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Yair Halberstadt
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Biology of the Living - A Conversation with two generations of Google AI
Yair Halberstadt15h20

Hi and welcome to LessWrong.

Please see the policy on AI generated content: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXujJjnmP85u8eM6B/policy-for-llm-writing-on-lesswrong

In particular:

Prompting a language model to write an essay and copy-pasting the result will not typically meet LessWrong's standards. Please do not submit unedited or lightly-edited LLM content. You can use AI as a writing or research assistant when writing content for LessWrong, but you must have added significant value beyond what the AI produced, the result must meet a high quality standard, and you must vouch for everything in the result.

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Undissolvable Problems: things that still confuse me
Yair Halberstadt3d20

I'm not claiming that we need any extra laws of physics to explain consciousness. I'm saying that even if you showed me the equations that proved I would behave like a conscious being, I still wouldn't feel like the problem was solved satisfactorily, until you explained why that would also make me feel like a conscious being.

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Wei Dai's Shortform
Yair Halberstadt4d53

I think that's fairly limited evidence, would want to see more data than that before claiming anything is vindicated.

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Undissolvable Problems: things that still confuse me
Yair Halberstadt4d20

Yes, that sounds right (minus the word metaphysical in camp 2).

To be precise: If you were to explain why, based on the laws of physics, I say the words "I Am Conscious" and otherwise act the way I do, I would still not feel like the mystery of consciousness has been explained, because there still doesn't seem to be any reason why there is something experiencing saying those words.

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Undissolvable Problems: things that still confuse me
Yair Halberstadt4d20

But experience itself isn't instantaneous, it's something that happens over time.

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We live in the luckiest timeline
Yair Halberstadt5d52

My claim is no nuclear bomb incident would have killed more than 25% of the population, or 500 million people in 1950, one billion 1970.

Reasoning is trivial - a single nuclear bomb can only kill a maximum of a few hundred thousand people at a time. At the height of the cold war there were a few thousand bombs on each side, most of which weren't aimed at people but second strike capabilities in rural areas. Knock on effects like famines could kill more, but I doubt they would be worse than WW2, since number of direct deaths would be smaller. It would likely lead to war, but again WW2 is your ballpark here for number of deaths from an all out global war.

Making an anthropic update from something that at worse would have reduced world population by 25 percent is basically identical to reading tealeaves, especially if you don't update the other way from WW1s and WW2s and other assorted disasters which majorly reduced world population.

Maybe we are the luckiest timeline. But the evidence for that is not enough to update you enough to meaningfully change your plans.

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We live in the luckiest timeline
Yair Halberstadt5d92

Not one of these would have ended humanity, or even long term particularly reduced it's population, hence the evidence towards survivorship bias from this is effectively 0.

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Undissolvable Problems: things that still confuse me
Yair Halberstadt5d20

To clarify I'm talking about why consciousness is a possible thing to exist, in this universe or any. I'm not talking about a reason why if things can be conscious, they would evolve to be so, or regardless of whether consciousness can exist, they would evolve to act in a way similar to conscious beings.

Granted that given that this universe does have consciousness in it, hence there must be some explanation for consciousness, the superintelligence probably would predict it.

But I'm saying that none of the explanations for why consciousness is a possible thing to exist, feel like the sort of thing that would be convincing to an entity that has no idea it exists in the first place. Nor can I even imagine what sort of argument would be convincing (other than showing them that conscious beings do in fact exist).

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Insofar As I Think LLMs "Don't Really Understand Things", What Do I Mean By That?
Yair Halberstadt8d*170

My counterargument, if I’m trying to play devil’s advocate, is that humans seem to notice this sort of thing in an online way. We don’t need to grow a 3x larger brain in order to notice and fix inconsistencies.

Having spent a lot of time attempting to explain things to my 3 year old children, I'm far from certain this is the case. No matter how many times we explain the difference between a city and a country, and when we go on a car, vs a plane she'll ask as us right after a five hour flight whether we're close to my work, which we usually go to on a one hour train.

My 5 year old groks all this intuitively, but there's very little point explaining it to the 3 year old (even though she talks beautifully, and can understand all the sentences we say as standalone facts). At some point her brain will grow more sophisticated and she'll grok all of this too.

I observed the same process with puzzles. No matter how many times I point out what corner pieces and edge pieces are, they simply cannot work out that a corner piece has to be next to an edge piece until they're about 3. No amount of explaining or examples will help.

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Cheap Labour Everywhere
Yair Halberstadt1mo30

Ok, you are technically correct, but in practice even in cheap labour societies a lot less than half of households have full time help.

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7Yair Halberstadt's Shortform
3y
16
8Arrows of time and space
15h
2
8Mortgage houses not land?
4d
1
23Undissolvable Problems: things that still confuse me
5d
19
18Thinking Mathematically - Convergent Sequences
1mo
5
61GDM also claims IMO gold medal
4mo
3
19Don't fight your LLM, redirect it!
4mo
2
31If Not Now, When?
5mo
3
194Gemini Diffusion: watch this space
6mo
39
-22Caplan's being melodramatic about circumcision
6mo
1
22Fake AI lawsuits to drive links
6mo
0
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