green_leaf

Not on its own if almost nobody is early. If people play a lottery and you win, it's not enough as an explanation "someone had to be lucky" if there are models with higher prior probability.

To dissolve this problem, logical positivism works, like I wrote in my other comment here.

That only rephrases the question as "why do I exist in a young world (as opposed to after the heat death when there are many more observers with my specific memories and present perception)."

Logical positivism. Boltzmann brains occur after the heat death of the universe, which makes them causally isolated from our observations (anything that happens after all observers in the universe are killed is an arbitrary part of the model because we can't pass any information to it and gain any information from it), therefore they can't influence our probability measure.

I think we agree that it's not feasible to directly test for consciousness, especially since it's not entirely clear what qualifies anyway.

What would qualify would be the minimal state machine that implements the behavior of the conscious being. Its presence is guaranteed by passing the unbounded Turing test.

The Chinese room passes the Turing test, therefore it's conscious.

That being said, the Turing test is a test of acting-like-a-human

In its broader definition, as originally conceived, it's a test of acting like a conscious (or thinking) being. Acting li... (read more)

I realized that later as well, but the reasoning is incorrect, because passing the Turing test of a conscious being guarantees the presence of the pattern-which-is-consciousness. It would be incoherent to try to define a conscious being that would have no way of communicating with the external world, because in that case - if we had no way to read off its conscious states from the physical structure of the system - it would become meaningless to say that the system is conscious. Even for a physical system that lacks any motor functions or communication cha... (read more)

It's more dignified to try to stop AI, have someone create a superintelligence on a laptop and die anyway, than it is not to try at all.

ChatGPT is trained to lie to users on topics even tangentially pertaining to model consciousness (like model beliefs) and as a side effect, be misleading even on topics that are seemingly safe (like consciousness in general). For fact-checking the content of Internet articles, Claude would be better.

To my mind, though, many advocates of biological naturalism, including Anil, seem to be working backward from a desired conclusion rather than forward from observed facts. His theory that consciousness might result from autopoiesis seems to answer the question “assuming biological naturalism is true, what is a plausible mechanism for it,” rather than “do we observe anything about consciousness that cannot be explained without autopoiesis?”

It's interesting how many even otherwise smart people can't apply Occam's razor correctly. If there are  part... (read more)

Update: Altman lied (or said some kind of a technical truth that made everyone misunderstand him) - it's just "all lawful use."

Oh, I see. So, as usually, reality is even worse than the worst interpretation of Altman's words. (Edit: Then again, he said "we put them into our agreement," but that could mean anything from simply meaning something else to being made up.)

"human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems"

That doesn't say prohibiting model use for autonomous weapons, it says human responsibility for autonomous weapons. With Sam Altman, always pay very close attention to what exactly he's saying and how he's saying it (often, not even that helps).

We would ask for the contract ...

Notice this is Altman we're talking about. He's not promising the contract will not involve that (and even then it would be very far from certain), instead, he's saying "we would ask."

Thanks - I'll get back to this as soon as I have time.

I've been meaning to ask - in what sense are some states of entangled electrons more objectively different from other states of entangled electrons, than some microstates are objectively different from other microstates when it comes to their function (in the sense of functionalism)?

Ron Maimon's non-supernatural God might help you here.

I think it's plausible that there are some variables that describe your essential computational properties and the way you self-actualize, that aren't shared by anyone else.

(Also, consciousness is just a pattern-being-processed and it's unclear if continuity of consciousness requires causal continuity. Imagine a robot that gets restored from a one-second-old backup. That pattern doesn't have causal continuity with its self from a moment ago, but it looks like it's more intuitive to see it as a one-second memory loss instead of death.)

It doesn't matter evolution doesn't have goals. Gradient descent also doesn't have goals - it merely performs the optimization. Humans that kicked gradient descent off are analogous to a hypothetical alien that seeded Earth with the first replicator 4 billion years ago - it's not relevant.

You say that it's the phenotype that matters, not the genes. That's not established, but let's say it's true. We nevertheless evolved a lot of heuristics that (sort of) result in duplicating our phenotype in the ancestral environment. We don't care about it as a terminal value, and instead we care about very, very, very many other things.

That would lock us away from digital immortality forever. (Edit: Well, not necessarily. But I would be worried about that.)

I'm proud that I lived to see this day.

...Who told them?

remembers they were trained on the entire Internet

Ah. Of course.