LESSWRONG
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All of Brent's Comments + Replies

When is a mind me?
Brent21

What are the other objections?

It's not just that it implies faster-than-light communication, it's that it implies communication at all.

Experiencing both bodies at the same time, you will be able to take actions in one body that you wouldn't have done without the other one. It seems odd that with no biological changes to your brain, the mere existence of another similar brain changes how this one functions. Why would they be linked? This implies the observer is some external soul-like thing that can manipulate matter. If you can't take actions based on your... (read more)

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1Flying Pen and Paper
Yes, it would imply the observer is external, but then it also would not change anything about how the brain functions. (Or vice versa, but I prefer this one.) I am unconvinced of the truth of what you say in the last sentence of your second paragraph. Either way, whether or not it might seem implausible, my question is why it is, or is not, implausible. Why exactly, based on what we currently know, is this extremely unlikely?
Sherlockian Abduction Master List
Brent20

I can confirm seeing this one. I had a guitar teacher who had short nails on one hand, and long nails on the other.

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1lewis smith
re. the article saying it's hard to observe; I think the short nails are pretty hard to spot (many people keep their nails short) but the long fingerstyle nails are quite unusual looking, though also not that common.
When is a mind me?
Brent10

What's the empirical or physical content of this belief?

 

I'll take a stab at explaining this with a simple thought experiment.

Say there are two people, Alice and Bob, each with their own unique brain states.
If Alice's brain state changes slightly, from getting older, learning something new, losing some neurons to a head injury, etc, she will still be Alice. Changing, adding, or removing a neuron does not change this fact.

Now what if instead part of her brain state was changing slowly to match Bob's? You could think of this as incrementally removing Al... (read more)

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2Adele Lopez
I would say that Alice's conscious experience is unlikely to suddenly disappear under this transformation, and that it could even be done in a way so that their experience was continuous. However, Alice-memories would gradually fade out, Bob-memories would gradually fade in, and thought patterns would slowly shift from Alice-like to Bob-like. At the end, the person would just be Bob. Along the way, I would say that Alice gradually died (using an information-theoretic definition of death). The thing that is odd when imagining this is that Alice never experiences her consciousness fading. The main thing I think your thought experiment demonstrates is that our sense of self is not solely defined by continuity of consciousness.
Transformers Represent Belief State Geometry in their Residual Stream
Brent10

I agree with you that the LLM's job is harder, but I think that has a lot to do with the task being given to the human vs. LLM being different in kind. The internal states of a human (thoughts, memories, emotions, etc) can be treated as inputs in the same way vision and sound are. A lot of the difficulty will come from the LLM being given less information, similar to how a human who is blindfolded will have a harder time performing a task where vision would inform what state they are in. I would expect if an LLM was given direct access to the same memories... (read more)

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1snewman
I think we're saying the same thing? "The LLM being given less information [about the internal state of the actor it is imitating]" and "the LLM needs to maintain a probability distribution over possible internal states of the actor it is imitating" seem pretty equivalent.