JacobW38 has not written any posts yet.
I'm a hardcore consciousness and metaphysics nerd, so some of your questions fall within my epistemic wheelhouse. Others, I am simply interested in as you are, and can only respond with opinion or conjecture. I will take a stab at a selection of them below:
4: "Easy" is up in the air, but one of my favorite instrumental practices is to identify lines of preprogrammed "code" in my cognition that do me absolutely no good (grief, for instance), and simply hack into them to make them execute different emotional and behavioral outputs. I think the best way to stay happy is just to manually edit out negative thought tendencies, and having some intellectual... (read 894 more words →)
If you go back even further we’re the descendants of single celled organisms that absolutely don’t have experience.
My disagreement is here. Anyone with a microscope can still look at them today. The ones that can move clearly demonstrate acting on intention in a recognizable way. They have survival instincts just like an insect or a mouse or a bird. It'd be completely illogical not to generalize downward that the ones that don't move also exercise intention in other ways to survive. I see zero reason to dispute the assumption that experience co-originated with biology.
I find the notion of "half consciousness" irredeemably incoherent. Different levels of capacity, of course, but experience itself is a binary bit that has to either be 1 or 0.
Explain to me how a sufficiently powerful AI would fail to qualify as a p-zombie. The definition I understand for that term is "something that is externally indistinguishable from an entity that has experience, but internally has no experience". While it is impossible to tell the difference empirically, we can know by following evolutionary lines: all future AIs are conceptually descended from computer systems that we know don't have experience, whereas even the earliest things we ultimately evolved from almost certainly did have experience (I have no clue at what other point one would suppose it entered the picture). So either it should fit the definition or I don't have the same... (read more)
I spoke briefly on acceptance in my comment to the other essay, and I think I agree more with how that one conceptualized it. Mostly, I disagree that acceptance entails grief, or that it has to be hard or complicated. At the very least, that's not a particularly radical form of acceptance. My view on grief is largely that it is an avoidable problem we put ourselves through for lack of radical acceptance. Acceptance is one move: you say all's well and you move on. With intensive pre-invested effort, this can be done for anything, up to and including whatever doom du jour is on the menu; just be careful not to... (read more)
A very necessary post in a place like here, in times like these; thank you very much for these words. A couple disclaimers to my reply: I'm cockily unafraid of death in personal terms, and I'm not fully bought into the probable AI disaster narrative, although far be it from me to claim to have enough knowledge to form an educated opinion; it's really a field I follow with an interested layman's eye. But I'm not exactly one of those struggling at the moment, and I'd even say that the recent developments with ChatGPT, Bing, and whatever follows them excite me more than they intimidate me.
All that said, I do make a... (read more)
I fully agree with the gist of this post. Empowerment, as you define it, is both a very important factor in my own utility function, and seems to be an integral component to any formulation of fun theory. In your words, "to transcend mortality and biology, to become a substrate independent mind, to wear new bodies like clothes" describes my terminal goals for a thousand years into the future so smack-dab perfectly that I don't think I could've possibly put it any better. Empowerment is, yes, an instrumental goal for all the options it creates, but also an end in itself, because the state of being empowered itself is just plain fun... (read more)
I highly recommend following Rational Animations on Youtube for this sort of general purpose. I'd describe their format as "LW meets Kurzgesagt", the latter which I already found highly engaging. They don't post new videos that often, but their stuff is excellent, even more so recently, and definitely triggers my dopamine circuits in a way that rationality content generally struggles to satisfy. Imo, it's perfect introductory material to anyone new on LW to get familiar with its ideology in a way that makes learning easy and fun.
(Not affiliated with RA in any way, just a casual enjoyer of chonky shibes)
You've described habituation, and yes, it does cut both ways. You also speak of "pulling the unusual into ordinary experience", as though that is undesirable, but contrarily, I find exactly that a central motivation to me. When I come upon things that on first blush inspire awe, my drive is to fully understand them, perhaps even to command them. I don't think I know how to see anything as "bigger than myself" in a way that doesn't ring simply as a challenge to rise above whatever it is.
Manipulating one's own utility functions is supposed to be hard? That would be news to me. I've never found it problematic, once I've either learned new information that led me to update it, or become aware of a pre-existing inconsistency. For example, loss aversion is something I probably had until it was pointed out to me, but not after that. The only exception to this would be things one easily attaches to emotionally, such as pets, to which I've learned to simply not allow myself to become so attached. Otherwise, could you please explain why you make the claim that such traits are not readily editable in a more general capacity?
Yes, I am a developing empirical researcher of metaphysical phenomena. My primary item of study is past-life memory cases of young children, because I think this line of research is both the strongest evidentially (hard verifications of such claims, to the satisfaction of any impartial arbiter, are quite routine), as well as the most practical for longtermist world-optimizing purposes (it quickly becomes obvious we're literally studying people who've successfully overcome death). I don't want to undercut the fact that scientific metaphysics is a much larger field than just one set of data, but elsewhere, you get into phenomena that are much harder to verify and really only make sense in the context... (read more)