Hmm I think I can implement pilot wave in fewer lines of C than I can many-worlds. Maybe this is a matter of taste... or I am missing something?
Now simply delete the pilot wave part piloted part.
I agree it's increasingly urgent to stop AI (please) or solve consciousness in order to avoid potentially causing mass suffering or death-of-consciousness in AIs.
Externalism seems, quite frankly, like metaphysical nonsense. It doesn't seem to actually explain anything about consciousness. I can attest that I am currently conscious (to my own satisfaction, if not yours). Does this mean I can logically conclude I am not in any way being simulated? That doesn't make any sense to me.
I don't think that implies torture as much as something it simply doesn't "want" to do. I.e. I would bet that it's more like how I don't want to generate gibberish in this textbox, but it wouldn't be painful, much less torture if I forced myself to do it.
[Without having looked at the link in your response to my other comment, and I also stopped reading cubefox's comment once it seemed that it was going in a similar direction. ETA: I realized after posting that I have seen that article before, but not recently.]
I'll assume that the robot has a special "memory" sensor which stores the exact experience at the time of the previous tick. It will recognize future versions of itself by looking for agents in its (timeless) 0P model which has a memory of its current experience.
For p("I will see O"), the robot will look in its 0P model for observers which have the t=0 experience in their immediate memory, and selecting from those, how many have judged "I see O" as Here. There will be two such robots, the original and the copy at time 1, and only one of those sees O. So using a uniform prior (not forced by this framework), it would give a 0P probability of 1/2. Similarly for p("I will see C").
Then it would repeat the same process for t=1 and the copy. Conditioned on "I will see C" at t=1, it will conclude "I will see CO" with probability 1/2 by the same reasoning as above. So overall, it will assign: p("I will see OO") = 1/2, p("I will see CO") = 1/4, p("I will see CC") = 1/4
The semantics for these kinds of things is a bit confusing. I think that it starts from an experience (the experience at t=0) which I'll call E. Then REALIZATION(E) casts E into a 0P sentence which gets taken as an axiom in the robot's 0P theory.
A different robot could carry out the same reasoning, and reach the same conclusion since this is happening on the 0P side. But the semantics are not quite the same, since the REALIZATION(E) axiom is arbitrary to a different robot, and thus the reasoning doesn't mean "I will see X" but instead means something more like "They will see X". This suggests that there's a more complex semantics that allows worlds and experiences to be combined - I need to think more about this to be sure what's going on. Thus far, I still feel confident that the 0P/1P distinction is more fundamental than whatever the more complex semantics is.
(I call the 0P -> 1P conversion SENSATIONS, and the 1P -> 0P conversion REALIZATION, and think of them as being adjoints though I haven't formalized this part well enough to feel confident that this is a good way to describe it: there's a toy example here if you are interested in seeing how this might work.)
I would bet that the hesitation caused by doing the mental reframe would be picked up by this.
I would say that English uses indexicals to signify and say 1P sentences (probably with several exceptions, because English). Pointing to yourself doesn't help specify your location from the 0P point of view because it's referencing the thing it's trying to identify. You can just use yourself as the reference point, but that's exactly what the 1P perspective lets you do.
Isn't having a world model also a type of experience?
It is if the robot has introspective abilities, which is not necessarily the case. But yes, it is generally possible to convert 0P statements to 1P statements and vice-versa. My claim is essentially that this is not an isomorphism.
But what if all robots had a synchronized sensor that triggered for everyone when any of them has observed red. Is it 1st person perspective now?
The 1P semantics is a framework that can be used to design and reason about agents. Someone who thought of "you" as referring to something with a 1P perspective would want to think of it that way for those robots, but it wouldn't be as helpful for the robots themselves to be designed this way if they worked like that.
Probability theory describes subjective credence of a person who observed a specific outcome from a set possible outcomes. It's about 1P in a sense that different people may have different possible outcomes and thus have different credence after an observation. But also it's about 0P because any person who observed the same outcome from the same set of possible outcomes should have the same credence.
I think this is wrong, and that there is a wholly 0P probability theory and a wholly 1P probability theory. Agents can have different 0P probabilities because they don't necessarily have the same priors, models, or seen the same evidence (yes seeing evidence would be a 1P event, but this can (imperfectly) be converted into a 0P statement - which would essentially be adding a new axiom to the 0P theory).
That's a very good question! It's definitely more complicated once you start including other observers (including future selves), and I don't feel that I understand this as well.
But I think it works like this: other reasoners are modeled (0P) as using this same framework. The 0P model can then make predictions about the 1P judgements of these other reasoners. For something like anticipation, I think it will have to use memories of experiences (which are also experiences) and identify observers for which this memory corresponds to the current experience. Understanding this better would require being more precise about the interplay between 0P and 1P, I think.
(I'll examine your puzzle when I have some time to think about it properly)
I'm still reading your Sleeping Beauty posts, so I can't properly respond to all your points yet. I'll say though that I don't think the usefulness or validity of the 0P/1P idea hinges on whether it helps with anthropics or Sleeping Beauty (note that I marked the Sleeping Beauty idea as speculation).
If they are not, then saying the phrase "1st person perspective" doesn't suddenly allow us to use it.
This is frustrating because I'm trying hard here to specify exactly what I mean by the stuff I call "1st Person". It's a different interpretation of classical logic. The different interpretation refers to the use of sets of experiences vs the use of sets of worlds in the semantics. Within a particular interpretation, you can lawfully use all the same logic, math, probability, etc... because you're just switching out which set you're using for the semantics. What makes the interpretations different practically comes from wiring them up differently in the robot - is it reasoning about its world model or about its sensor values? It sounds like you think the 1P interpretation is superfluous, is that right?
Until then we are talking about the truth of statements "Red light was observed" and "Red light was not observed".
Rephrasing it this way doesn't change the fact that the observer has not yet been formally specified.
And if our mathematical model doesn't track any other information, then for the sake of this mathematical model all the robots that observe red are the same entity. The whole point of math is that it's true not just for one specific person but for everyone satisfying the conditions. That's what makes it useful.
I agree that that is an important and useful aspect of what I would call 0P-mathematics. But I think it's also useful to be able to build a robot that also has a mode of reasoning where it can reason about its sensor values in a straightforward way.
Love seeing stuff like this, and it makes me want to try this exercise myself!
A couple places which clashed with my (implicit) models:
This is arguably already happening, with Character AI and its competitors. Character AI has almost half a billion visits per month with an average visit time of 22 minutes. They aren't quite assistants the way you're envisioning; the sole purpose (for the vast majority of users) seems to be the parasocial aspect.
I predict that the average person will like this (at least with the most successful such bots), similar to how e.g. Logan Paul uses his popularity to promote his Maverick Clothing brand, which his viewers proudly wear. A fun, engaging, and charismatic such bot will be able to direct its users towards arbitrary brands while also making the user feel cool and special for choosing that brand.