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Where “pain” and “suffering” are defined, respectively, as... what?
Roughly, pain is a sensation typically associated with damage to the body, suffering is an experience of stimuli as intrinsically unpleasant.
I do not suffer if my room is painted a color I do not like, but I still may care about the color my room is painted.
So pain asymbolia means something else than “being able to feel pain but not caring about it”?
It means "being able to feel pain but not suffering from it."
Suppose an AI were to design and implement more efficient algorithms for processing sensory stimuli? Or add a "face recognition" module when it determines that this would be useful for interacting with humans?
The ancient Greeks have developed methods of improved memorization. It has been shown that human-trained dogs and chimps are more capable of human-face recognition than others of their kind. None of them were artificial (discounting selective breeding in dogs and Greeks).
It seems that you should be able to write a simple program that overwrites its own code with an arbitrary value. Wouldn't that be a counterexample?
Would you consider such a machine an artificial intelligent agent? Isn't it just a glorified printing press?
I'm not saying that some configurations of memory are physically impossible. I'm saying that intelligent agency entails typicality, and therefore, for any intelligent agent, there are some things it is extremely unlikely to do, to the point of practical impossibility.
Do we agree, then, that humans and artificial agents are both subject to laws forbidding logical contradictions and the like, but that artificial agents are not in principle necessarily bound by the same additional restrictions as humans?
I would actually argue the opposite.
Are you familiar with the claim that people are getting less intelligent since modern technology allows less intelligent people and their children to survive? (I never saw this claim discussed seriously, so I don't know how factual it is; but the logic of it is what I'm getting at.) The idea is that people today are less constrained in their required intelligence, and therefore the typical human is becoming less intelligent.
Other claims are that activities such as browsing the internet and video gaming are changing the set of mental skills which humans are good at. We improve in tasks which we need to be good at, and give up skills which are less useful. You gave yet another example in your comment regarding face recognition.
The elasticity of biological agents is (quantitatively) limited, and improvement by evolution takes time. This is where artificial agents step in. They can be better than humans, but the typical agent will only actually be better if it has to. Generally, more intelligent agents are those which are forced to comply to tighter constraints, not looser ones.
Suppose an AI were to design and implement more efficient algorithms for processing sensory stimuli? Or add a "face recognition" module when it determines that this would be useful for interacting with humans?
The ancient Greeks have developed methods of improved memorization. It has been shown that human-trained dogs and chimps are more capable of human-face recognition than others of their kind. None of them were artificial (discounting selective breeding in dogs and Greeks).
It seems that you should be able to write a simple program that overwrites its own code with an arbitrary value. Wouldn't that be a counterexample?
Would you consider such a machine an artificial intelligent agent? Isn't it just a glorified printing press?
I'm not saying that some configurations of memory are physically impossible. I'm saying that intelligent agency entails typicality, and therefore, for any intelligent agent, there are some things it is extremely unlikely to do, to the point of practical impossibility.
Certainly that doesn't count as an intelligent agent - but a GAI with that as its only goal, for example, why would that be impossible? An AI doesn't need to value survival.
I'd be interested in the conclusions derived about "typical" intelligences and the "forbidden actions", but I don't see how you have derived them.
Do we agree, then, that humans and artificial agents are both subject to laws forbidding logical contradictions and the like, but that artificial agents are not in principle necessarily bound by the same additional restrictions as humans?
I would actually argue the opposite.
Are you familiar with the claim that people are getting less intelligent since modern technology allows less intelligent people and their children to survive? (I never saw this claim discussed seriously, so I don't know how factual it is; but the logic of it is what I'm getting at.) The idea is that people today are less constrained in their required intelligence, and therefore the typical human is becoming less intelligent.
Other claims are that activities such as browsing the internet and video gaming are changing the set of mental skills which humans are good at. We improve in tasks which we need to be good at, and give up skills which are less useful. You gave yet another example in your comment regarding face recognition.
The elasticity of biological agents is (quantitatively) limited, and improvement by evolution takes time. This is where artificial agents step in. They can be better than humans, but the typical agent will only actually be better if it has to. Generally, more intelligent agents are those which are forced to comply to tighter constraints, not looser ones.
I think we have our quantifiers mixed up? I'm saying an AI is not in principle bound by these restrictions - that is, it's not true that all AIs must necessarily have the same restrictions on their behavior as a human. This seems fairly uncontroversial to me. I suppose the disconnect, then, is that you expect a GAI will be of a type bound by these same restrictions. But then I thought the restrictions you were talking about were "laws forbidding logical contradictions and the like"? I'm a little confused - could you clarify your position, please?
Depending on the rest of your utility distribution, that is probably true. Note, however, that an additional 10^6 utility in the right half of the utility function will change the median outcome of your "life": If 10^6 is larger than all the other utility you could ever receive, and you add a 49 % chance of receiving it, the 50th percentile utility after that should look like the 98th percentile utility before.
Could you rephrase this somehow? I'm not understanding it. If you actually won the bet and got the extra utility, your median expected utility would be higher, but you wouldn't take the bet, because your median expected utility is lower if you do.
I want that it is possible to have a very bad outcome: If I can play a lottery that has 1 utilium cost, 10^7 payoff and a winning chance of 10^-6, and if I can play this lottery enough times, I want to play it.
"Enough times" to make it >50% likely that you will win, yes? Why is this the correct cutoff point?
Ah, it appears that I'm mixing up identities as well. Apologies.
Yes, I retract the "variance greater than 5". I think it would have to be variance of at least 10,000 for this method to work properly. I do suspect that this method is similar to decision-making processes real humans use (optimizing the median outcome of their lives), but when you have one or two very important decisions instead of many routine decisions, methods that work for many small decisions don't work so well.
If, instead of optimizing for the median outcome, you optimized for the average of outcomes within 3 standard deviations of the median, I suspect you would come up with a decision outcome quite close to what people actually use (ignoring very small chances of very high risk or reward).
This all seems very sensible and plausible!
Thanks for challenging my position. This discussion is very stimulating for me!
Sure, but we could imagine an AI deciding something like "I do not want to enjoy frozen yogurt", and then altering its code in such a way that it is no longer appropriate to describe it as enjoying frozen yogurt, yeah?
I'm actually having trouble imagining this without anthropomorphizing (or at least zoomorphizing) the agent. When is it appropriate to describe an artificial agent as enjoying something? Surely not when it secretes serotonin into its bloodstream and synapses?
This seems trivially false - if an AI is instantiated as a bunch of zeros and ones in some substrate, how could Godel or similar concerns stop it from altering any subset of those bits?
It's not a question of stopping it. Gödel is not giving it a stern look, saying: "you can't alter your own code until you've done your homework". It's more that these considerations prevent the agent from being in a state where it will, in fact, alter its own code in certain ways. This claim can and should be proved mathematically, but I don't have the resources to do that at the moment. In the meanwhile, I'd agree if you wanted to disagree.
You see reasons to believe that any artificial intelligence is limited to altering its motivations and desires in a way that is qualitatively similar to humans? This seems like a pretty extreme claim - what are the salient features of human self-rewriting that you think must be preserved?
I believe that this is likely, yes. The "salient feature" is being subject to the laws of nature, which in turn seem to be consistent with particular theories of logic and probability. The problem with such a claim is that these theories are still not fully understood.
Thanks for challenging my position. This discussion is very stimulating for me!
It's a pleasure!
Sure, but we could imagine an AI deciding something like "I do not want to enjoy frozen yogurt", and then altering its code in such a way that it is no longer appropriate to describe it as enjoying frozen yogurt, yeah?
I'm actually having trouble imagining this without anthropomorphizing (or at least zoomorphizing) the agent. When is it appropriate to describe an artificial agent as enjoying something? Surely not when it secretes serotonin into its bloodstream and synapses?
Yeah, that was sloppy of me. Leaving aside the question of when something is enjoying something, let's take a more straightforward example: Suppose an AI were to design and implement more efficient algorithms for processing sensory stimuli? Or add a "face recognition" module when it determines that this would be useful for interacting with humans?
This seems trivially false - if an AI is instantiated as a bunch of zeros and ones in some substrate, how could Godel or similar concerns stop it from altering any subset of those bits?
It's not a question of stopping it. Gödel is not giving it a stern look, saying: "you can't alter your own code until you've done your homework". It's more that these considerations prevent the agent from being in a state where it will, in fact, alter its own code in certain ways. This claim can and should be proved mathematically, but I don't have the resources to do that at the moment. In the meanwhile, I'd agree if you wanted to disagree.
Hm. It seems that you should be able to write a simple program that overwrites its own code with an arbitrary value. Wouldn't that be a counterexample?
You see reasons to believe that any artificial intelligence is limited to altering its motivations and desires in a way that is qualitatively similar to humans? This seems like a pretty extreme claim - what are the salient features of human self-rewriting that you think must be preserved?
I believe that this is likely, yes. The "salient feature" is being subject to the laws of nature, which in turn seem to be consistent with particular theories of logic and probability. The problem with such a claim is that these theories are still not fully understood.
This sounds unjustifiably broad. Certainly, human behavior is subject to these restrictions, but it is also subject to much more stringent ones - we are not able to do everything that is logically possible. Do we agree, then, that humans and artificial agents are both subject to laws forbidding logical contradictions and the like, but that artificial agents are not in principle necessarily bound by the same additional restrictions as humans?
knowing the value of Current Observation gives you information about Future Decision.
Here I'd just like to note that one must not assume all subsystems of Current Brain remain constant over time. And what if the brain is partly a chaotic system? (AND new information flows in all the time... Sorry, I cannot condone this model as presented.)
Perhaps it can observe your neurochemistry in detail and in real time.
I already mentioned this possibility. Fallible models make the situation gameable. I'd get together with my friends, try to figure out when the model predicts correctly, calculate its accuracy, work out a plan for who picks what, and split the profits between ourselves. How's that for rationality? To get around this, the alien needs to predict our plan and - do what? Our plan treats his mission like total garbage. Should he try to make us collectively lose out? But that would hamper his initial design.
(Whether it cares about such games or not, what input the alien takes, when, how, and what exactly it does with said input - everything counts in charting an optimal solution. You can't just say it uses Method A and then replace it with Method B when convenient. THAT is the point: Predictive methods are NOT interchangeable in this context. (Reminder: Reading my brain AS I make the decision violates the original conditions.))
Perhaps land-ape psychology turns out to be really simple if you're an omnipotent thought-experiment enthusiast.
We're veering into uncertain territory again... (Which would be fine if it weren't for the vagueness of mechanism inherent in magical algorithms.)
The reasoning wouldn't be "this person is a one-boxer" but rather "this person will pick one box in this particular situation".
Second note: An entity, alien or not, offering me a million dollars, or anything remotely analogous to this, would be a unique event in my life with no precedent whatever. My last post was written entirely under the assumption that the alien would be using simple heuristics based on similar decisions in the past. So yeah, if you're tweaking the alien's method, then disregard all that.
It's very difficult to be the sort of person who would pick one box in the situation you are in without actually picking one box in the situation you are in.
From the alien's point of view, this is epistemologically non-trivial if my box-picking nature is more complicated than a yes-no switch. Even if the final output must take the form of a yes or a no, the decision tree that generated that result can be as endlessly complex as I want, every step of which the alien must predict correctly (or be a Luck Elemental) to maintain its reputation of infallibility.
If it's worse, just do the other thing - isn't that more "rational"?
As long as I know nothing about the alien's method, the choice is arbitrary. See my second note. This is why the alien's ultimate goals, algorithms, etc, MATTER.
(If the alien reads my brain chemistry five minutes before The Task, his past history is one of infallibility, and no especially cunning plan comes to mind, then my bet regarding the nature of brain chemistry would be that not going with one box is silly if I want the million dollars. I mean, he'll read my intentions and place the money (or not) like five minutes before... (At least that's what I'll determine to do before the event. Who knows what I'll end up doing once I actually get there. (Since even I am unsure as to the strength of my determination to keep to this course of action once I've been scanned, the conscious minds of me and the alien are freed from culpability. Whatever happens next, only the physical stance is appropriate for the emergent scenario. (("At what point then, does decision theory apply here?" is what I was getting at.) Anyway, enough navel-gazing and back to Timeless Decision Theory.))))
knowing the value of Current Observation gives you information about Future Decision.
Here I'd just like to note that one must not assume all subsystems of Current Brain remain constant over time. And what if the brain is partly a chaotic system? (AND new information flows in all the time... Sorry, I cannot condone this model as presented.)
Well... okay, but the point I was making was milder and pretty uncontroversial. Are you familiar with bayesian networks?
Perhaps it can observe your neurochemistry in detail and in real time.
I already mentioned this possibility. Fallible models make the situation gameable. I'd get together with my friends, try to figure out when the model predicts correctly, calculate its accuracy, work out a plan for who picks what, and split the profits between ourselves. How's that for rationality? To get around this, the alien needs to predict our plan and - do what? Our plan treats his mission like total garbage. Should he try to make us collectively lose out? But that would hamper his initial design.
(Whether it cares about such games or not, what input the alien takes, when, how, and what exactly it does with said input - everything counts in charting an optimal solution. You can't just say it uses Method A and then replace it with Method B when convenient. THAT is the point: Predictive methods are NOT interchangeable in this context. (Reminder: Reading my brain AS I make the decision violates the original conditions.))
I never said it used method A? And what is all this about games? It predicts your choice.
You're not engaging with the thought experiment. How about this - how would you change the thought experiment to make it work properly, in your estimation?
Perhaps land-ape psychology turns out to be really simple if you're an omnipotent thought-experiment enthusiast.
We're veering into uncertain territory again... (Which would be fine if it weren't for the vagueness of mechanism inherent in magical algorithms.)
Well, yeah. We're in uncertain territory as a premise.
The reasoning wouldn't be "this person is a one-boxer" but rather "this person will pick one box in this particular situation".
Second note: An entity, alien or not, offering me a million dollars, or anything remotely analogous to this, would be a unique event in my life with no precedent whatever. My last post was written entirely under the assumption that the alien would be using simple heuristics based on similar decisions in the past. So yeah, if you're tweaking the alien's method, then disregard all that.
I'm not tweaking the method. There is no given method. The closest to a canonical method that I'm aware of is simulation, which you elided in your reply.
It's very difficult to be the sort of person who would pick one box in the situation you are in without actually picking one box in the situation you are in.
From the alien's point of view, this is epistemologically non-trivial if my box-picking nature is more complicated than a yes-no switch. Even if the final output must take the form of a yes or a no, the decision tree that generated that result can be as endlessly complex as I want, every step of which the alien must predict correctly (or be a Luck Elemental) to maintain its reputation of infallibility.
What makes you think you're so special - compared to the people who've been predicted ahead of you?
If it's worse, just do the other thing - isn't that more "rational"?
As long as I know nothing about the alien's method, the choice is arbitrary. See my second note. This is why the alien's ultimate goals, algorithms, etc, MATTER.
If you know nothing about the alien's methods, there still is a better choice. You do not have the same expected value for each choice.
(If the alien reads my brain chemistry five minutes before The Task, his past history is one of infallibility, and no especially cunning plan comes to mind, then my bet regarding the nature of brain chemistry would be that not going with one box is silly if I want the million dollars. I mean, he'll read my intentions and place the money (or not) like five minutes before... (At least that's what I'll determine to do before the event. Who knows what I'll end up doing once I actually get there. (Since even I am unsure as to the strength of my determination to keep to this course of action once I've been scanned, the conscious minds of me and the alien are freed from culpability. Whatever happens next, only the physical stance is appropriate for the emergent scenario. (("At what point then, does decision theory apply here?" is what I was getting at.) Anyway, enough navel-gazing and back to Timeless Decision Theory.))))
And what do you mean by "the possibility of getting tortured will manifest itself only very slightly at the 50th percentile"? I thought you were restricting yourself to median outcomes, not distributions? How do you determine the median distribution?
I don't. I didn't write that.
Your formulation requires that there be a single, high probability event that contributes most of the utility an agent has the opportunity to get over its lifespan. In situations where this is not the case (e.g. real life), the decision agent in question would choose to take all opportunities like that.
The closest real-world analogy I can draw to this is the decision of whether or not to start a business. If you fail (which there is a slightly more than 50% chance you will), you are likely to be in debt for quite some time. If you succeed, you will be very rich. This is not quite a perfect analogy, because you will have more than one chance in your life to start a business, and the outcomes of business ownership are not orders of magnitude larger than the outcomes in real life. However, it is much closer than the "51% chance to lose $5, 49% chance to win $10000" that your example intuitively brings to mind.
Ah! Sorry for the mixed-up identities. Likewise, I didn't come up with that "51% chance to lose $5, 49% chance to win $10000" example.
But, ah, are you retracting your prior claim about a variance of greater than 5? Clearly this system doesn't work on its own, though it still looks like we don't know A) how decisions are made using it or B) under what conditions it works. Or in fact C) why this is a good idea.
Certainly for some distributions of utility, if the agent knows the distribution of utility across many agents, it won't make the wrong decision on that particular example by following this algorithm. I need more than that to be convinced!
For instance, it looks like it'll make the wrong decision on questions like "I can choose to 1) die here quietly, or 2) go get help, which has a 1/3 chance of saving my life but will be a little uncomfortable." The utility of surviving presumably swamps the rest of the utility function, right?
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Agree, with the assumption that "stimuli" as relevant to suffering includes internal stimuli generated from one's own thoughts.
Yeah, that's certainly a fair clarification. It'd probably take a lot more space to give a really robust definition of "suffering", but that's close enough for gummint work.