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SilasBarta comments on What big goals do we have? - Less Wrong
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Mine would be "Understand consciousness well enough to experience life from the perspective of other beings, both natural and artificial." (Possibly a subset of "Advance science", though a lot of it is engineering.)
That is, I'd want to be able to experience what-it-is-like to be a bat (sorry, Nagel), have other human cognitive architectures (like having certain mental disorders or enhancements, different genders), to be a genetically engineered new entity, or a mechanical AGI.
This goal is never fully satisifed, because there are always other invented/artificial beings you can experience, plus new scenarios.
I'd like to fly too, but isn't it more like a dream than a goal? How do you make incremental progress towards that?
Knowing what-it-is-like only requires the "like", not the "is". This would be satisfied by e.g. a provably accurate simulation of the consciousness of a bat that I can enter while still retaining my memories.
Incremental progress comes about through better understanding of what makes something conscious and how an entity's sensory and computational abilities affect the qualities of their subjectively-experienced existence. Much has already been made.
Isn't that not really being a bat, then? You'll never know what it's like to be a bat; you'll only know what it's like for humans who found themselves in a bat body.
It's a bit hard to specify exactly what would satisfy me, so saying that I would "retain my memories" might be overbroad. Stil, you get the point, I hope: my goals is to be able to experience fundamentally different kinds of consciousness, where different senses and considerations have different "gut-level" significance.