All of James Camacho's Comments + Replies

For the Sake of Pleasure Alone

Maybe it's my genome's fault that I care so much about future me. It is very similar to future it, and so it forces me to help it survive, even if in a very different person than I am today.

For the Sake of Pleasure Alone

When I say, "me," I'm talking about my policy, so I'm a little confused when you say I could have been a different snapshot. Tautologically, I cannot. So, if I'm trying to maximize my pleasure, a Veil of Ignorance doesn't make sense. The only case it really applies is when I make pacts like, "if you help bring me into existence, I'll help you maximize your pleasure," except those pacts can't actually form. What really happens is existing people try to bring into existence people that will help them maximize their pleasure, either by having similar policies to their own, or being willing to serve them.

2Greenless Mirror1mo

I understand that you say that you are a policy and not a snapshot, I don't understand why exactly you consider yourself a policy if you say "I also hold to your timeless snapshot theory". Even from a policy perspective, the snapshot you find yourself in is the "standard" by which you judge divergence of other snapshots. I think you might underestimate how different you are even from yourself in different states and ages. Would you not wish happiness on your child-self or old-self if they were too different from you in terms of "policy"? Would you feel "the desire to help another person as yourself" if he was similar enough to you? And I still don't understand what do you mean by a "mechanism to choose who you would be born as" (other than killing everyone and making your forks the most common life form in the universe). Even if we consider you not as a snapshot, but as a "line of continuity of consciousness"/policy/person in the standard sense, you could have been born a different person/policy. And in the absence of such a mechanism, I think utilitarianism is "selfishly" rational. I don't understand why timeless pacts can't form either, it's like the basis of TDT and you already don't believe in time.

James Camacho1mo20

I try to be pragmatic, which means I only find it useful to consider constructive theories; anything else is not defined, and I would say you cannot even talk about them. This is why I take issue with many simple explanations of utilitarianism: people claim to "sum over everyone equally" while not having a good definition for "everyone" or "summing equally". I think these are the two mistakes you are making in your post.

You say something like,

You never had the mechanism to choose who you would be born as, and the simplest option is pure chance.

but you cann... (read more)

2Greenless Mirror1mo

Thank you, that was interesting. I may not be able to maintain the level of formality you are expecting, I think the imprecise explanations that allow you to win are still valid, but I will try to explain it in a way that we can understand each other. We diverged at the point: I understand why it might seem that infinities break probability theory. Let me clarify what I meant when I said that you are a random consciousness from a "virtual infinite queue". My simplest model of reality posits that there is a finite number of snapshots of consciousness in the universe - unless, for example, AI somehow defeats entropy, unless we account for other continuums, and so on. I hope you don’t have an issue with the idea that you could be a random snapshot from an unknown, but finite, set of them. (But I also suppose that you can use the mathematical expectation of finding yourself as a random consciousness from an infinite series, if the variance of that series is defined). But the queue of consciousnesses you could be is "virtually (or potentially) infinite" because there is no finite number of consciousnesses you could find yourself generating after which the pool of consciousnesses would be empty. Probabilities exist on a map, not on the territory: the universe has already created all the possible snapshots. But what you discover yourself to be influences the subjective distribution of probabilities for how many snapshots of consciousness there are in the universe - if I discover myself maximizing their number, my expectation of the number of snapshots increases. The question is whether I find this maximization useful (and I do). Now, regarding "the choice of who to be born as". I understand your definition of "yourself as a policy" and why it is useful: timeless decision theory often enables easy coordination with agents who are "similar enough to you", allowing for mutual modeling. However, I don’t understand why you think this definition is relevant if, at the same

Economics Roundup #5

James Camacho1mo*20

Not quite. I think people working more do get more done, but it ends up lowering wages and decreasing the entropy of resource allocation (concentrates it to the top). If you're looking for the good of the society, you probably want the greatest free energy,

\frac{GDP}{Total Assets} + temperature \cdot ({Theil}_{T} - ln population) .

The temperature is usually somewhere between $0.2$ (economic boom) and $1.0$ (recessions), and $\frac{GDP}{Total Assets} \approx 0.1$ in the United Kingdom. I couldn't find a figure for the Theil index, but the closest I got is that Croatia's was&n... (read more)

Economics Roundup #5

James Camacho1mo2-3

Dan Neidle: The 20,000% spike at £100,000 is absolutely not a joke – someone earning £99,999.99 with two children under three in London will lose an immediate £20k if they earn a penny more. The practical effect is clearer if we plot gross vs net income.

Can't it actually be good to encourage people to not work? I'd imagine if everyone in the United Kingdom worked half the number of hours, salaries wouldn't decrease very much. Their society, as a whole, doesn't need to work so many hours to maintain the quality of life, they only individually need to because they drive each others' wages down.

3rotatingpaguro1mo

Economy can be positive-sum, i.e., the more people work, the more everyone gets. Do you think the UK in particular is in a situation where instead if you work more, you are just lowering wages without getting more done?

We know what societies that mutilate prisoners are like, because plenty of them have existed.

This is where I disagree. There are only a few post-industrial socieities that have done this, and they were already rotten before starting the mutilation (e.g. Nazi Germany). There is nothing to imply that mutilation will turn your society rotten, only that when your society becomes rotten mutilation may begin.

James Camacho1mo62

So, you're making two rather large claims here that I don't agree with.

When you look at the history of societies that punish people by mutilation, you find that mutilation goes hand in hand (no pun intended) with bad justice systems--dictatorship, corruption, punishment that varies between social classes, lack of due process, etc.

This seems more a quirk of scarcity than due to having a bad justice system. Historically, it wasn't just the tryannical, corrupt governments that punished people with mutlation, it was every civilization on the planet! I thin... (read more)

-3Jiro1mo

We could, but with actual humans, we won't. "By observing human beings" is not "without any justification". We know what societies that mutilate prisoners are like, because plenty of them have existed. Also, individuals don't have to "become irrational" for the ones who are already irrational to gain more influence.

James Camacho1mo1-6

I don't understand your objection. Would you rather go to prison for five years or lose a hand? Would you rather unfairly be imprisoned for five years, and then be paid $10mn in compensation, or unfairly have your hand chopped off and paid $10mn in compensation? I think most people would prefer mutilation over losing years of their lives, especially when it was a mistake. Is your point that, if someone is in prison, they can be going through the appeal process, and thus, if a mistake occurs they'll be less damaged? Because currently it takes over eight yea... (read more)

-1Jiro1mo

I would agree that eight years of imprisonment can be as bad or worse as mutilation. But the problem is that punishing people by mutilation has different incentives than punishing them with jail--at least among actual human punishers. When you look at the history of societies that punish people by mutilation, you find that mutilation goes hand in hand (no pun intended) with bad justice systems--dictatorship, corruption, punishment that varies between social classes, lack of due process, etc. Actual humans aren't capable of implementing a justice system which punishes by mutilation but does so in a way that you could argue is fair.

James Camacho1mo0-1

Similar disclaimer: don't assume these are my opinions. I'm merely advocating for a devil.

If we're going for efficiency, I feel like we can get most of the safety gains with tamer measures. For example, you could cut off a petty thief's hand, or castrate a rapist. The actual procedure would be about as expensive as execution, but if a mistake was made there is still a living person to pay reparations to. I think you could also make the argument that this is less cruel than imprisoning someone for years—after all, people have a "right to life, liberty, and ... (read more)

4Jiro1mo

The idea that we can pay reparations for a mistake is bizarre even considering just widely accepted punishments. You can't imprison someone for 40 years, discover they're innocent, and "pay reparations" for the mistake--there's nothing you can pay someone to give them 40 years. Never mind paying reparations for mutilation, you can't do it for imprisonment. Also, in practice, societies which cut off the hands of thieves are not societies where justice is served even ignoring the punishments themselves. Tyrants like cutting off hands precisely because it's a punishment that can't be reversed, and you don't have to wait 40 years for it to become permanent.

The Dilemma’s Dilemma

James Camacho1mo20

If you're going to be talking about trust in society, you should definitely take a look at Gossner's Simple Bounds on the Value of a Reputation.

1James Stephen Brown23d

Thanks, I'll check it out.

The bottom row is close to what I imagine, but without IO ports on the same edge being allowed to connect to each other (though that is also an interesting problem). These would be the three diagrams for the square:

The middle one makes a single loop which is one-third of them, and $n = 4 / 2 = 2$ in this case. My guess for how to prove the recurrence is to "glue" polygons together:

There are $n + 1$ pairs of sizes $(k, n + 1 - k)$ we can glue together (if you're okay with $2$ -sided polygons), but I haven't made much progress in this direction.... (read more)

So, I'm actually thinking about something closer to this for "one loop":

This is on a single square tile, with four ports of entry/exit. What I've done is doubled the rope in each connection, so there is one connection going from the top to the bottom and a different connection going from the bottom to the top. Then you tie off the end of each connection with the start of the connection just clockwise to it.

Some friends at MIT solved this problem for a maths class, and it turns out there's a nice recurrence. Let $P (n, ℓ)$ be the probability there are... (read more)

2Ben1mo

I think I am not understanding the question this equation is supposed to be answer, as it seems wrong to me. I think you are considering the case were we draw arrowheads on the lines? So each line is either an "input" or an "output", and we randomly connect inputs only to outputs, never connecting two inputs together or two outputs? With those assumptions I think the probability of only one loop on a shape with N inputs and N outputs (for a total of 2N "puts") is 1/N. The equation I had ( (N-2)!! / (N-1)!!) is for N "points", which are not pre-assigned into inputs and outputs. These diagrams explain my logic. On the top row is the "N puts" problem. First panel on the left, we pick a unmatched end (doesn't matter which, by symmetry), the one we picked is the red circle, and we look at the options of what to tie it to, the purple circles. One purple circle is filled with yellow, if we pick that one then we will end up with more than one loop. The probability of picking it randomly is 1/7 (as their are 6 other options). In the next panel we assume we didn't die. By symmetry again it doesn't matter which of the others we connected to, so I just picked the next clockwise. We will follow the loop around. We are now looking to match the newly-red point to another purple. Now their are 5 purples, the yellow is again a "dead end", ensuring more than one loop. We have a 1/5 chance of picking it at random. Continuing like this, we eventually find that the probability of having only one loop is just the probability of not picking badly at any step, (6/7)x(4/5)x(2/3) = (N-2)!! / (N-1)!!. In the second row I do the same thing for the case where the lines have arrows, instead of 8 ports we have 4 input ports and 4 output ports, and inputs can only be linked to outputs. This changes things, because now each time we make a connection we only reduce the number of options by one at the next step. (Because our new input was never an option as an output). The one-loop chance her

James Camacho1mo70

Your math is correct, it's $13!!$ and $(\frac{14}{2}) = 91$ for the number of tiles and connections. I wrote some code here:

https://github.com/programjames/einstein_tiling

Here's an example:

An interesting question I have is: suppose we tied off the ends going clockwise around the perimeter of the figure. What is the probability we have exactly one loop of thread, and what is the expected number of loops? This is a very difficult problem; I know several MIT math students who spent several months on a slightly simpler problem.

2Ben1mo

This is really wonderful, thank you so much for sharing. I have been playing with your code. The probability that their is only one loop is also very interesting. I worked out something, which feels like it is probably already well known, but not to me until now, for the simplest case. In the simplest case is one tile. The orange lines are the "edging rule". Pick one black point and connect it to another at random. This has a 1/13 chance of immediately creating a closed loop, meaning more than one loop total. Assuming it doesn't do that, the next connection we make has 1/11 chance of failure. The one after 1/9. Etc. So the total probability of having only one loop is the product: (12/13) (10/11) (8/9) (6/7) (4/5) (2/3), which can be written as 12!! / 13!! (!! double factorial). For a single tile this comes out at 35% ish. (35% chance of only one loop). If we had a single shape with N sides we would get a probability of (N-2)!! / (N-1)!! . The probability for a collection of tiles is, as you say, much harder. Each edge point might not uniformly couple to all other edge points because of the multi-stepping in between. Also loops can form that never go to the edge. So the overall probability is most likely less than (N-2)!!/(N-1)!! for N edge dots.

2Shankar Sivarajan1mo

I had the same thought. I expect the probability of one loop trivially goes to zero as the tiling goes to infinity—because of the small loops—and that a better question would be whether there is an infinite loop. That looks an interesting (and hard!) percolation problem.

What's the Right Way to think about Information Theoretic quantities in Neural Networks?

James Camacho1mo30

The sidelengths for the Einstein tile are all either $1$ or $\sqrt{3}$ , except for a single side of length $2$ . I think it makes more sense to treat that side as two sides, with a $180^{\circ}$ angle between them. Then you would get fourteen entry/exit points:

The aperiodic tiling from the paper cannot be put onto a hexagonal grid, and some of the tiles are flipped vertically, so you need every edge to have an entry/exit to make a Celtic knot out of it. Also, I would recommend using $T i l e (1, 1)$ rather than $T i l e (1, \sqrt{3})$ so the arcs t... (read more)

2Ben1mo

That is a nice idea. The "two sides at 180 degrees" only occurred to me after I had finished. I may look into that one day, but with that many connections is needs to be automated. In the 6 entries/exits ones above you pick one entry, you have 5 options of where to connect it. Then, you pick the next unused entry clockwise, and have 3 options for where to send it, then you have only one option for how to connect the last two. So its 5x3x1 = 15 different possible tiles. With 14 entries/exits, its 13x11x9x7x5x3x1 = 135,135 different tiles. (13!!, for !! being double factorial). You also have (I think) 13+12+11+10+... = 91 different connection pieces. One day, I may try and write a code to make some of those. I strongly suspect that they won't look nice, but they might be interesting anyway.

Answer by James CamachoFeb 01, 202510

I'm not entirely sure what you've looked at in the literature; have you seen "Direct Validation of the Information Bottleneck Principle for Deep Nets" (Elad et al.)? They use the Fenchel conjugate

\[\mathrm{KL}(P||Q) = \sup_{f} [\mathbb{E}_P[f]-\log (\mathbb{E}_Q[e^f])]\]

This turns finding the KL-divergence into an optimisation problem for $f^*(x) = \log \frac{p(x)}{q(x)}$. Since

\[I(X;Y)=\mathrm{KL}(P_{X,Y}||P_{X\otimes Y}),\]

you can train a neural network to predict the mutual information. For the information bottleneck, you would train two addition... (read more)

What's the Right Way to think about Information Theoretic quantities in Neural Networks?

James Camacho2mo40

Reversible networks (even when trained) for example have the same partition induced even if you keep stacking more layers, so from the perspective of information theory, everything looks the same

I don't think this is true? The differential entropy changes, even if you use a reversible map:

H (Y) = H (X) + E_{X} [log | det J |]

where $J$ is the Jacobian of your map. Features that are "squeezed together" are less usable, and you end up with a smaller entropy. Similarly, "unsqueezing" certain features, or examining them more closely, gives a higher entropy.

2Dalcy2mo

Ah you're right. I was thinking about the deterministic case. Your explanation of the jacobian term accounting for features "squeezing together" makes me update towards thinking maybe the quantizing done to turn neural networks from continuous & deterministic to discrete & stochastic, while ad hoc, isn't as unreasonable as I originally thought it was. This paper is where I got the idea that discretization is bad because it "conflates 'information theoretic stuff' with 'geometric stuff', like clustering" - but perhaps this is in fact capturing something real.

The quantum red pill or: They lied to you, we live in the (density) matrix

James Camacho2mo10

A couple things to add:

Since every invertible square matrix can be decomposed as $A^{t} = e^{(Z + i H) t}$ , you don't actually need a unitary assumption. You can just say that after billions of years, all but the largest Z-matrices have died out.
There's another tie between statistics and quantum evolution called the Wick rotation. If you set $t = i β$ , then $E [e^{(Z + i H) t}] = E [e^{- H β}]$ so the inverse-temperature is literally imaginary time! You can recover the Boltzmann distribution by looking at the expected number of particles in each state: $E [⟨ n | e^{(Z + i H) t} | n$

... (read more)

No one has the ball on 1500 Russian olympiad winners who've received HPMOR

James Camacho2mo-1-2

Why are conservatives for punitive correction while progressives do not think it works? I think this can be explained by the difference between stable equilibria and saddle points.

If you have a system where people make random "mistakes" an $ϵ$ amount of the time, the stable points are known as trembling-hand equilibria. Or, similarly, if they transition to different policies some H of the time, you get some thermodynamic distribution. In both models, your system is exponentially more likely to end up in states it is hard to transition out of (Ellis... (read more)

James Camacho2mo*4-2

Oh, I did misread your post. I thought these were just people on some mailing list that had no relation to HPMOR/EA and you were planning on sending them books as advertising. This makes a lot more sense, and I'm much more cool with this form of advertising.

EDIT: I will point out, it still does scream "cult tactic" to me, probably because it is targeting specific people who do not know there is a campaign behind the scenes to get them to join the group. I don't think it is wrong to advertise to people who have given their consent, but I do think it is dangerous to have a culture where you discuss how to best advertise to specific people.

No one has the ball on 1500 Russian olympiad winners who've received HPMOR

[+]James Camacho2mo-6-7

Mikhail Samin2mo*1610

I’m confused. Are you perhaps missing some context/haven’t read the post?

Tl;dr: We have emails of 1500 unusually cool people who have copies of HPMOR (and other books) because we’ve physically sent these copies to them because they’ve filled out a form saying they want a copy.

Spam is bad (though I wouldn’t classify it as defection against other groups). People have literally given us email and physical addresses to receive stuff from us, including physical books. They’re free to unsubscribe at any point.

I certainly prefer a world where groups that try to i... (read more)

No one has the ball on 1500 Russian olympiad winners who've received HPMOR

James Camacho3mo7-4

This screams "cult tactic" to me. Is the point of EA to identify high-value targets and get them to help the EA community, or to target high-value projects that help the broader community?

7Mikhail Samin2mo

huh? I would want people who might meaningfully contribute to solving what's probably the most important problem humanity has ever faced to learn about it and, if they judge they want to work on it, to be enabled to work on it. I think it'd be a good use of resources to make capable people learn about the problem and show them they can help with it. Why does it scream "cult tactic" to you?

No one has the ball on 1500 Russian olympiad winners who've received HPMOR

James Camacho3mo42

I'd recommend against that. It's too similar to Mormonism w/ Marriott.

Computational functionalism probably can't explain phenomenal consciousness

James Camacho3mo00

Given that Euan begins his post with an axiom of materialism, it's referenced in the quote I'm responding to, and I'm responding to Euan, not talking to a general audience, I think it's your fault for intepreting it as "most people, full stop".

If all trade is voluntary, then what is "exploitation?"

James Camacho3mo10

Dollars are essentially energy from physics, and trades are state transitions. So, in expectation entropy will increase. Suppose person $i$ controls a proportion $p_{i}$ of the dollars. In an efficient market, entropy will be maximal, so we want to find the distribution

arg max - \sum p_{i} ln p_{i}, subject to \sum w_{i} p_{i} = Total Societal Wealth Generation .

For a given Total Societal Wealth Generation, this is the Boltzmann distribution

p_{i} \propto e^{β w_{i}}

where $β$ is the temperature (frequency of trades). I subsumed $β w_{i}$ as a single constant in my earl... (read more)

2joseph_c3mo

Isn't $\beta$ proportional to the inverse temperature, and so should be smaller now (with easier, more frequent trading)?

If all trade is voluntary, then what is "exploitation?"

James Camacho3mo30

Exploitation is using a superior negotiating position to inflict great costs on someone else, at small benefit to yourself.

If someone is inflicting any cost on me for their own benefit, that is not a mutually beneficial trade, so your definition doesn't solve the problem. You cannot just look at subtrades either—after all, you can always break up every trade into two transactions where you first only pay a cost, and then only get a benefit at someone else's expense.

My definition is closer to this:

A trade is exploitative when it decreases a society's w

... (read more)

3Darmani3mo

My intended meaning of the wording is that the "infliction" is relative to a more Pareto-optimal trade. E.g.: in the ultimatum game, us splitting a dollar with 99 cents to me and 1 cent to you is a positive-benefit trade, but is still inflicting a cost if you assume the negotation begins at 50/50. The idea of the subtrade is an interesting thought, but I think any trade needs to be considered an atomic agreement. E.g.: while I might physically hand the convenience store clerk a dollar before they give me the candy bar, it can't be broken down into two trades, because the full agreement is there from the outset. But if they demand an extra $1 bribe in the middle, giving me the choice "Pay another $1 and get candy bar, call authorities and waste a lot of time, or pay $0 and get no candy bar," then that's a new trade Suppose my son really wants to be a circus performer, but I want him to go to college; he says that, if he couldn't be a circus performer, he'd be a doctor. My son is about to enter a big circus competition, and I tell him that, if he wins, I'll give my full blessing and financial support for him to attend circus academy instead. By that definition, it sounds like my offer to let him pursue his dream is actually exploitative! This is for me the most interesting part of your comment. I want to know how this was derived.

Lack of Social Grace Is an Epistemic Virtue

James Camacho3mo11

For humans from our world, these questions do have answers—complicated answers having to do with things like map–territory confusions that make receiving bad news seem like a bad event (rather than the good event of learning information about how things were already bad, whether or not you knew it), and how it's advantageous for others to have positive-valence false beliefs about oneself.

If you have bad characteristics (e.g. you steal from your acquaintances), isn't it in your best interest to make sure this doesn't become common knowledge? You don't... (read more)

Creating Interpretable Latent Spaces with Gradient Routing

James Camacho4mo*20

If you're not already aware of the information bottleneck, I'd recommend The Information Bottleneck Method, Efficient Compression in Color Naming and its Evolution, and Direct Validation of the Information Bottleneck Principle for Deep Nets. You can use this with routing for forward training.

EDIT: Probably wasn't super clear why you should look into this. An optimal autoencoder should try to maximize the mutual information between the encoding and the original image. You wouldn't even need to train a decoder at the same time as the encoder! But, unfortunat... (read more)

g-w1's Shortform

James Camacho4mo20

And I migrated my comment.

g-w1's Shortform

James Camacho4mo20

James Camacho4mo11

Maybe, there's an evolutionary advantage to thinking of yourself as distinct from the surrounding universe, that way your brain can simulate counterfactual worlds where you might take different actions. Will you actually take different actions? No, but thinking will make the one action you do take better. Since people are hardwired to think their observations are not necessarily interactions, updating in the other direction has significant surprisal.

1amelia4mo

This is a very good point!

Computational functionalism probably can't explain phenomenal consciousness

I think physicists like to think of the universe through a "natural laws" perspective, where things should work the same whether or not they were there to look at them. So, it seems strange when things do work differently when they look at them.

1amelia4mo

Thanks for the feedback! I agree. It's just that if we think of humans and wave functions as both being manifestations of the same pool of interacting information, then it seems less surprising that our actions (like in measuring wave functions) would be connected to the behavior of wave functions. That "surprise" is something I think we could overcome if we communicated more clearly.

James Camacho4mo00

The reason wave function collapse is so surprising, is because not collapsing seems to be the norm. In fact, the best gravimeters are made by interfering the wavefunctions of entire molecules (ref: atom interferometer). We only see "wave function collapse" in particular kinds of operations, which we then define as observations. So, it isn't surprising that we observe wave function collapse—that's how the word "observe" is defined. What is surprising is that collapse even occurs to be observed, when we know it is not how the universe usually operates.

1amelia4mo

"What is surprising is that collapse even occurs to be observed, when we know it is not how the universe usually operates." But if we're manifestations of the same pool of interacting information as wave functions, then I don't understand how it's surprising that our actions (like in measuring wave functions) would be connected to the behavior of wave functions. That "surprise" is something I think we could overcome if we communicated more clearly.

James Camacho4mo-40

and that's because I think you don't understand them either.

What am I supposed to do with this? The one effect this has is to piss me off and make me less interested in engaging with anything you've said.

Why is that the one effect? Jordan Peterson says that the one answer he routinely gives to Christians and atheists that piss them off is, "what do you mean by that?" In an interview with Alex O'Conner he says,

So people will say, well, do you believe that happened literally, historically? It's like, well, yes, I believe that it's okay. Okay. What

... (read more)

Computational functionalism probably can't explain phenomenal consciousness

James Camacho4mo*20

But my view is that maths and computation are not the only symbols upon which constructive discussion can be built.

I find it useful to take an axiom of extensionality—if I cannot distinguish between two things in any way, I may as well consider them the same thing for all that it could affect me. Given maths/computation/logic is the process of asserting things are the same or different, it seems to me to be tautologically true that maths and computaiton are the only symbols upon which useful discussion can be built.

I'm not arguing against the claim th

James Camacho4mo1-3

In response to the two reactions:

Why do you say, "Besides, most people actually take the opposite approch: computation is the most "real" thing out there, and the universe—and any consciouses therein—arise from it."

Euan McLean said at the top of his post he was assuming a materialist perspective. If you believe there exists "a map between the third-person properties of a physical system and whether or not it has phenomenal consciousness" you believe you can define consciousness with a computation. In fact, anytime you believe something can be explicitl... (read more)

2Anthony DiGiovanni3mo

I'm happy to grant that last sentence for the sake of argument, but note that you originally just said "most people," full stop, without the massively important qualifier "who take the materialist perspective."

3EuanMcLean4mo

I'm not arguing against the claim that you could "define consciousness with a computation". I am arguing against the claim that "consciousness is computation". These are distinct claims. Massive claim, nothing to back it up. I think I have a sense of what's happening here. You don't consider an argument precise enough unless I define things in more mathematical terms. I've been reading a lot more philosophy recently so I'm a lot more of a wordcell than I used to be. You are only comfortable with grounding everything in maths and computation, which is chill. But my view is that maths and computation are not the only symbols upon which constructive discussion can be built. I'd be excited to actually see this counterargument. Is it written down anywhere that you can link to?

4Rafael Harth4mo

I reacted locally invalid (but didn't downvote either comment) because I think "computation" as OP is using it is about the level of granularity/abstraction at which consciousness is located, and I think it's logically coherent to believe both (1) materialism[1] and (2) consciousness is located at a fundamental/non-abstract level. To make a very unrealistic analogy that I think nonetheless makes the point: suppose you believed that all ball-and-disk integrators were conscious. Do you automatically believe that consciousness can be defined with a computation? Not necessarily -- you could have a theory according to which a digital computer computing the same integrals is not consciousness (since, again, consciousness is about the fine-grained physical steps, rather than the abstracted computational steps, and a digital computer calculating ∫50x2dx performs very different physical steps than a ball-and-disk integrator doing the same). The only way you now care about "computation" is if you think "computation" does refer to low-level physical steps. In that case, your implication is correct, but this isn't what OP means, and OP did define their terms. ---------------------------------------- 1. as OP defines the term; in my terminology, materialism means something different ↩︎

Computational functionalism probably can't explain phenomenal consciousness

The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A Partial Summary and Review

I don't like this writing style. It feels like you are saying a lot of things, without trying to demarcate boundaries for what you actually mean, and I also don't see you criticizing your sentences before you put them down. For example, with these two paragraphs:

Surely there can’t be a single neuron replacement that turns you into a philosophical zombie? That would mean your consciousness was reliant on that single neuron, which seems implausible.

The other option is that your consciousness gradually fades over the course of the operations. But surely

... (read more)

0EuanMcLean4mo

I'm sorry my summary of the thought experiment wasn't precise enough for you. You're welcome to read Chalmers' original paper for more details, which I link to at the top of that section. I gave very brief recaps of my arguments from the other posts in the sequence here so I can connect those arguments to more general CF (rather than theoretical & practical CF). Sorry if they're too fast. You are welcome to go into the previous posts I link to for more details. What am I supposed to do with this? The one effect this has is to piss me off and make me less interested in engaging with anything you've said. This is an assumption I state at the top of this very article. I don't "just claim" this, this is what I argue in the theoretical CF post I link to. I define this when I state my "realism about phenomenal consciousness" assumption, to the precision I judge is necessary for this discussion. Big claims. Nothing to back it up. Not sure why you expect me to update on this. This is all covered in the theoretical CF post I link to.

1James Camacho4mo

In response to the two reactions: 1. Why do you say, "Besides, most people actually take the opposite approch: computation is the most "real" thing out there, and the universe—and any consciouses therein—arise from it." Euan McLean said at the top of his post he was assuming a materialist perspective. If you believe there exists "a map between the third-person properties of a physical system and whether or not it has phenomenal consciousness" you believe you can define consciousness with a computation. In fact, anytime you believe something can be explicitly defined and manipulated, you've invented a logic and computer. So, most people who take the materialist perspective believe the material world comes from a sort of "computational universe", e.g. Tegmark IV. 1. Soldier mindset. Here's a soldier mindset: you're wrong, and I'm much more confident on this than you are. This person's thinking is very loosey-goosey and someone needed to point it out. His posts are mostly fluff with paradoxes and questions that would be completely answerable (or at least interesting) if he deleted half the paragraphs and tried to pin down definitions before running rampant with them. Also, I think I can point to specific things that you might consider soldier mindset. For example, If you actually want to know the answer: when you define the terms properly (i.e. KL-divergence from the firings that would have happened), the entire paradox goes away. I wasn't giving him the answer, because his entire post is full of this same error: not defining his terms, running rampant with them, and then being shocked when things don't make sense.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LpcEstrPpPkygzkqd/fractals-to-quasiparticles

I did some more thinking, and realized particles are the irreps of the Poincaire group. I wrote up some more here, though this isn't complete yet:

Why are there no interesting (1D, 2-state) quantum cellular automata?

Risk is a great study into why selfish egoism fails.

I took an ethics class at university, and mostly came to the opinion that morality was utilitarianism with an added deontological rule to not impose negative externalities on others. I.e. "Help others, but if you don't, at least don't hurt them." Both of these are tricky, because anytime you try to "sum over everyone" or have any sort of "universal rule" logic breaks down (due to Descartes' evil demon and Russell's vicious circle). Really, selfish egoism seemed to make more logical sense, but it doesn't h... (read more)

James Camacho4mo*10

I wrote up my explanation as its own post here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LpcEstrPpPkygzkqd/fractals-to-quasiparticles

1Optimization Process4mo

I thank you for your effort! I am currently missing a lot of the mathematical background necessary to make that post make sense, but I will revisit it if I find myself with the motivation to learn!

Why are there no interesting (1D, 2-state) quantum cellular automata?

Answer by James CamachoNov 26, 2024*50

I think you're looking for the irreducible representations of $˜ I s o (n, 1)$ (edit: for 1D, $˜ I s o (1, 1)$ ). I'll come back and explain this later, but it's going to take awhile to write up.

5Optimization Process4mo

I've never been familiar enough with group-theory stuff to memorize the names (which, warning, also might mean that it will take you a lot of time to write a sufficiently-dumbed-down version), but the internet suggests ~Iso(n,1) is related to... the Minkowski metric? I would be flabbergasted to learn that something so specific-to-our-universe was relevant to this toy mathematical contraption.

James Camacho4mo1-1

Utilitarianism is usually introduced as summing "equally" between people, but we all know some arrangements of atoms are more equal than others.

How do you choose to sum the utility when playing a Prisoner's Dilemma against a rock?

Are You More Real If You're Really Forgetful?

[+]James Camacho4mo-5-2

0Viliam4mo

I see a difference in the word "summed". In practice this would probably mean things like cooperating in the Prisoner's Dilemma (maximizing the sum of utility, rather than the utility of an individual player).

James Camacho4mo3-3

I think this is correct, but I would expect most low-level differences to be much less salient than a dog, and closer to 10^25 atoms dispersed slightly differently in the atmosphere. You will lose a tiny amount of weight for remembering the dog, but gain much more back for not running into it.

Are You More Real If You're Really Forgetful?