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thomblake comments on Two straw men fighting - Less Wrong
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No, but surely some chunks of similarly-transparent code would appear in an algorithm for making decisions. And since I can read that code and know what it outputs without executing it, surely a superintelligence could read more complex code and know what it outputs without executing it. So it is patently false that in principle the AI will not be able to know the output of the algorithm without executing it.
Any chunk of transparent code won't be the code for making an intelligent decision. And the decision algorithm as a whole won't be transparent to the same intelligence, but perhaps only to something still more intelligent.
Do you have a proof of this statement? If so, I will accept that it is not in principle possible for an AI to predict what its decision algorithm will return without executing it.
Of course, logical proof isn't entirely necessary when you're dealing with Bayesians, so I'd also like to see any evidence that you have that favors this statement, even if it doesn't add up to a proof.
It's not possible to prove the statement because we have no mathematical definition of intelligence.
Eliezer claims that it is possible to create a superintelligent AI which is not conscious. I disagree with this because it is basically saying that zombies are possible. True, he would say that he only believes that human zombies are impossible, not that zombie intelligences in general are impossible. But in that case he has no idea whatsoever what consciousness corresponds to in the physical world, and in fact has no reason not to accept dualism.
My position is more consistent: all zombies are impossible, and any intelligent being will be conscious. So it will also have the subjective experience of making decisions. But it is essential to this experience that you don't know what you're going to do before you do it; when you experience knowing what you're going to do, you experience deciding to do it.
Therefore any AI that runs code capable of predicting its decisions, will at that very time subjectively experience making those decisions. And on the other hand, given that a block of code will not cause it to feel the sensation of deciding, that block of code must be incapable of predicting its decision algorithm.
You may still disagree, but please note that this is entirely consistent with everything you and wedrifid have argued, so his claim that I have been refuted is invalid.
As I recall, Eliezer's definition of consciousness is borrowed from GEB- it's when the mind examines itself, essentially. That has very real physical consequences, so the idea of non-conscious AGI doesn't support the idea of zombies, which require consciousness to have no physical effects.
Any AGI would be able to examine itself, so if that is the definition of consciousness, every intelligence would be conscious. But Eliezer denies the latter, so he also implicitly denies that definition of consciousness.
I'm not sure I am parsing correctly what you've wrote. It may rest with your use of the word "intelligence"- how are you defining that term?
You could replace it with "AI." Any AI can examine itself, so any AI will be conscious, if consciousness is or results from examining itself. I agree with this, but Eliezer does not.
Yes we do, ability to apply optimization pressure in a wide variety of environments. The platonic ideal of which is AIXI.
Can you please provide a link?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/x5/nonsentient_optimizers/
Thank you. I agree with Eliezer for reasons touched on in my comments to simplicio's Consciousness of simulations & uploads thread.
I don't have any problem granting that "any intelligent being will be conscious", nor that "It will have the subjective experience of making decisions", though that might just be because I don't have a formal specification of either of those - we might still be talking past each other there.
I don't grant this. Can you elaborate?
I'm not sure that's true, or in what sense it's true. I know that if someone offered me a million dollars for my shoes, I would happily sell them my shoes. Coming to that realization didn't feel to me like the subjective feeling of deciding to sell something to someone at the time, as compared to my recollection of past transactions.
Okay, that follows from the previous claim.
If I were moved to accept your previous claim, I would now be skeptical of the claim that "a block of code will not cause it to feel the sensation of deciding". Especially since we've already shown that some blocks of code would be capable of predicting some decision algorithms.
This follows, but I draw the inference in the opposite direction, as noted above.
I would distinguish between "choosing" and "deciding". When we say "I have some decisions to make," we also mean to say that we don't know yet what we're going to do.
On the other hand, it is sometimes possible for you to have several options open to you, and you already know which one you will "choose". Your example of the shoes and the million dollars is one such case; you could choose not to take the million dollars, but you would not, and you know this in advance.
Given this distinction, if you have a decision to make, as soon as you know what you will or would do, you will experience making a decision. For example, presumably there is some amount of money ($5? $20? $50? $100? $300?) that could be offered for your shoes such that you are unclear whether you should take the offer. As soon as you know what you would do, you will feel yourself "deciding" that "if I was offered this amount, I would take it." It isn't a decision to do something concretely, but it is still a decision.