I don't think any of the claims you just listed are actually true. I guess we'll see.
I don't see any indication of AGI so it does not really worry me at all.
Nobody saw any indication of the atomic bomb before it was created. In hindsight would it have been rational to worry?
Your claims about the about the compute and data needed and alleged limits remind me of the fact that Heisenberg actually thought there was no reason to worry because he had miscalculated the amount of U-235 that would be needed. It seems humans are doomed to continue repeating this mistake and underestimating the severity of catastrophic long tails.
In this context for me, an intelligent agent is able to understand common language and act accordingly, e.g. if a question is posed it can provide a truthful answer
Humans regularly fail at such tasks but I suspect you would still consider humans generally intelligent.
In any case, it seems very plausible that whatever decision procedure is behind more general forms of inference, it will very likely fall to the inexorable march of progress we've seen thus far.
If it does, the effectiveness of our compute will potentially increase exponentially almost overn...
Chess playing is similar story, we thought that you have to be intelligent, but we found a heuristic to do that really well.
You keep distinguishing "intelligence" from "heuristics", but no one to my knowledge has demonstrated that human intelligence is not itself some set of heuristics. Heuristics are exactly what you'd expect from evolution after all.
So your argument then reduces to a god of the gaps, where we keep discovering some heuristics for an ability that we previously ascribed to intelligence, and the set of capabilities left to "real intelligence...
From prior research, I understood the main problem of nuclear power plant cost to be constant site-specific design adjustments leading to constant cost and schedule overruns. This means there is no standard plant design or construction, each installation is unique with its own quirks, its own parts, its own customizations and so nothing is fungible and training is barely transferrable.
This was the main economic promise behind small modular reactors: small, standard reactors modules that can be assembled at a factory and shipped to a site using regular tran...
I'm not sure in what way it's unjustified for me to have an intuition that qualia are different from physical structures
It's unjustified in the same way that vilalism was an unjustified explanation of life: it's purely a product of our ignorance. Our perception of subjective experience/first-hand knowledge is no more proof of accuracy than our perception that water breaks pencils.
Intuition pumps supporting the accuracy of said perception either beg the question or multiply entities unnecessarily (as detailed below).
...Nothing you said indicates that p-zo
Epiphenomenalists, like physicalists, believe that sensory data causes the neurophysical responses in the brain which we identify with knowledge. They disagree with physicalists because they say that our subjective qualia are epiphenomenal shadows of those neurophysical responses, rather than being identical to them. There is no real world example that would prove or disprove this theory because it is a philosophical dispute. One of the main arguments for it is, well, the zombie argument.
Which seems to suggest that epiphenominalism either begs the quest...
Epiphenomenalists do not deny that we have first-hand experience of subjectivity; they deny that those experiences are causally responsible for our statements about consciousness.
Since this is the crux of the matter, I won't bother debating the semantics of most of the other disagreements in the interest of time.
As for whether subjectivity is causally efficacious, all knowledge would seem to derive from some set of observations. Even possibly fictitious concepts, like unicorns and abstract mathematics, are generalizations or permutations of concepts tha...
I would hope not. 3 is entirely conceivable if we grant 2, so 4 is unsupported
It's not, and I'm surprised you find this contentious. 3 doesn't follow from 2, it follows from a contradiction between 1+2.
1 states that consciousness has no effect upon matter, and yet it's clear from observation that the concept of subjectivity only follows if consciousness can affect matter, ie. we only have knowledge of subjectivity because we observe it first-hand. P-zombies do not have first-hand knowledge of subjectivity as specified in 2.
If there were another way to i...
This was longer than it needed to be
Indeed. The condensed argument against p-zombies:
This is an interesting discussion, but this claim struck me as odd:
If something exists, it can be counted (or given a cardinality, if it is infinite).
This seems like an open philosophical question. Clearly you are a finitist of some sort, but as far as I know it hasn't been empirically verified that real numbers don't exist. Certainly continuous functions are widely employed in physics, but whether all of physics can be cast into a finitist framework is an open question last I checked.
So your assertion above doesn't seem firmly justified, as uncountab...
"Copy" implies having more than 1 object : The Copy and the Original at the same point of time, but not space.
Why preference space over time? Time is just another dimension after all. buybuydandavis's definition of "copy" seems to avoiding preference for a particular dimension, and so seems more general.
It is not scientific induction, since you can't measure elegance quantitatively.
You can formally via Kolmogorov complexity.
there is another argument speaking for many-worlds (indeed, even for all possible worlds - which raises new interesting questions of what is possible of course - certainly not everything that is imaginable): that to specify one universe with many random events requires lots of information, while if everything exists the information content is zero - which fits nicely with ex nihilo nihil fit
Now THAT's an interesting argument for MWI. It's not a final nail in the coffin for de Broglie-Bohm, but the naturalness of this property is certainly compelling.
maybe there will be some good discrete model but so far the Plank length is not a straightforward discrete unit, not like cell in game of life.
't Hooft has been quite successful in defining QM in terms of discrete cellular automata, taking "successful" to mean that he has reproduced an impressive amount of quantum theory from such a humble foundation.
...More interesting still is why reals have been so useful (and not just reals, but also complex numbers, vectors, tensors, etc. which you can build out of reals but which are algebraic objects in
(simplicity of the map) alone is sufficient to judge a theory- you also need to take into account the theory's parsimony (simplicity of the territory).
Solomonoff Induction gauges a theory's parsimony via Kolmogorov complexity, which is a formalization of Occam's razor. It's not a naive measurement of simplicity.
s/compliment/complement.