All of Harmless's Comments + Replies
A surprising amount of human cognition is driven purely verbally/symbolicaly - I recall a study showing that on average people with a native language that had much more concise wording/notation for numbers could remember much longer numbers. As a relatvely verbal person, my intuition about the relationship between observation and vocabulary would be that to know something is to be able to say what it means to know it, but then again it's possible that my case doesn't generalise and that I just happen to rely on symbol-pushing for most of my abstract cognit...
I’d also note that has anyone tried carrying around an umbrella all the time?
I have! This probably doesn't have any useful metaphorical properties, but my outdoor nonraincoat has deep enough pockets that my umbrella only barely pokes out the top, so I just leave it in that pocket 24/7.
It's nice to just not worry about whether or not it will rain, and it counterbalances the weight from my battery pack in my other coat pocket.
(I don't know if I'd recommend it - I have an unreasonably light coat for how warm it is so I can spare the weight budget,...
It might just be status quo bias or cynicism-driven pattern-matching, but I feel like for any given deadline, paxlovid-is-illegal is more of a "stable state" than paxlovid-is-legal - it feels like it would be easier to lock the general public into 'paxlovid is dangerous/untrustworthy/ineffective" with a campaign against it than it would be to lock the general public into a state of "paxlovid is safe and works and we use it" with a campaign for it, although now I'm actually trying to visualise a world in which paxlovid remains illegal indefinitely in the face of evidence I feel less confident in that cynicism than I did two weeks ago.
You might want to try recruiting from people from a more philosophical/mathematical background as opposed to recruiting from a programming background (hopefully we might be able to crack the problem from the pure logic perspective before we get to an application), but yeah now that you mention it "recruiting people to help the AGI issue without also worsening it" looks like it might be an underappreciated issue.
Do you think it will ever be possible to simulate a human mind (or analagous conscious mind) on a deterministic computer?
Do you think it possible in principle that a 'non-deterministic' human mind can be simulated on a non-deterministic substrate analagous to our current flesh substrate, such as a quantum computer?
If yes to either, do you think that it is necessary to simulate the mind on the lowest level of physics (e.g. on a true simulated spacetime indistinguishable from the original) or are higer-level abstractions (like building a mathematical model o...
I don't have a specific mental image for what I mean when I say 'non-deterministic', I was placing a bet on the assumption that YimbyGeorge was hypothesizing that conscious was somehow fundamentally mysterious and therefore couldn't be 'merely' deterministic, based on pattern-matching this view rather than any specific mental image of what it would mean for consciousness to only be possible in non-deterministic systems.
When you say 'require new physics that can explain consciousness', are you imagining:
"New insight shows human brain neuron connections have hundreds of tiny side channels that run much faster than the main connections, leading scientists to conclude that the human brain's processing apacity is much greater than previously thought"
or
"New insight reveals thin threads that run through all connections and allow neurons to undergo quantum superposition, allowing much faster and more complex pattern-matching and conscious thought than previously thougt pos...
I would also note that most modern-day AI like GPT-N are not actually optimisers, just algorithms produced by optimisation processes - the entity of [GPT-N + its trainer + its training data] could be considered an optimiser (albeit a self-contained one), but as soon as you take GPT-N out of that environment it is a stateless algorithm that looks at a short string of text and provides a probability distribution for the next letter. When it is run in generative mode, the set of its weights and answers will be no different from its isolated guesses when being trained.
I think it might be useful to think about what it would mean for the sentence “time is an illusion” to be true, or to be false.
There’s a certain contrarian perspective I find it useful to be able to take, by applying that perspective to this question I generated a few scripts:
“Of course a timeline is defined as a static object – if you take time out of the world-in-which-your-model-is-embedded and put it directly into your model you’ll find that there’s no time left over for your model to change in. There’s only one dimension of time, so you can’t have a m...
My conjecture is that the abillity for characters to explain counting, equal quantities, and causal relations has been deliberately removed to allow those latter processes (with particular emphasis on the scientific method) to be used, to illustrate the general foundation of empiricism without needing to resort to an actually difficult problem where there might be genuine ambiguity about the answers. The lack of a common ground about causal reasoning and reality allows the process to described from the ground up, instead of resting on previous vague intuitions about reality and beliefs.
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- Pick the lock
- Smash down the door
- Unscrew the door from its hinges and remove it
- Escape through a vent
- Hack the door
- Alter your administration records to show that you ought to be released
- Wait 10 years for natural administration changes to destabilise your holders until it is no longer remembered that you should be kept here
- Use a significant portion of your 10 years of energy to create an explosion that destroys the walls
- Walk out between the comically spaced bars
- Bend the bars to allow you to escape
- Dig into the wall and remove the bars from where they were mount
- Saturn V rocket
- SpaceX Starship
- Shine a torch (the something you are sending is light photons)
- Point a radioactive source towards the moon
- Point a neutrino emitter
- Send data by interfacing with the satelites around the moon
- Invent teleportation, and then teleport there
- Create a machine that can exactly copy your object and then destroy the 'original', use it to get the object to the moon, and then resolve the resulting dilemma about whether it's the 'same' object with your choice of counterargument
- Space elevator
- Just walk
- Sit on a nuke, and then detonate it
- Actually
(I probably shouldn't interact, but I would at least like to perform a small case study on what happened here, so I am going to try just out of curiosity.)
Human substrate is generally optimised for running one human, but can be repurposed for a variety of purposes. In particular, while memes can lodge themselves quite deeply inside someone, this process is quite inflexible, and generally humans run arbitary processes X by thinking 'what is the X thing to do here?.
Somewhere between the point where [the-generative-process-that-has-generated-for-itself-... (read more)