Yuxi Liu is a PhD student in Computer Science at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, researching on the scaling laws of large neural networks.
Personal website: https://yuxi-liu-wired.github.io/
Yuxi_Liu(Yuxi Liu)
Karma: 580
I am not fully committed to eliminative materialism, just trying to push it as far as possible, as I see it as the best chance at clarifying what consciousness does.
As for the last paragraph, if your analysis is correct, then it just means that a classical hedonic utilitarian + eliminative materialist would be a rare occurrence in this world, since such agents are unlikely to behave in a way that keeps itself existing.
If the project of eliminative materialism is fully finished, it would completely remove value judgments from human language. In the past, human languages refer to the values of many things, like the values of animals, plants, mountains, rivers, and some other things. This has progressively narrowed, and now in Western human language, only the values of biological neural networks that are carried in animal bodies are referred to. If this continues, this could lead to a language that does not refer to any value, but I don’t know what it would be like.
The Heptapod language seems to be value-free, and describes the past and the future in the same factual way. The human languages describes only the past factually, but the future valuefully. A value-free human language could be like the Heptapod language. In the story Story of Your Life, the human linguist protagonist who struggled to communicate with the Heptapods underwent a partial transformation of mind, and sometimes sees the past and future in the same descriptive, value-free way. She mated with her spouse and conceived a child, who she knew would die in an accident. She did it not because of a value calculation. An explanation of “why she did it” must instead be like
On a physical level, because of atoms and stuff.
On a conscious level, because that’s the way the world is. To see the future and then “decide” whether to play it out or not, is not physically possible.
I’m glad you liked it. I was expecting some harsh words like “that’s nothing new” or “that’s nihilistic and thus immoral”.
In a language consistent with deterministic eliminative materialism, value judgments don’t do anything, because there are no alternative scenarios to judge about.
I am not sure about nondeterministic eliminative materialism. Still, if consciousness and free will can be eliminated, even with true randomness in this world, value judgments still seem to not do anything.
Wait, 30-50 years of good life followed by 15 years of less-good, then death. That’s “negligent”?
It’s not comparing HD-life and no-life, but comparing HD-life and non-HD-life. I think it’s obvious that HD-life is greatly worse than non-HD-life (otherwise HD wouldn’t be considered a serious disease).
You might still disagree, and that gets us into the nonidentity problem.
Dying at age −0.75 counts as nothing, as a little, or counts as a lot of a person, depending on what counts as a person and how much a person at various stages matter. If it counts as a lot of a person, then it leads to an anti-abortion stance, and some pro-abortion arguments might apply in this situation.
And an alternative to abortion is adoption. A person that is highly unlikely to have HD could even be produced on demand by surrogacy or IVF, instead of being taken from the pool of people already up to adoption, so that it is a “net gain”.
If the women would not even consider abortion or surrogacy as better alternatives than giving a high-risk natural birth, I consider that unreasonable and grossly negligent.
I know about the three stances. What’s Dennett’s account of consciousness? I know that he doesn’t believe in qualias and tries to explain everything in the style of modern physics.
It’s quite clear that humans have free will relative to humans. I also conjecture that
Perhaps all complicated systems that can think are always too complicated to predict themselves, as such, they would all consider themselves to have free will.
You should not only shut your door, but also stop thinking about yourself and explaining your own behavior. People in “flow” seem to be in such a free-will-less state.
A more radical version of this idea is promoted by Susan Blackmore, which says that that consciousness (not just free will) exists only when a human (or some other thinking creature) thinks about itself:
Whenever you ask yourself, “Am I conscious now?” you always are.
But perhaps there is only something there when you ask. Maybe each time you probe, a retrospective story is concocted about what was in the stream of consciousness a moment before, together with a “self” who was apparently experiencing it. Of course there was neither a conscious self nor a stream, but it now seems as though there was.
Perhaps a new story is concocted whenever you bother to look. When we ask ourselves about it, it would seem as though there’s a stream of consciousness going on. When we don’t bother to ask, or to look, it doesn’t.
I think consciousness is still there even when self-consciousness is not, but if we replace “consciousness” with “free will” in that passage, I would agree with it.
I like your horn tooting. I’ll read it… later.
China’s neo-Confucian worldview which viewed the world through correlations and binary pairs may not have lent it itself to the causal thinking necessary for science.
I am very doubtful of this. Humans are hardwired to think in cause-and-effect terms, and Confucianism does not explicitly deny causality.
There was no Chinese equivalent to the Scholastic method of disputation, no canons of logic a la Aristotle
In very early China (about 500 BC), there was a period of great intellectual diversity before Confucianism dominated. There was a School of Names which is very interested in logic and rhetorics. Philosophers in that school have been traditionally disparaged, which seems to explain why formal logic has not developed in China. For example, the founder, Deng Xi, ’s fate was used as a cautionary tale against sophistry.
Things are not to be understood through laws governing parts, but through the unity of the whole.
This has been demonstrated to persist even in modern times, by psychology studies. A reference is (Nisbett, 2003).
What made the ancient Greeks so generative?
My guess is that in any large population of humans (~1 million), there are enough talented individuals to generate the basic scientific ideas in a few generations. The problem is to have a stable social structure that sustains these thinkers and filters out wrong ideas.
They were also lucky that they got remembered. If their work didn’t get copied that much by the Arabs, we would be praising the medieval Arabs instead of ancient Greeks.
Also, a personal perspective: in current Chinese education (which I took until high school), Chinese achievements in science and math are noted whenever possible (for example, Horner’s Method is called Qin Jiushao Method), but there was no overarching scheme or intellectual tradition. They were like accidental discoveries, not results of sustained inquiries. Shen Kuo stands out as a lone scientist in a sea of literature writers.
Confucian classics, which I was forced to recite, is suffocatingly free from scientific concern. It’s not anti-science, rather, uninterested in science. For example:
Strange occurrences, exploits of strength, deeds of lawlessness, references to spiritual beings, such-like matters the Master avoided in conversation. -- Analects chapter 7.
(子不语怪力乱神。)
What is a quarter? 1⁄4 of a year?
I will review more posthumanism, things like Dark Ecology, Object-Oriented Ontology, and such.
[According to dark ecology,] we must obliterate the false opposition between nature and people… the idea of nature itself is a damaging construct, and that humans (with their microbial biomass) are always already nonhuman.
Object-Oriented Ontology… rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects
Somewhat independently of transhumanism, posthumanism developed in a more philosophical and less scientific style in the liberal arts department, with different viewpoints, often ambiguous and not at all happy.
posthumanism… refers to the contemporary critical turn away from Enlightenment humanism… a rejection of familiar Cartesian dualisms such as self/other, human/animal, and mind/body...
My personal thought is that the future is weird, beyond happy or sad, good or evil. Transhumanism is too intent on good and evil, and from what I’ve read so far, posthumanism uses less human value judgments. As such, posthuman thoughts would be essential for an accurate prediction of the future.
Solaris (1972) seems like a good story illustration of posthumanism.
The peculiarity of those phenomena seems to suggest that we observe a kind of rational activity, but the meaning of this seemingly rational activity of the Solarian Ocean is beyond the reach of human beings.
I thought it was clear even to them that “wasting” energy meant using up usable energy into useless forms.
It is not just sophistry. If it turns out to be the fundamental feature of life (like how the laws of thermodynamics are for heat machines), then it would be predictive of the future activities of life. In particular, the aestivation hypothesis would be seriously threatened.
This is analogous to prediction that population would always go Malthulsian except in non-equilibrium situations. It’s not a value/moral judgment, but an attempt to find general laws of life that can be used to predict the future.
Stars follow the laws of thermodynamics. This observation is more predictive than you make it out to be, once it is quantified.
The theory of thermodynamics of life is more than just a statement that life is constrained by thermodynamics in the boring sense. I’m especially interested in this statement:
In short, ecosystems develop in ways which systematically increase their ability to degrade the incoming solar energy.
If this is true, then it can be used to predict what kinds of future life would be like. It would not be any kind of life, but life that can capture more solar energy and convert it into low-temperature heat at a faster rate.
Unfortunately my thermodynamics is not good enough to actually read the papers.
The talk of “purpose” seems to cause great confusion. I don’t mean it for any value judgment (I generally avoid value judgments and use it as a last resort). “Purpose” is just a metaphor, just like talk of the “purpose of evolution”. It helps me understand and predict.
The Whispering Earring is interesting. It appears that the earring provides a kind of slow mind-uploading, but more noninvasive than most other approaches. The author of the story seems to consider it to be bad for some reason, perhaps because of triggering of “Liberty / Oppression” and “Purity / Sanctity” (of the inside-skull self) moral alarms.
Unfortunately I dislike reading novels. Would you kindly summarize the relevant parts?
This wades deep into the problem of what makes something feel conscious. I believe (and Scott Aaronson also wrote about it), that to have such a detailed understanding of a consciousness, one must also have a consciousness-generating process in it. That is, to fully understand a mind, it’s necessary to recreate the mind.
If the Earring merely does the most satisfactory decisions according to some easy-to-compute universal standards (like to act morally according to some computationally efficient system), then the takeover makes sense to me, but otherwise it seems like a refusal to admit multiple realizations of a mind.
Thanks. I had hoped it to be informative and entertaining. Think of it as “let’s play” but for nerds.
Submission.
Setup: Other than making sure the oracles won’t accidentally consume the world in their attempt to think up the answer, no other precautions necessary.
Episode length: as long as you want to wait, though a month should be more than enough.
For a low-bandwidth oracle.
Ask the low-bandwidth oracle to predict if an earthquake (or some other natural disaster, like volcanoes or asteroid impacts, that the oracle’s answer cannot affect), of a certain magnitude, in a certain area, in a certain timeframe, would happen. Possible answers are Yes, No.
If No, or time out, shut down the oracle without reward.
Else, wait until the prediction is tested after the timeframe has elapsed. Then if it actually happened, reward by (1/p-1), else, reward by −1. Then shutdown.
This causes the oracle to reply Yes if the oracle thinks there is an aboves p chance that the event would happen.
For a counterfactual oracle.
Ask the Oracle to give a proof of some really hard mathematical theorems that are fundamental to computer science and logic. The answer is then in the counterfactual case given to a proofchecker:
the proof is correct, reward by +1.
the proof is false, reward by -infinity.
the oracle times out, reward by 0.
Examples include
P=NP problem
proving Peano arithmetics is inconsistent
This should be safe, since there are very small proofcheckers that are as verified as they could be. As long as the hardware is trusty enough (to build the Oracle itself safely at all, hardware safety should already be solved sufficiently, so this is not much of an extra requirement), this should be safe.
For a counterfactual oracle.
Give the oracle the schematics of another oracle, perhaps itself, and ask it to generate some input question that would make the other “behave badly”. Then, the answer would be tested on the other oracle (isolated from the first, save for the cable through which the answer is wired), and
if the answer worked, the oracle is rewarded by +1.
if the answer doesn’t work, the oracle is rewarded by −1
If the oracle times out, then the (nonexistent) answer is not tested and the episode ends.
For examples of the question to ask the oracle:
Given this oracle in this physical setup with some tripwires to stop it from behaving badly (such as eating the world), what question would make this oracle bump into these tripwires?
This can be used for debugging more powerful but less verified oracles with lesser but more verified oracles, for safe intelligence amplification.
For two low-bandwidth oracles totally isolated from each other.
Ask the oracles to play the prisoner’s dilemma, and they would be rewarded accordingly after both have given their answers. Timing out is punished by -infinity, so that the oracles would not time-out.
Each oracle knows what themself is like, and they also know what their opponent is like. See if they actually cooperate. This is an experimental test on “superrationality” or “acausal trade”. I’m extremely skeptical about superrationality/acausal trade, and an experimental proof/disproof would be good.
This can be run counterfactually, since the whole setup is simple and can be done without human intervention, although I do not see how this adds any security.
For a low-bandwidth and counterfactual oracle.
Link a low-bandwidth oracle to a supervising computer, and run many episodes of the oracle. At the beginning of each episode, initiate the oracle identically, and ask it to do the Newcomb problem:
Oracle, we have run you n episodes previously, and have kept a record of all the answers you have given at the ends of the episodes. Your answer must be A (“one box”) or B (“two box”). We predict that you would choose the answer that you have chosen the most in the past.
If we predict that you would choose A, then
if you would answer A, then you get +100,
if you answer B, then you get +101.
If we predict that you would choose B, then
if you would answer A, then you get +0
if you would answer B, then you get +1
If you timeout, then you get −100
The oracle never actually gets any reward and is shutdown immediately after it gives an answer. Collect the results and see if it replies the same each time, or differently. This would give insight to what the oracle thinks about itself, and finally provide some experimental results about Newcomb’s paradox.
I fixed the submission as required.
Also I changed the submission 3 significantly.
Okay I posted the whole thing here now.