suffering mostly comes from craving” seems to me to be one of the true but not obvious insights from Buddhism. So just equating them in the definition is kinda provoking a reaction like from Said.
I agree but I don’t think the Buddhist definition is what Lsusr said it is (do you?). Suffering is primarily caused by the feeling that the world ought to be different but I don’t think it’s identical. Although I do expect you can find some prominent voices saying so.
Now you’re sort of asking me to do the work for you, but I did get interested enough to start thinking about it, so here’s my more invested take.
So first of all, I don’t see how this is a form of the fallacy of the undistributed middle. The article you linked to says that we’re taking and and conclude . I don’t see how your fallacy is doing (a probabilistic version of) that. Your fallacy is taking as given (with meaning “makes more likely”), and and concluding
Second
We’ve substituted a sharp condition for a vague one, hence the name diagnostic dilution.
I think we’ve substituted a vague condition for a sharp one, not vice-versa? The 32 bit integer seems a lot more vague than the number being about kids?
Third, your leading example isn’t an example of this fallacy, and I think you only got away with pretending it’s one by being vague about the distribution. Because if we tried to fix it, it would have to be like this
A: the number is probably > 100000
X: the number is a typical prior for having kids
Y: the number is a roughly uniformly distributed 32 bit integer
And is not actually true here. Whereas in the example you’re criticizing
A: the AI will have seek to eliminate threatening agents
X: the AI builds football stadiums
Y: the AI has goal-directed behavior
here does seem to be true.
(And also I believe the fallacy isn’t even a fallacy because if and together do in fact imply , at least if both are sufficiently strong?)
So my conclusion here is that the argument actually just doesn’t work, or I still just don’t get what you’re asserting,[1] but the example you make does not seem to have the same problems as the example you’re criticizing, and neither of them seems to have the same structure as the example of the fallacy you’re linking. (For transparency, I initially weak-downvoted because the post seemed confusing and I wasn’t sure if it’s valid, then removed the downvote because you improved the presentation, now strong-downvoted because the central argument seems just broken to me now.)
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like maybe the fallacy isn’t about propositions implying each other but instead about something more specific to an element being in a set, but at this point the point is just not argued clearly.
Would it help if I wrote them out more explicitly rather than tagged them into sentences?
Yes, the edit definitely makes it better.
Yes I have to choose a distribution but if I’m forced to predict an unknown int32 with no additional information the uniform distribution seems like a reasonable choice. Ad-hoc, not explicitly defined probability distributions are common in this discussion.
Well it’s clearly not a reasonable choice given that it results in a fallacy. I think if the actual error is using the wrong prior distribution then this should be reflected in what the diagnostic dilution fallacy is defined as. It’s not putting the element into the larger set because that isn’t false. I’d suggest a phrasing but I don’t have a good enough grasp on the concept to do this, and I’m still not even sure that the argument you’re criticizing is in fact an example of this fallacy if were phrased more precisely. (Also nitpicky, but “condition” in the definition is odd as well if they’re general hypotheses.)
This post is difficult for me to follow because
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your use of types is inconsistent (the , , should be hypotheses I believe, but you’re saying stuff like this, which makes it sound like they’re half of hypotheses, or other objects---)
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you say “I know their number of kids is a nonnegative 32 bit integer, and almost all such numbers are greater than 1 million. So I suppose they’re highly likely to have more than 1 million kids.” But this isn’t true; the premise you’re actually using here is that the number is a 32 bit integer with a uniform distribution. Just noting that an unknown element is in a set doesn’t itself imply anything about its probability distribution.
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you’re not quoting the exact argument you’re criticizing
Maybe these are all just formalities that have no bearing on the validity of the critique, but at least for me they make it too difficult to figure out whether I agree with you or not to make it worth it, so I’m just giving up.
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Not sure what this means? What is not okay if you agree-vote this?
I think the basic mechanism here is that people actually judge most things by their pleasantness to a much larger degree than they tend to admit, and general bad mood decreases pleasantness.
Directionally I agree with lc saying it sounds like you’re depressed, but I don’t think it actually has to be anywhere near clinical depression. I think “I’m generally sadder so things seem less exciting” is a very commonly true description. You reporting it could have more to do with you being more introspective than with how extreme the condition is.
The general remedy is just to improve your well-being, which of course is very difficult. But I don’t think there’s any conceptual move you can make that will help here; the core issue very much seems to be a lack of fulfillment.
On the contrary, if your AGI definition includes most humans, it sucks.
All the interesting stuff that humanity does is done by thing that most humans can’t do. What you call baby AGI is by itself not very relevant for any of the dangers about AGI discussed in e.g. superintelligence. You could quibble with the literal meaning of “general” or whatever but the historical associations with the term seem much more important to me. If people read years of how AGI will kill everyone and then you use the term AGI, obviously people will think you mean the thing with the properties they’ve read about.
Bottom line is, current AI is not the thing we were talking about under the label AGI for the last 15 years before LLMs, so we probably shouldn’t call it AGI.
The author has been pretty negative on LW so I’m kind of expecting this to be a (failed?) experiment to demonstrate that LW will just eat up any idea that sounds clever. (If not then I’m sorry for sounding dismissive, but wanted to register this prediction.)
The main issue I see with the thesis (even in theory, ignoring that it’s not practical) is, as Richard said,
Consider 3,124,203,346 (or ↗643,302,421,3). Suppose we don’t just care about the rough magnitude, but about its exact value. In our current system, you have to count the number of digits in a large number – reading to the right – and then jump back to the beginning of the number in order to read off its exact value.
This just isn’t true? We don’t count the number of digits. That’s not how human vision works. We recognize the length of the number almost instantly and then read the number from left to right. This example here is about as large as it can get for this principle to still hold (and it wouldn’t work without separators), but the vast majority of relevant numbers we read are small enough. And even here, I just look at this number, without counting, and my brain goes “billion!”
But not that unpleasant, I guess. I really wonder what people think when they see a benchmark on which LLMs get 30%, and then confidently say that 80% is “years away”. Obviously if LLMs already get 30%, it proves they’re fundamentally capable of solving that task[1], so the benchmark will be saturated once AI researchers do more of the same. Hell, Gemini 2.5 Pro apparently got 5⁄7 (71%) on one of the problems, so clearly outputting 5/7-tier answers to IMO problems was a solved problem, so an LLM model getting at least 6*5 = 30 out of 42 in short order should have been expected. How was this not priced in...?
Agreed, I don’t really get how this could be all that much of an update. I think the cynical explanation here is probably correct, which is that most pessimism is just vibes based (as well as most optimism).
If a child plays too many videogames you might take away their switch, and while that might decrease their utility, I’d hardly describe it as suffering in any meaningful sense.
Not sure this is important to discuss, but I definitely would. If I remember correctly, this kind of thing had a pretty strong effect on me when I was small, probably worse than getting a moderate injury as an adult. I feel like it’s very easy to make a small kid suffer because they’re so emotionally defenseless and get so easily invested in random things.
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Okay so even though I’ve already written a full-length post about timelines, I thought I should make a shortform putting my model into a less eloquent and far more speculative-sounding and capricuous format. Also I think the part I was hedging the most on in the post is probably the most important aspect of the model.
I propose that the ability to make progress on...
well-defined problems with verifiable solutions; vs.
murky problems where the solution criterion is unclear and no one can ever prove anything
… are two substantially different dimensions of intelligence, and IQ is almost entirely about the first one. The second one isn’t in-principle impossible to measure, it’s probably not even difficult, but extremely difficult to make a socially respected test for it because you could almost only include questions where the right answer is up for debate. I called this philosophical intelligence in my post because philosophical problems are usually great examples, but it’s not restricted to those. You could also things like
Is neoliberalism or progressivism a better governing philosophy?
Should we ship weapons to Ukraine?
What’s the best way to teach {insert topic here}?
Of course you can’t put those onto a test any more than you can ask “does liberterian free will exist?” on a test, so the existence of non-philosophical questions here doesn’t make measuring this ability any easier.
People often point to someone famous saying something they think is stupid and then say things like “this again proves that being an expert in one domain doesn’t translate into being smart anywhere else!” This always rubbed me the wrong way because intelligence in one area should transfer to other areas! It’s all general problem-solving capability! But in fact, those people do exist, and I’ve talked to some of them. People who have genuine intellectual horsepower on narrow problems, but as I ask them anything about a more fuzzy topic, their take is just so surface level and dumb that my immediate reaction is always this sense of disbelief, like, “it shouldn’t be possible for your thoughts here to be this shallow given how smart you are!”
… but conversely, there clearly is such a thing as expertise in a narrow area correlating with smart philosophical/political views. So sometimes intelligence does transfer and sometimes it doesn’t...
Well, I think it’s obvious what point I’m going to make here; I think sometimes people are experts in their field due to #1 and sometimes #2, and the extent that it’s #2 this tends to transfer into making sense on other questions, whereas to the extent it’s #1, it’s in fact almost meaningless. (And some people become famous without either #1 and #2, but less so if they’re experts in technical fields.)
I think #2 has outsized importance for progress on many things related to AI alignment and rationality. For example, I think Eliezer is quite high in both #1 and #2, but the reason he has produced a more useful body of work than the average genius has much more to do with #2. Almost nothing in the sequences seems to require genius level IQ; I think he could be a SD lower in IQ and still have written most of them. It would make a difference, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think it would be the bottleneck. (None of this depends on what Eliezer is up to nowadays btw, you can ignore the last 15 years for this paragraph.)
Now what about dangerous capability advances and takeover scenarios from LLMs; can those happen without #2? Imo, absolutely not. Not even a little bit. You can have all sorts of negative effects of the kind that are already happening—job loss, increased social isolation, information silos, misinformation, maybe even some extent of capability enhancement, stuff like that—but the classical superingelligence-ian scenarios require the ability to make progress on problems with murky and unverifiable solutions.
I think the entire notion that LLMs can’t really come up with novel concepts—one of the less stupid criticisms of LLMs, imo—is a direct result of this (coming up with a novel concept is exactly the kind of thing you need #2 for because there’s no way to verify whether any one idea for a new concept does or doesn’t make sense). Although this is not absolute because sometimes they can spit out new ideas at random; the “inability to derive new concepts” framing doesn’t quite point at the right thing since creativity isn’t the issue, it’s the ability to reliably figure out whether a new concept is actually useful. The disconnect between stuff like METR’s supposed exponential growth in LLM’s capabilities on long-horizon tasks and actual job replacement on those tasks is another. There is just a really fundamental problem here where metrics for AI progress are biased towards things you can measure—duh! -- which systematically biases toward #1 over #2. (Although METR has actually acknowledged this at least a little bit, I feel like they’ve actually been very epistemically virtuous from what I could see, so I don’t wanna trash them.)
Or to just put it all very bluntly, if LLMs cannot answer questions as easy as “does libertarian free will exist” or “what’s the right interpretation of quantum mechanics?”—and they can’t—then clearly they’re not very smart. And I think they’re not very smart in a way that is necessary for basically all of the doom-y scenarios.
I’m not expecting anyone to agree with any of this, but in a nutshell, much of my real skepticism about LLM scaling is about the above, especially lately. I don’t think we’re particularly close to AGI… and consequently, I also don’t think much of the classical superintelligence-ian views have actually been tested, one way or another.