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The case for stopping AI safety research

Could you expand upon your points in the second-to-last paragraph? I feel there are a lot of interesting thoughts leading to these conclusions, but it's not immediately clear to me what they are.

keltan's Shortform

andeslodes10mo10

I'm confused by what you mean that GPT-4o is bad? In my experience it has been stronger than plain GPT-4, especially at more complex stuff. I do physics research and it's the first model that can actually improve the computational efficiency of parts of my code that implement physical models. It has also become more useful for discussing my research, in the sense that it dives deeper into specialized topics, while the previous GPT-4 would just respond in a very handwavy way.

1keltan10mo

Man, I wish that was my experience. I feel like I’m constantly asking GPT4o a question, getting a weird or bad response. Then switching to 4 to finish the job.

When is a mind me?

andeslodes11mo5036

You're missing the bigger picture and pattern-matching in the wrong direction. I am not saying the above because I have a need to preserve my "soul" due to misguided intuitions. On the contrary, the reason for my disagreement is that I believe you are not staring into the abyss of physicalism hard enough. When I said I'm agnostic in my previous comment, I said it because physics and empiricism lead me to consider reality as more "unfamiliar" than you do (assuming that my model of your beliefs is accurate). From my perspective, your post and your conc... (read more)

2brambleboy8mo

Are you trying to say that quantum physics provides evidence that physical reality is subjective, with conscious observers having a fundamental role? Rob implicitly assumes the position advocated by The Quantum Physics Sequence, which argues that reality exists independently of observers and that quantum stuff doesn't suggest otherwise. It's just one of the many presuppositions he makes that's commonly shared on here. If that's your main objection, you should make that clear.

6joe8mo

So in reading your comments of this post, I feel like I am reading comments made by a clone of my own mind. Though you articulate my views better than I can. This particular comment you make, I don't think it gets The attention it deserves. It was pretty revolutionary for myself when I learned to think of almost every worldview at a model of reality. It's most revolutionary when one realizes what is arguably an outdated Newtonian view to fall into this category of model. It really highlights that actual reality is at the least very hard to get at. This is a severe an issue with regards to consciousness.

1dinfinity8mo

I would say that it is irrelevant for the points the post/Rob is trying to make whether consciousness is classical or quantum, given that conscious experience has, AFAIK, never been reported to be 'quantum' (i.e. that we don't seem to experience superpositions or entanglement) and that we already have straightforward classical examples of lack of conscious continuity (namely: sleeping). In the case of sleeping and waking up it is already clear that the currently awake consciousness is modeling its relation to past consciousnesses in that body through memories alone. Even without teleporters, copiers, or other universes coming into play, this connection is very fragile. How sure can a consciousness be that it is the same as the day before or as one during lucid parts of dreams? If you add brain malfunctions such as psychoses or dissociative drugs such as ketamine to the mix, the illusion of conscious continuity can disappear completely quite easily. I like to word it like this: A consciousness only ever experiences what the brain that produces it can physically sense or synthesize. With that as a starting point, modeling what will happen in the various thought experiments and analyses of conscious experience becomes something like this: "Given that there is a brain there, it will produce a consciousness, which will remember what is encoded in the structure of that brain and which will experience what that brain senses and synthesizes in that moment." There is no assumption that consciousness is classical in that, I believe. There is also no assumption of continuity in that, which I think is important as in my opinion that assumption is quite shaky and misdirects many discussions on consciousness. I'd say that the value in the post is in challenging that assumption.

When is a mind me?

andeslodes1y2727

First off, would you agree with my model of your beliefs? Would you consider it an accurate description?

Also, let me make clear that I don't believe in cartesian souls. I, like you, lean towards physicalism, I just don't commit to the explanation of consciousness based on the idea of the brain as a **classical** electronic circuit. I don't fully dismiss it either, but I think it is worse on philosophical grounds than assuming that there is some (potentially minor) quantum effect going on inside the brain that is an integral part of the explanation fo... (read more)

5Rob Bensinger1y

Why would the laws of physics conspire to vindicate a random human intuition that arose for unrelated reasons? We do agree that the intuition arose for unrelated reasons, right? There's nothing in our evolutionary history, and no empirical observation, that causally connects the mechanism you're positing and the widespread human hunch "you can't copy me". If the intuition is right, we agree that it's only right by coincidence. So why are we desperately searching for ways to try to make the intuition right? Why is this an advantage of a theory? Are you under the misapprehension that "hypothesis H allows humans to hold on to assumption A" is a Bayesian update in favor of H even when we already know that humans had no reason to believe A? This is another case where your theory seems to require that we only be coincidentally correct about A ("sufficiently complex arrangements of water pipes can't ever be conscious"), if we're correct about A at all. One way to rescue this argument is by adding in an anthropic claim, like: "If water pipes could be conscious, then nearly all conscious minds would be instantiated in random dust clouds and the like, not in biological brains. So given that we're not Boltzmann brains briefly coalescing from space dust, we should update that giant clouds of space dust can't be conscious." But is this argument actually correct? There's an awful lot of complex machinery in a human brain. (And the same anthropic argument seems to suggest that some of the human-specific machinery is essential, else we'd expect to be some far-more-numerous observer, like an insect.) Is it actually that common for a random brew of space dust to coalesce into exactly the right shape, even briefly?

When is a mind me?

andeslodes1y6038

I find myself strongly disagreeing with what is being said in your post. Let me preface by saying that I'm mostly agnostic with respect to the possible "explanations" of consciousness etc, but I think I fall squarely within camp 2. I say mostly because I lean moderately towards physicalism.

First, an attempt to describe my model of your ontology:

You implicitly assume that consciousness / subjective experience can be reduced to a physical description of the brain, which presumably you model as a classical (as opposed to quantum) biological electr... (read more)

2FireStormOOO8mo

(Assuming a frame of materialism, physicalism, empiricism throughout even if not explicitly stated) Some of your scenarios that you're describing as objectionable would reasonably be described as emulation in an environment that you would probably find disagreeable even within the framework of this post. Being emulated by a contraption of pipes and valves that's worse in every way than my current wetware is, yeah, disagreeable even if it's kinda me. Making my hardware less reliable is bad. Making me think slower is bad. Making it easier for others to tamper with my sensors is bad. All of these things are bad even if the computation faithfully represents me otherwise. I'm mostly in the same camp as Rob here, but there's plenty left to worry about in these scenarios even if you don't think brain-quantum-special-sauce (or even weirder new physics) is going to make people-copying fundamentally impossible. Being an upload of you that now needs to worry about being paused at any time or having false sensory input supplied is objectively a worse position to be in in. The evidence does seem to lean in the direction that non-classical effects in the brain are unlikely, neurons are just too big for quantum effects between neurons, and even if there were quantum effects within neurons, it's hard to imagine them being stable for even as long as a single train of thought. The copy losing their train of thought and having momentary confusion doesn't seem to reach the bar where they don't count as the same person? And yet weirder new physics mostly requires experiments we haven't thought to do yet, or experiments is regimes we've not yet been able to test. Whereas the behavior of things at STP in water is about as central to things-Science-has-pinned-down as you're going to get. You seem to hold that the universe maybe still has a lot of important surprises in store, even within the central subject matter of century old fields? Do you have any kind of intuition pum

3Rob Bensinger1y

There are always going to be many different ways someone could object to a view. If you were a Christian, you'd perhaps be objecting that the existence of incorporeal God-given Souls is the real crux of the matter, and if I were intellectually honest I'd be devoting the first half of the post to arguing against the Christian Soul. Rather than trying to anticipate these objections, I'd rather just hear them stated out loud by their proponents and then hash them out in the comments. This also makes the post less boring for the sorts of people who are most likely to be on LW: physicalists and their ilk. Why do you assume that you wouldn't experience the copy's version of events? The un-copied version of you experiences walking into the room, sitting there, hearing the scanner working, and hearing it stop; then that version of you experiences walking out. It seems like nothing special happened in this procedure; this version of you doesn't feel anything weird, and doesn't feel like their "consciousness split into two" or anything. The copied version of you experiences walking into the room, sitting here, hearing the scanner working, and then an instantaneous experience of (let's say) feeling like you've been teleported into another room -- you're now inside the simulation. Assuming the simulation feels like a normal room, it could well seem like nothing special happened in this procedure -- it may feel like blinking and seeing the room suddenly change during the blink, while you yourself remain unchanged. This version of you doesn't necessarily feel anything weird either, and they don't feel like their "consciousness split into two" or anything. It's a bit weird that there are two futures, here, but only one past -- that the first part of the story is the same for both versions of you. But so it goes; that just comes with the territory of copying people. If you disagree with anything I've said above, what do you disagree with? And, again, what do you mean by sayin

The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 and its implications

andeslodes2y21

Could you explain what made you change your mind and update back to zero? It's nice to write down your beliefs but it would be much more helpful for the rest of us if you could share what information actually helped you update.

5Mitchell_Porter2y

A number of deflationary thoughts or realizations added up to the thought, "I'm not seeing, hearing, or reading anything here, that is beyond mundane explanation". For example, realizing that an object "the size of a football field" might be an object in a sensor reading that is inferred to be the size of a football field, rather than something bulky and massive that was seen with the naked eye... But these precursor thoughts were not individually decisive. It's not that I definitely knew what actually happened in any particular case. It was just the vivid realization that, wow, there really could be nothing at all behind all this hype.

The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 and its implications

andeslodes2y62

Thank you for the kind words. I do think that the probability is too low, especially given the new revelations, but I believe that this is also due to the choice of wording. The "alien technology has visited our solar system" part smuggles in a few assumptions which "uncorrelate" the question a bit from the recent evidence. To clarify:

The "alien technology" part makes this refer to extraterrestrials and the "solar system" part seems to indicate that said extraterrestrials originate from outside our solar system. So the question alludes to the c... (read more)

The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 and its implications

andeslodes2y53

You are right in saying that the UAP topic has been discussed on Lesswrong. I acknowledge this in the introduction of my post. Could you indicate which post you want me to find by "using the search function"?

I also think it is unfair to say that nothing in my post is worth updating over. Has there been any other document where serious politicians so strongly signal towards a connection of UAPs and non-human intelligence?

2mako yass2y

Yes, I said "for me".

The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 and its implications

andeslodes2y103

Thank you for taking the time to clarify! With this new info I think I can now give a stronger outline of my argument.

First, let me say that I do agree to a high degree with what Eliezer is saying in his tweet. Based on this, I can see why your prior for specifically "Aliens with visible craft" is so low. However, I strongly believe that his argument is focusing too much on a specific case, namely of "extraterrestrials with advanced technology coming from far far away", which is why I also think he is overconfident in his bet. My point is similar to... (read more)

The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 and its implications

andeslodes2y62

What you are saying about your prior for "Actually non-human intelligence (NHI)" being tiny closely agrees with what I said about the community being too certain in its ontology. You have to keep in mind that your choice of prior by default assumes that your ontology is not wrong. While I agree at surface level with Eliezer's statements, I think this kind of reasoning is used to reject otherwise strong evidence before even thinking about it enough to realize it is strong evidence.

Having a look at your link, I see you give 3% to the probab... (read more)

3Adele Lopez2y

Since a "UAP disclosure act" type law is pretty specific. Each detail I'd include in what that means would make it less likely in both worlds, which is why it's pretty low in both (probably not low enough tbh). Most of these details "cancel out" due to being equally unlikely in both worlds. The relevant details are things I expect to correlate with each other (mostly can be packed into a "politicians are taking UAPs seriously" bit, which I do take the act to be strong evidence of). I do think you were right about me handwaving the evidence to some extent, and after a bit more thinking I think it'd be more fair to conceptualize the evidence here as "politicians are taking UAPs seriously", and came up with these very very rough numbers for that. Note that while this evidence is stronger, my prior for "Aliens with visible UAPs" is much lower because I find that a priori pretty implausible for aliens with interstellar tech (and again, the numbers here are meant to be suggestive, and are not refined to the point where they accurately depict my intuitions). [And I'd strongly encourage you to share a bayescalc.io link suggestive of your own priors and likelihoods, and including all the things you consider as significant evidence! Making discussions like this more concrete was one of my major motivations in designing the site.] They're meant to gesture at the breadth of Something Else (and I was aware that you had addressed many of these, it doesn't change that this is the competing hypothesis). I'll be curious to see what sort of stuff does come out due to this law! But I strongly expect it to be pretty uncompelling. If I'm wrong about that, I'll update more of course (though probably only to the point of keeping this possibility "in the back of my mind" with this level of evidence).

The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 and its implications

andeslodes2y61

Maybe I'm naïve, but this lack of engagement has been extremely disappointing. I expected that an official document, which is sponsored by such high-profile politicians and which explicitly and non-dismissively refers to "non-human intelligence", crash retrievals / reverse engineering programs and "biological evidence of living or deceased non-human intelligence", would at least generate lively discussion.

It now seems to me that the community is so certain in its ontology that it literally ignores any evidence that goes against the rationalist ... (read more)

Adele Lopez2y*174

At least personally, I do see this as evidence of aliens (with strength between my intuitive feeling of 'weak' vs 'strong' at ~4.8 db). But my prior for Actually Aliens is very very low (I basically agree with the points in Eliezer's recent tweet on the subject), and so this evidence is just not enough for me to start taking it seriously.

See here for an interactive illustration with some very very rough numbers

Certainly, the presence of aliens would be one reason a politician might sponsor a serious UAP disclosure act (though I still find it strange as a r... (read more)

The UAP Disclosure Act of 2023 and its implications

andeslodes2y10

I thought it was worth taking the time to dig deep into this document as I haven't seen it mentioned here at all, despite it being one-week old at this point. No matter your beliefs on UAPs, I think the contents of this document should be an important part of the equation.

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