All of johnsonmx's Comments + Replies

I think the elephant in the room is the purpose of the simulation.

Bostrom takes it as a given that future intelligences will be interested in running ancestor simulations. Why is that? If some future posthuman civilization truly masters physics, consciousness, and technology, I don't see them using it to play SimUniverse. That's what we would do with limitless power; it's taking our unextrapolated, 2017 volition and asking what we'd do if we were gods. But that's like asking a 5-year-old what he wants to do when he grows up, then taking the answer seriousl... (read more)

We don't live in a universe that's nice or just all the time, so perhaps there are nightmare scenarios in our future. Not all traps have an escape. However, I think this one does, for two reasons.

(1) all the reasons that RobinHanson mentioned;

(2) we seem really confused about how consciousness works, which suggests there are large 'unknown unknowns' in play. It seems very likely that if we extrapolate our confused models of consciousness into extreme scenarios such as this, we'll get even more confused results.

A rigorous theory of valence wouldn't involve cultural context, much as a rigorous theory of electromagnetism doesn't involve cultural context.

Cultural context may matter a great deal in terms of how to build a friendly AGI that preserves what's valuable about human civilization-- or this may mostly boil down to the axioms that 'pleasure is good' and 'suffering is bad'. I'm officially agnostic on whether value is simple or complex in this way.

One framework for dealing with the stuff you mention is Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV)- it's not the last word on anything but it seems like a good intuition pump.

We're not on the same page. Let's try this again.

• The assertion I originally put forth is AI safety; it is not about reverse-engineering qualia. I'm willing to briefly discuss some intuitions on how one may make meaningful progress on reverse-engineering qualia as a courtesy to you, my anonymous conversation partner here, but since this isn't what I originally posted about I don't have a lot of time to address radical skepticism, especially when it seems like you want to argue against some strawman version of IIT.

• You ask for references (in a somewhat ru

If you're looking for a Full, Complete Data-Driven And Validated Solution to the Qualia Problem, I fear we'll have to wait a long, long time. This seems squarely in the 'AI complete' realm of difficulty.

But if you're looking for clever ways of chipping away at the problem, then yes, Casali's Perturbational Complexity Index should be interesting. It doesn't directly say anything about qualia, but it does indirectly support Tononi's approach, which says much about qualia. (Of course, we don't yet know how to interpret most of what it says, nor can we validat... (read more)

The stuff by Casali is pretty topical, e.g. his 2013 paper with Tononi.

Testing hypotheses derived from or inspired by IIT will probably be on a case-by-case basis. But given some of the empirical work on coma patients IIT has made possible. I think it may be stretching things to critique IIT as wholly reliant on circular reasoning.

That said, yes there are deep methodological challenges with qualia that any approach will need to overcome. I do see your objection quite clearly- I'm confident that I address this in my research (as any meaningful research on this must do) but I don't expect you to take my word for it. The positio... (read more)

I do have some detailed thoughts on your two questions-- in short, given certain substantial tweaks, I think IIT (or variants by Tegmark/Griffiths) can probably be salvaged from its (many) problems in order to provide a crisp dataset on which to base testable hypotheses about qualia.

(If you're around the Bay Area I'd be happy to chat about this over a cup of coffee or something.)

I would emphasize, though, that this post only talks about the value results in this space would have for FAI, and tries to be as agnostic as possible on how any reverse-engineering may happen.

Are you referring to any specific "current research into qualia", or just the idea of qualia research in general? I definitely agree that valence research is a subset of qualia research- but there's not a whole lot of either going on at this point, or at least not much that has produced anything quantitative/predictive.

I suspect valence is actually a really great path to approach more 'general' qualia research, since valence could be a fairly simple property of conscious systems. If we can reverse-engineer one type of qualia (valence), it'll help us reverse other types.

It would probably be highly dependent on the AI's architecture. The basic idea comes from Shulman and Bostrom - Superintelligence, chapter 9, in the "Incentive methods" section (loc 3131 of 8770 on kindle).

My understanding is that such a strategy could help as part of a comprehensive strategy of limitations and inventivization but wouldn't be viable on its own.

Right, absolutely. These are all things that we don't know, but should.

Are you familiar with David Pearce's Hedonistic Imperative movement? He makes a lot of the same points and arguments, basically outlining that it doesn't seem impossible that we could (and should) radically reduce, and eventually eliminate, suffering via technology.

But the problem is, we don't know what suffering is. So we have to figure that out before we can make much radical progress on this sort of work. I.e., I think a rigorous definition of suffering will be an information-theoret... (read more)

Although life, sin, disease, redness, maleness, and dogness are (I believe) inherently 'leaky' / 'fuzzy' abstractions that don't belong with electromagnetism, this is a good comment. If a hypothesis is scientific, it will make falsifiable predictions. I hope to have something more to share on this soon.

I think we're still not seeing eye-to-eye on the possibility that valence, i.e., whatever pattern within conscious systems innately feels good, can be described crisply.

If it's clear a priori that it can't, then yes, this whole question is necessarily confused. But I see no argument to that effect, just an assertion. From your perspective, my question takes the form: "what's the thing that all dogs have in common?"- and you're trying to tell me it's misguided to look for some platonic 'essence of dogness'. Concepts don't work like that. I do get ... (read more)

Right- good questions.

First, I think getting a rigorous answer to this 'mystery of pain and pleasure' is contingent upon having a good theory of consciousness. It's really hard to say anything about which patterns in conscious systems lead to pleasure without a clear definition of what our basic ontology is.

Second, I've been calling this "The Important Problem of Consciousness", a riff off Chalmers' distinction between the Easy and Hard problems. I.e., if someone switched my red and green qualia in some fundamental sense it wouldn't matter; if so... (read more)

Right. It might be a little bit more correct to speak of 'temporal arrangements of arrangements of particles', for which 'processes' is a much less awkward shorthand.

But saying "pleasure is a neurological process" seems consistent with saying "it all boils down to physical stuff- e.g., particles, eventually", and doesn't seem to necessarily imply that "you can't find a 'pleasure pattern' that's fully generalized. The information is always contextual."

Good is a complex concept, not an irreducible basic constituent of the universe. It's deeply rooted in our human stuff like metabolism (food is good), reproduction (sex is good), social environment (having allies is good) etc

It seems like you're making two very distinct assertions here: first, that valence is not a 'natural kind', that it doesn't 'carve reality at the joints', and is impossible to form a crisp, physical definition of; and second, that valence is highly connected to drives that have been evolutionarily advantageous to have. The second is... (read more)

I see the argument, but I'll note that your comments seem to run contrary to the literature on this: see, e.g., Berridge on "Dissecting components of reward: ‘liking’, ‘wanting’, and learning", as summed up by Luke in The Neuroscience of Pleasure. In short, behavior, memory, and enjoyment ('seeking', 'learning', and 'liking' in the literature) all seem to be fairly distinct systems in the brain. If we consider a being with a substantially different cognitive architecture, whether through divergent evolution or design, it seems problematic to view... (read more)

Surely neurological processes are "arrangements of particles" too, though.

I think your question gets to the heart of the matter- is there a general principle to be found with regard to which patterns within conscious systems innately feel good, or isn't there? It would seem very surprising to me if there wasn't.

I had posted the original in 2013, and did a major revision today, before promoting it (leaving the structure of the questions intact, to preserve previous discussion referents).

I hope I haven't committed any faux pas in doing this.

Thank you- that paper is extremely relevant and I appreciate the link.

To reiterate, mostly for my own benefit: As Tegmark says- whether we're talking about a foundation to ethics, or a "final goal", or we simply want to not be confused about what's worth wanting, we need to figure out what makes one brain-state innately preferable to another, and ultimately this boils down to arrangements of particles. But what makes one arrangement of particles superior to another? (This is not to give credence to moral relativism- I do believe this has a crisp answer).

Very interesting. No objections to your main points, but a few comments on side points and conclusions:

• You say "it's not like we know of a specific technological innovation that would solve poverty, if only someone would develop it." I would identify Greg Cochran's 'genetic spellcheck' as such a tech, along with what other people are suggesting. http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/typos/

• "We might have exhausted the low-hanging fruits in our desires." I think this is right, but it's complicated. I think the Robin Hanson way to f

On the first point-- what you say is clearly right, but is also consistent with the notion that there are certain mathematical commonalities which hold across the various 'flavors' of pleasure, and different mathematical commonalities in pain states.

Squashing the richness of human emotion into a continuum of positive and negative valence sounds like a horribly lossy transform, but I'm okay with that in this context. I expect that experiences at the 'pleasure' end of the continuum will have important commonalities 'under the hood' with others at that same ... (read more)

I understand the type of criticism generally, but could you say more about this specific case?

I'm curious if the objection stems from some mismatch of abstraction layers, or just the habit of not speaking about certain topics in certain terms.

It does, and thank you for the reply.

How should we define "pleasure"? -- A difficult question. As you mention, it is a cloud of concepts, not a single one. It's even more difficult because there appears to be precious little driving the standardization of the word-- e.g., if I use the word 'chair' differently than others, it's obvious, people will correct me, and our usages will converge. If I use the word 'pleasure' differently than others, that won't be as obvious because it's a subjective experience, and there'll be much less convergence towar... (read more)

We seem to be talking past each other, to some degree. To clarify, my six questions were chosen to illustrate how much we don't know about the mathematics and science behind psychological valence. I tried to have all of them point at this concept, each from a slightly different angle. Perhaps you interpret them as 'disguised queries' because you thought my intent was other than to seek clarity about how to speak about this general topic of valence, particularly outside the narrow context of the human brain?

I am not trying to "Learn how to manipulate p... (read more)

Tononi's Phi theory seems somewhat relevant, though it only addresses consciousness and explicitly avoids valence. It does seem like something that could be adapted toward answering questions like this (somehow).

Current models of emotion based on brain architecture and neurochemicals (e.g., EMOCON) are relevant, though ultimately correlative and thus not applicable outside of the human brain.

There's also a great deal of quality literature about specific correlates of pain and happiness- e.g., Building a neuroscience of pleasure and well-being and An fMRI-B... (read more)

I'd just like to say thanks for posting this. Cogent, researched, cheerful, and helpful.

Another view of Philosophy, which I believe Russell also subscribed to (but I can't seem to find a reference for presently) is that philosophy was the 'mother discipline'. It was generative. You developed your branch of Philosophy until you got your ontology and methodology sorted out, and then you stopped calling what you were doing philosophy. (This has the amusing side-effect of making anything philosophers say wrong by definition-- sometimes useful, but always wrong.)

The Natural Sciences, Psychology, Logic, Mathematics, Linguistics-- they all got their... (read more)

We can speak of different tiers of stuff, interacting (or not) through unknown causal mechanisms, but Occam's Razor would suggest these different tiers of stuff might actually be fundamentally the same 'stuff', just somehow viewed from different angles. (This would in turn suggest some form of panpsychism.)

In short, I have trouble seeing how we make these metaphysical hierarchizations pay rent. Perhaps that's your point also.

Yes, and I would say finding bunnies cuter than human babies isn't a strong argument against Dennett's hypothesis. Supernormal Stimuli are quite common in humans and non-humans.

I think this argument could be analogously phrased: "The reason why exercise makes us feel good can't be to get us to exercise more, because cocaine feels even better than exercise." Seems wrong when we put it that way.

You probably get a much richer sensation of zebra-ness under some conditions (being there, touching the zebra, smelling the zebra, seeing it move) than just seeing a picture of one on flickr. Experiencing zebra-ness isn't a binary value, and some types of exposures will tend to commandeer many more neurons than others.

I think the first 3/4ths are very well stated. I couldn't agree more.

On the last bit, my personal intuition is there are plenty of things people can do for FAI research beyond raising money. Moreover, such intangibles are likely often more important to the cause of FAI than cash.

(Also, the argument that "some of those willing and able able to do FAI research are spending their time raising money, right now, for lack of other ways to get money" may be undermined by the paragraph above it; e.g., I'd rather be thinking about FAI than raising money for others to think about FAI.)

I would suggest that a breakdown in social order (without a singularity occurring) is another scenario that might be roughly as probable as the others you mentioned. In such case, it would seem the manner by which you invest in equities would matter. I.e.., the value of most abstract investments may vanish, and the value of equities held in trust by various institutions (or counterparties) may also vanish.

I think it's possible that any leaky abstraction used in designing FAI might doom the enterprise. But if that's not true, we can use this "qualia translation function" to make a leaky abstractions in a FAI context a tiny bit safer(?).

E.g., if we're designing an AGI with a reward signal, my intuition is we should either (1) align our reward signal with actual pleasurable qualia (so if our abstractions leak it matters less, since the AGI is drawn to maximize what we want it to maximize anyway); (2) implement the AGI in an architecture/substrate whi... (read more)

I'd say nobody does! But a little less glibly, I personally think the most productive strategy in biologically-inspired AGI would be to focus on tools that help quantify the unquantified. There are substantial side-benefits to such a focus on tools: what you make can be of shorter-term practical significance, and you can test your assumptions.

Chalmers and Tononi have done some interesting work, and Tononi's work has also had real-world uses. I don't see Tononi's work as immediately applicable to FAI research but I think it'll evolve into something that wil... (read more)

I don't think an AGI failing to behave in the anticipated manner due to its qualia* (orgasms during cat creation, in this case) is a special or mysterious problem, one that must be treated differently than errors in its reasoning, prediction ability, perception, or any aspect of its cognition. On second thought, I do think it's different: it actually seems less important than errors in any of those systems. (And if an AGI is Provably Safe, it's safe-- we need only worry about its qualia from an ethical perspective.) My original comment here is (I believe) ... (read more)

I definitely agree with your first paragraph (and thanks for the tip on SIAI vs SI). The only caveat is if evolved/brain-based/black-box AGI is several orders of magnitude easier to create than an AGI with a more modular architecture where SI's safety research can apply, that's a big problem.

On the second point, what you say makes sense. Particularly, AGI feelings haven't been completely ignored at LW; if they prove important, SI doesn't have anything against incorporating them into safety research; and AGI feelings may not be material to AGI behavior any... (read more)

Thank you.

I'd frame why I think biology matters in FAI research in terms of research applicability and toolbox dividends.

On the first reason--- applicability--- I think more research focus on biologically-inspired AGI would make a great deal of sense is because the first AGI might be a biologically-inspired black box, and axiom-based FAI approaches may not particularly apply to such. I realize I'm (probably annoyingly) retreading old ground here with regard to which method will/should win the AGI race, but SIAI's assumptions seem to run counter to the ass... (read more)

I'm Mike Johnson. I'd estimate I come across a reference to LW from trustworthy sources every couple of weeks, and after working my way through the sequences it feels like the good outweighs the bad and it's worth investing time into.

My background is in philosophy, evolution, and neural nets for market prediction; I presently write, consult, and am in an early-stage tech startup. Perhaps my highwater mark in community exposure has been a critique of the word Transhumanist at Accelerating Future. In the following years, my experience has been more mixed, bu... (read more)