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TheAncientGeek comments on FAI and the Information Theory of Pleasure - Less Wrong
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There's a lot of philosophical research, and very little scientific research. That confirms the impression of philosophers qualia are a Hard Problem.
How do you reverse engineer a quale? how do you tell you have succeeded? I think that you have underestimated the hardness of the problem.
I do have some detailed thoughts on your two questions-- in short, given certain substantial tweaks, I think IIT (or variants by Tegmark/Griffiths) can probably be salvaged from its (many) problems in order to provide a crisp dataset on which to base testable hypotheses about qualia.
(If you're around the Bay Area I'd be happy to chat about this over a cup of coffee or something.)
I would emphasize, though, that this post only talks about the value results in this space would have for FAI, and tries to be as agnostic as possible on how any reverse-engineering may happen.
Im still not seeing how IIT would help with confirming that an attempt at reverse engineering had succeeded, absent circular reasoning along the lines of "IIT says the system will have qualia. therefore the system wil have qualia".
Testing hypotheses derived from or inspired by IIT will probably be on a case-by-case basis. But given some of the empirical work on coma patients IIT has made possible. I think it may be stretching things to critique IIT as wholly reliant on circular reasoning.
That said, yes there are deep methodological challenges with qualia that any approach will need to overcome. I do see your objection quite clearly- I'm confident that I address this in my research (as any meaningful research on this must do) but I don't expect you to take my word for it. The position that I'm defending here is simply that progress in valence research will have relevance to FAI research.
Out of curiosity, do you think valence has a large or small kolgoromov complexity?
I think it's smallish. and that's philosoophy, because I don't have qualiometer.
refs?
The stuff by Casali is pretty topical, e.g. his 2013 paper with Tononi.
You mean this?
But that isn't really saying anything about qualia. The authors can relate their PCI measure to consciousness as judged medically... in humans. But would that scale be applicable to very simple systems or artificial systems? There is a real possibility that qualia could go missing in computational simulations,even assuming strict physicalism. In fact , we standardly assume that AIs embedded in games don't suffer.
If you're looking for a Full, Complete Data-Driven And Validated Solution to the Qualia Problem, I fear we'll have to wait a long, long time. This seems squarely in the 'AI complete' realm of difficulty.
But if you're looking for clever ways of chipping away at the problem, then yes, Casali's Perturbational Complexity Index should be interesting. It doesn't directly say anything about qualia, but it does indirectly support Tononi's approach, which says much about qualia. (Of course, we don't yet know how to interpret most of what it says, nor can we validate IIT directly yet, but I'd just note that this is such a hard, multi-part problem that any interesting/predictive results are valuable, and will make the other parts of the problem easier down the line.)
That's what I am disputing. You are taking a problem we don;t know how to make a start on, and turning it into a smaller problem we also don't know how to make a start on. That is't an advance. Reducing or simplifying a problem isn't an unconditional, universal solvent, it only works where the simpler problem is one you can actually make progress on.
IIT isn't going toi be of any real use unless it is confirmed, and how are you goign to confirm it, as a theory of qualia, without qualiometers?
If we are going to continue not having qualiometers, we may have to give up on testing consciousness objectiively in favour oof subjective measures...phenomenology and heterophenomenology. But you can only do heterophenomenology on a system that can report its subjective sates. Starting with simpler systems, like a single simulated pain receptor, is not going to work.
We're not on the same page. Let's try this again.
The assertion I originally put forth is AI safety; it is not about reverse-engineering qualia. I'm willing to briefly discuss some intuitions on how one may make meaningful progress on reverse-engineering qualia as a courtesy to you, my anonymous conversation partner here, but since this isn't what I originally posted about I don't have a lot of time to address radical skepticism, especially when it seems like you want to argue against some strawman version of IIT.
You ask for references (in a somewhat rude monosyllabic manner) on "some of the empirical work on coma patients IIT has made possible" and I give you exactly that. You then ignore it as "not really qualia research"- which is fine. But I'm really not sure how you can think that this is completely irrelevant to supporting or refuting IIT: IIT made a prediction, Casali et al. tested the prediction, the prediction seemed to hold up. No qualiometer needed. (Granted, this would be a lot easier if we did have them.)
This apparently leads to you say,
More precisely, I'm taking a problem you don't know how to make a start on, and am turning it into a smaller problem that you also don't seem to know how to make a start on. Which is fine, and I don't wish to be a jerk about it, and not merely because Tononi/Tegmark/Griffith could be wrong in how they're approaching consciousness, and I could be wrong in how I'm adapting their stuff to try to explain some specific things about qualia. But you seem to just want to give up, to put this topic beyond the reach of science, and criticize anyone trying to find clever indirect approaches. Needless to say I vehemently disagree with the productiveness of that attitude.
I think we are in agreement that valence could be a fairly simple property. I also agree that the brain is Vastly Complex, and that qualia research has some excruciatingly difficult methodological hurdles to overcome, and I agree that IIT is still a very speculative hypothesis which shouldn't be taken on faith. I think we differ radically on our understandings of IIT and related research. I guess it'll be an empirical question whether IIT morphs into something that can substantially address questions of qualia- based on my understandings and intuitions, I'm pretty optimistic about this.