Crossposted from opentheory.net STV is Qualia Research Institute‘s candidate for a universal theory of valence, first proposed in Principia Qualia (2016). The following is a brief discussion of why existing theories are unsatisfying, what STV says, and key milestones so far. I. Suffering is a puzzle We know suffering when...
The following is QRI's unified theory of music, meditation, psychedelics, depression, trauma, and emotional processing. Implications for how the brain implements Bayesian updating, and future directions for neuroscience. Crossposted from http://opentheory.net Context: follow-up to The Neuroscience of Meditation and A Future For Neuroscience; a unification of (1) the Entropic Brain...
Part of my research impact model has been something like: LLM knowledge will increasingly be built via dialectic with other LLMs. In dialectics, if you can say One True Thing in a domain, this can function as a diamond-perfect kernel of knowledge that can be used to win arguments against other AIs with, and shape LLM dialectic on this topic (analogy to soft sweeps in genetics).
Alignment research and consciousness research are not the same thing. But they’re not orthogonal, and I think I’ve seen some ways to push consciousness research forward, so I’ve been focused on trying to (1) speedrun what I see as the most viable consciousness research path, while (2)... (read more)
I’m really enjoying this series of posts. Perhaps this will be addressed in 4-6, but I’m wondering about prescriptions which might follow from c-risks.
I have a sense that humanity has built a tower of knowledge and capital and capacities, and just above the tower is a rope upwards labeled “AGI”. We don’t know exactly where it leads, aside from upwards.
But the tower we’ve built is also dissolving along multiple dimensions. Civilizations require many sorts of capital and investment, and in some ways we’ve been “eating the seed corn.” Decline is a real possibility, and if we leap for the AGI rope and miss, we might fall fairly hard and have to rebuild... (read more)
Dennett talks about Darwin’s theory of evolution being a “universal acid” that flowed everywhere, dissolved many incorrect things, and left everything we ‘thought’ we knew forever changed. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, with its description of language-games and the strong thesis that this is actually the only thing language is, was that for philosophy. Before PI it was reasonable to think that words have intrinsic meanings; after, it wasn’t.
“By their fruits you shall know them.”
A frame I trust in these discussions is trying to elucidate the end goal. What does knowledge about consciousness look like under Eliezer’s model? Under Jemist’s? Under QRI’s?
Let’s say you want the answer to this question enough you go into cryosleep with the instruction “wake me up when they solve consciousness.” Now it’s 500, or 5000, or 5 million years in the future and they’ve done it. You wake up. You go to the local bookstore analogue, pull out the Qualia 101 textbook and sit down to read. What do you find in the pages? Do you find essays on how we realized consciousness was merely... (read more)
Goal factoring is another that comes to mind, but people who worked at CFAR or Leverage would know the ins and outs of the list better than I.
Speaking personally, based on various friendships with people within Leverage, attending a Leverage-hosted neuroscience reading group for a few months, and having attended a Paradigm Academy weekend workshop.
I think Leverage 1.0 was a genuine good-faith attempt at solving various difficult coordination problems. I can’t say they succeeded or failed; Leverage didn’t obviously hit it out of the park, but I feel they were at least wrong in interesting, generative ways that were uncorrelated with the standard and more ‘boring’ ways most institutions are wrong. Lots of stories I heard sounded weird to me, but most interesting organizations are weird and have fairly strict IP protocols so I mostly withhold judgment.
The stories my... (read more)
Hi Steven,
This is a great comment and I hope I can do it justice (took an overnight bus and am somewhat sleep-deprived).
First I’d say that neither we nor anyone has a full theory of consciousness. I.e. we’re not at the point where we can look at a brain, and derive an exact mathematical representation of what it’s feeling. I would suggest thinking of STV as a piece of this future full theory of consciousness, which I’ve tried to optimize for compatibility by remaining agnostic about certain details.
One such detail is the state space: if we knew the mathematical space consciousness ‘live in’, we could zero in on symmetry metrics optimized for this... (read more)
Hi Steven, amazing comment, thank you. I’ll try to address your points in order.
0. I get your Mario example, and totally agree within that context; however, this conclusion may or may not transfer to brains, depending on how e.g. they implement utility functions. If the brain is a ‘harmonic computer’ then it may be doing e.g. gradient descent in such a way that the state of its utility function can be inferred from its large-scale structure.
1. On this question I’ll gracefully punt to lsusr‘s comment :) I endorse both his comment and framing. I’d also offer that dissonance is in an important sense ‘directional’ — if you have a symmetrical network and... (read more)
Neural Annealing is probably the most current actionable output of this line of research. The actionable point is that the brain sometimes enters high-energy states which are characterized by extreme malleability; basically old patterns ‘melt’ and new ones reform, and the majority of emotional updating happens during these states. Music, meditation, and psychedelics are fairly reliable artificial triggers for entering these states. When in such a malleable state, I suggest the following:
>Off the top of my head, I’d suggest that one of the worst things you could do after entering a high-energy brain state would be to fill your environment with distractions (e.g., watching TV, inane smalltalk, or other ‘low-quality patterns’). Likewise,... (read more)
Crossposted from opentheory.net
STV is Qualia Research Institute‘s candidate for a universal theory of valence, first proposed in Principia Qualia (2016). The following is a brief discussion of why existing theories are unsatisfying, what STV says, and key milestones so far.
I. Suffering is a puzzle
We know suffering when we feel it — but what is it? What would a satisfying answer for this even look like?
The psychological default model of suffering is “suffering is caused by not getting what you want.” This is the model that evolution has primed us toward. Empirically, it appears false (1)(2).
The Buddhist critique suggests that most suffering actually comes from holding this as our model of suffering. My... (read 1827 more words →)
The following is QRI's unified theory of music, meditation, psychedelics, depression, trauma, and emotional processing. Implications for how the brain implements Bayesian updating, and future directions for neuroscience. Crossposted from http://opentheory.net
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Context: follow-up to The Neuroscience of Meditation and A Future For Neuroscience; a unification of (1) the Entropic Brain & REBUS (Carhart-Harris et al. 2014; 2018; 2019), (2) the Free Energy Principle (Friston 2010), (3) Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves (Atasoy et al. 2016; 2017), and (4) QRI’s Symmetry Theory of Valence (Johnson 2016; Gomez Emilsson 2017).
0. Introduction
Why is neuroscience so hard?
Part of the problem is that the brain is complicated. But we’ve also mostly been doing it wrong, trying to explain the brain... (read 11968 more words →)
In defense of David’s point, consciousness research is currently pre-scientific, loosely akin to 1400’s alchemy. Fields become scientific as they settle on a core ontology and methodology for generating predictions from this ontology; consciousness research presently has neither.
Most current arguments about consciousness and uploading are thus ultimately arguments by intuition. Certainly an intuitive story can be told why uploading a brain and running it as a computer program would also simply transfer consciousness, but we can also tell stories where intuition pulls in the opposite direction, e.g. see Scott Aaronson’s piece here https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1951 ; my former colleague Andres also has a relevant paper arguing against computationalist approaches here https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opphil-2022-0225/html
Of the attempts to... (read more)