Does LW have an anti-publication-bias registry somewhere?

Not that I know of, but that does sound quite awesome.

..I'll be attending the March workshop.

I look forward to meeting you, Giles!

This is interesting. People who are vulnerable to the donor illusion either have some of their money turned into utilons, or are taught a valuable lesson about the donor illusion, possibly creating more utilons in the long term.

This is useful to me as I'll be attending the March workshop. If I successfully digest any of the insights presented here then I'll have a better platform to start from. (Two particular points are the stuff about the parasympathetic nervous system, which I'd basically never heard of before, and the connection between the concepts of "epistemic rationality" and "knowing about myself" which is more obvious-in-retrospect).

Thanks for the write-up!

And yes, I'll stick up at least a brief write-up of my own after I'm done. Does LW have an anti-publication-bias registry somewhere?

I had in mind treating individuals as institutions, with interlocking and often competing subcomponets. I'm not finding a link that would be helpful; does anyone else know of a good summary or introduction?

I had in mind treating individuals as institutions, with interlocking and often competing subcomponets. I'm not finding a link that would be helpful; does anyone else know of a good summary or introduction?

I used not to take Searle's arguments seriously until I actually understood what they were about.

Before anything, I should say that I disagree with Searle's arguments. However, it is important to understand them if we are to have a rational discussion.

Most importantly, Searle does not claim that machines can never understand, or that there is something inherently special about the human brain that cannot be replicated in a computer. He acknowledges that the human brain is governed by physics and is probably subject to the church-turing thesis.

Searle's main argument is this: sophistication of computation does not by itself lead to understanding. That is, just because a computer is doing something that a human could not do without understanding does not mean the computer must be understanding it as well. It is very hard to argue against this, which is why the Chinese room argument has stuck around for so long.

Searle is of the opinion that if we can find the 'mechanism' of understanding in the brain and replicate it in the computer, the computer can understand as well.

To get down to the nuts and bolts of the argument, he maintains that a precise molecular-level simulation of a human brain would be able to understand, but a computer that just happened to act intelligent might not be able to.

In my opinion, this argument just hides yet another form of vitalism. That there is something above and beyond the mechanical. However, everywhere in the brain we've looked, we've found just neurons doing simple computations on their inputs. I believe that that is all there is to it - that something with the capabilities of the human brain also has the ability to understand.

However, this is just a belief at this point. There is no way to prove it. There probably will be no way until we can figure out what consciousness is.

So there you have it. The chinese room argument is really just another form of the Hard Problem of consciousness. Nothing new to see here.

More posts like this please!

As part of Singularity University's acquisition of the Singularity Summit, we will be changing our name and ...

OK, this is big news. Don't know how I missed this one.

Appoint a chief editor. Chief's most important job would be to maintain a list of what most urgently needs adding or expanding in the wiki, and posting a monthly Discussion post reminding people about these. (Maybe choosing a different theme each month and listing a few requested edits in that category, together with a link to the wiki page that contains the full list).

When people make these changes, they can add a comment and chief editor (or some other high status figure) will respond with heaps of praise.

People will naturally bring up any other topics they'd like to see on the wiki or general comments about the wiki. Chief editor should take account of these and where relevant bring them up with the relevant people (e.g. the programmers).

I'm not sure how much I can elaborate-- it seemed like a very undifferentiated ugh field. I not only didn't want to do more, I didn't want to think about how to get myself to do more.

It took some sense of duty to make my first comment rather than just letting the whole thing go.