There was a rush to deontology that died away quickly, mostly retreating back into its special enclave of veganism.
Can you explain what you mean by the second half of that sentence?
Vegans believe that they should follow a deontological rule, to never eat meat, rather than weighing the costs and benefits of individual food choices. They don't consume meat even when it is expensive (in various senses) to not do so. And they advocate for others to commit to doing likewise.
Whereas EA thinking in other areas instead says to do the math.
To clarify, what question were you thinking that is more interesting than? I see that as one of the questions that is raised in the post. But perhaps you are contrasting "realize it is conscious by itself" with the methods discussed in "Could we build language models whose reports about sentience we can trust?"
I think I'd need to hear more about what you mean by sapience (the link didn't make it entirely clear to me) and why that would ground moral patienthood. It is true in my opinion that there are other plausible grounds for moral patienthood besides sentience (which, its ambiguity notwithstanding, I think can be used about as precisely as sapience, see my note on usage), most notably desires, preferences, and goals. Perhaps those are part of what you mean by 'sapience'?
Great, thanks for the explanation. Just curious to hear your framework, no need to reply:
-If you do have some notion of moral patienthood, what properties do you think are important for moral patienthood? Do you think we face uncertainty about whether animals or AIs have these properties? -If you don't, are there questions in the vicinity of "which systems are moral patients" that you do recognize as meaningful?
Very interesting! Thanks for your reply, and I like your distinction between questions:
Positive valence involves attention concentration whereas negative valence involves diffusion of attention / searching for ways to end this experience.
Can you elaborate on this? What is do attention concentration v. diffusion mean? Pain seems to draw attention to itself (and to motivate action to alleviate it). On my normal understanding of "concentration", pain involves concentration. But I think I'm just unfamiliar with how you / 'the literature' use these terms.
I'm trying to get a better idea of your position. Suppose that, as TAG also replied, "realism about phenomenal consciousness" does not imply that consciousness is somehow fundamentally different from other forms of organization of matter. Suppose I'm a physicalist and a functionalist, so I think phenomenal consciousness just is a certain organization of matter. Do we still then need to replace "theory" with "ideology" etc?
to say that [consciousness] is the only way to process information
I don't think anyone was claiming that. My post certainly doesn't. If one thought consciousness were the only way to process information, wouldn't there not even be an open question about which (if any) information-processing systems can be conscious?
A few questions:
Suffering seems to need a lot of complexity
and also seems deeply connected to biological systems.
I think I agree. Of course, all of the suffering that we know about so far is instantiated in biological systems. Depends on what you mean by "deeply connected." Do you mean that you think that the biological substrate is necessary? i.e. you have a biological theory of consciousness?
AI/computers are just a "picture" of these biological systems.
What does this mean?
...Now, we could someday crack con
Thanks for this great comment! Will reply to the substantive stuff later, but first - I hadn't heard of the The Welfare Footprint Project! Super interesting and relevant, thanks for bringing to my attention
A third (disconcerting) possibility is that the list of demands amounts to saying “don’t ever build AGIs”
That would indeed be disconcerting. I would hope that, in this world, it's possible and profitable to have AGIs that are sentient, but which don't suffer in quite the same way / as badly as humans and animals do. It would be nice - but is by no means guaranteed - if the really bad mental states we can get are in a kinda arbitrary and non-natural point in mind-space. This is all very hard to think about though, and I'm not sure what I think.
...I’m hope
Thanks, I'll check it out! I agree that the meta-problem is a super promising way forward
The whole field seems like an extreme case of anthropomorphizing to me.
Which field? Some of these fields and findings are explicitly about humans; I take it you mean the field of AI sentience, such as it is?
Of course, we can't assume that what holds for us holds for animals and AIs, and have to be wary of anthropomorphizing. That issue also comes up in studying, e.g., animal sentience and animal behavior. But what were you thinking is anthropomorphizing exactly? To be clear, I think we have to think carefully about what will and will not carry over from...
would read a review!
This author is: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/
"I believe the best choice is cloning. More specifically, cloning John von Neumann one million times"
...I guess even though I don't disagree that knowledge accumulation has been a bottleneck for humans dominating all other species, I don't see any strong reason to think that knowledge accumulation will be a bottleneck for an AGI dominating humans, since the limits to human knowledge accumulation seem mostly biological. Humans seem to get less plastic with age, mortality among other things forces us to specialize our labor, we have to sleep, we lack serial depth, we don't even approach the physical limits on speed, we can't run multiple instances of our own
The core part of Ajeya's model is a probability distribution over how many OOMs of compute we'd need with today's ideas to get to TAI / AGI / APS-AI / AI-PONR / etc.
I didn't know the last two acronyms despite reading a decent amount of this literature, so thought I'd leave this note for other readers. Listing all of them for completeness (readers will of course know the first two):
TAI: transformative AI
AGI: artificial general intelligence
APS-AI: Advanced, Planning, Strategically aware AI [1]
AI-PONR: AI point of no return [2]
[1] from Carlsmith, which Dan...
In general, I don't yet see a strong reason to think that our general brain architecture is the sole, or potentially even primary reason why we've developed civilization, discontinuous with the rest of the animal kingdom. A strong requirement for civilization is the development of cultural accumulation via language, and more specifically, the ability to accumulate knowledge and technology over generations.
In The Secrets of Our Success, Joe Henrich argues that without our stock of cultural knowledge, individual humans are not particularly more generally...
Thanks so much for this!
For example, I was aiming to pursue a PhD in machine learning, partly because I thought it would make me worthwhile. When I felt worthwhile I stopped that; I was able to think more freely about which strategy looked best according to my values.
If you have a chance I’d love to hear more about what this process looked like. What did thinking something would make you worthwhile feel like? Do you think that self love helped you care less about the status of a PhD? Or was it some other mechanisms? In general, how self...
I'm curious about this passage:
...Yes, yes, all of that is good, that is an excellent list of some of the downsides one should measure. It reminds me of nothing so much as an Effective Altruist trying to measure the advantages of an intervention to find things they can measure and put into a report. Yes, they will say, here is a thing called ‘development’ so it counts as something that can be put into the utility function and we can attach a number, excellent, very good. Then we can pretend that this is a full measure of how things actually work, and still
fixed the "Samberg" typo - thanks!
Thanks for your thoughts! I think I'm having a bit of trouble unpacking this. Can you help me unpack this sentence:
"But I our success rides on overcoming these arguments and designing AI where more is better."
What is "more"? And what are "these arguments"? And how does this sentence relate to the question of whether explain data makes us put place more or less weight on similar-to-introspection hypotheses?
You might be interested in this post by Harri Besceli, which argues that "the best and worst experiences you had last week probably happened when you were dreaming".
Eric Schwitzgebel has also written that philosophical hedonists, if consistent, would care more about the quality of dream experiences: https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-much-should-you-care-about-how-you.html
Even if we were able to get good readings from insula & cingulate cortex & amygdala et alia, do you have thoughts on how and whether we could "ground" these readings? Would we calibrate on someone's cringe signal, then their gross signal, then their funny signal - matching various readings to various stimuli and subjective reports?
Hi Steven, thanks!
Wait But Why, which of course is not an authoritative neuroscience source, uses "scale" to mean "how many neurons can be simultaneously recorded". But then it says fMRI and EEG have "high scale", but "low spatial resolution" - somewhat confusing since low spatial resolution means that fMRI and EEG don't record any individual neurons. So, my gloss on "scale" is more like WBW actually is talking about, and probably is better called "coverage". And then it's best to just talk about "number of simultaneously record...
I scheduled a conversation with Evan based on this post and it was very helpful. If you're on the fence, do it! For me, it was helpful as a general career / EA strategy discussion, in addition to being useful for thinking about specifically Long-Term Future Fund concerns.
And I can corroborate that Evan is indeed not that intimidating.
"I'm tempted to recommend this book to people who might otherwise be turned away by Rationality: From A to Z."
Within the category of "recent accessible introduction to rationality", would you recommend this Pinker book, or Julia Galef's "Scout Mindset"? Do thoughts on the pros and cons of each, or who would benefit more from each?
Thanks for collecting these things! I have been looking into these arguments recently myself, and here are some more relevant things:
Thank you for writing about this. It's a tremendously interesting issue.
...I feel qualitatively more conscious, which I mean in the "hard problem of consciousness" sense of the word. "Usually people say that high-dose psychedelic states are indescribably more real and vivid than normal everyday life." Zen practitioners are often uninterested in LSD because it's possible to reach states that are indescribably more real and vivid than (regular) real life without ever leaving real life. (Zen is based around being totally present for real life. A Zen master
Tons of handy stuff here, thanks!
I love the sound of Cold Turkey. I use Freedom for my computer, and I use it less than I otherwise would because of this anxious feeling, almost certainly exaggerated but still with a basis in reality, that whenever I start a full block it is a Really Big Deal and I might accidentally screw myself over - for example, if I suddenly remember I have to do something else. (Say, I'm looking for houses and it turns out I actually need to go look something up). But Cold Turkey, I'd just block stuff a lot more freely without the an...
I enjoyed reading this and skimming through your other shortforms. I’m intrigued by this idea of using the short form as something like a journal (albeit a somewhat public facing one).
Any tips, if I might want to start doing this? How helpful have you found it? Any failure modes?
[disclaimer: not an expert, possibly still confused about the Baldwin effect]
A bit of feedback on this explanation: as written, it didn’t make clear to me what makes it a special effect. “Evolution selects for genome-level hardcoding of extremely important learned lessons.” As a reader I was like, what makes this a special case? If it’s useful lesson then of course evolution would tend to select for knowing it innately - that does seem handy for an organism.
As I understand it, what is interesting about the Baldwin effect is that such hard coding is selecte...
I'm very intrigued by "prosthetic human voice meant for animal use"! Not knowing much about animal communication or speech in general, I don't even know what this mean. Could you say a bit more about what that would be?
Welcome, David! What sort of math are you looking to level up on? And do you know what AI safety/related topics you might explore?
Thanks for this! People interested in the claim (which Korsgaard takes to be a deficiency of utilitarianism) that for utilitarians "people and animals don’t really matter at all; they are just the place where the valuable things happen", might be interested in Richard Yetter Chappell's [1] paper "Value Receptacles" (pdf). It's an exploration of what this claim could even mean, and a defense of utilitarianism in light of it.
[1] Not incidentally, a long-time effective altruist. Whose blog is great.
Interesting - what sort of thing do you use this for? what sort of thing have you done after rolling a 2?
I imagine it must be things that are in some sense 'optional' since (quite literally) odds are you will not end up doing it.
That poem was not written by Hitler.
According to this website and other reputable-seeming sources, the German poet Georg Runsky published that poem, "Habe Geduld", around 1906.