A number of reviewers have noticed the same problem IABIED: an assumption that lessons learnt in AGI cannot be applied to ASI -- that there is a "discontinuity or "phase change". It seems to the sceptics that if ASI is only slightly behind human capabilities , then good enough alignment...
My reason to believe that consciousness is fundamental rather than structural is that it seems to me more Occamian to believe that consciousness is eternal
A single non physical consciousness might be more Occamian than multiple ones, but it's less Occamian than a purely physical ontology.
ETA
The AI is already not aligned
For what value of "aligned"? The current state of play is thanking just about anything could be said to be aligned or misaligned, sending in exactly what the speaker means by the terms.
There is a lot of semantic confusion between people who use "alignment" in an engineering sense,meaning something that renders current AI safe in good enough way -- and the people who use it to mean a maths style solution , that applies perfectly to every case. A completely unaligned AI would be completely unco-operative , and therefore of no commercial use, so the prevailing level of alignment isn't zero.
You even acknowledge that there... (read 449 more words →)
Harris can also be critiqued from the direction of libertarian free will.
Half of the answer is to recognise that my unconscious mind is still mine -- following its prompting is not being under the control of someone else. The other half us understanding that the conscious mind can still exert control.
The basic mechanism is that the unconscious mind proposes various ideas and actions , which the conscious mind decides between, and finally puts the chosen one into action. (Since you only have one body, it is important to decide on a clear course of action, not half of one thing and half of another).
Sam Harris makes much of the fact that the... (read 609 more words →)
In figuring out what would constitute good conduct and productive discourse, it’s important to appreciate how bizarre the human practice of “discourse” looks in light of Aumann’s dangerous idea.
Within the rationalsphere , Aumanns Theorem is simplified into something like "reasonable people can't agree to differ". Yet they can, because the conditions on AAT are much more stringent than an informal understanding of what it is to be reasonable. So AAT lacks real world applicability..
There is a further problem that prior beliefs can include beliefs about epistemology, about what constitutes evidence.
Controversies that are sufficiently deep, or which cut across cultural boundaries run into a problem where, not only do parties disagree about... (read 476 more words →)
What is the butterfly effect mechanism?
If everything is a coherent superposition evolving according to the Schrödinger equation, there is very little cancellation or unwinding of "branches" ..But also no real branching, because superposed states continued to interact.
Decoherence, in the other hand, isn't guaranteed to leave you with more than one branch.
Indeterministic is a loaded word.
In what way? I would have thought "random" is more loaded.
Certainly we don’t believe our actions to be random,
We see them as (up to a point) responsible and controlled, irrespective of fundamental determinism.
but I maintain that the question before compatibilists/semicompatibilists (which I hoped this post would address but IMO doesn’t) is why seeing free will as a human construct is meaningful.
I didn't say free will was a construct. I suggested moral responsibility was.
Of course that is meaningful -- that is a rather low bar -- the question is whether it is sufficient.
... (read more)So if I create an AI that steals money, I am the greater jerk but the AI
A number of reviewers have noticed the same problem IABIED: an assumption that lessons learnt in AGI cannot be applied to ASI -- that there is a "discontinuity or "phase change".
It seems to the sceptics that if ASI is only slightly behind human capabilities , then good enough alignment is good enough; and if ASI is developed gradually , alignment can be tweaked as you go along. So, only a sudden leap to much more than human ASI constitutes a problem.
Yet Y&S claim that AIs cannot be aligned, even under the assumption of gradualism. The only explanation so far is Eliezer's "Dragon story" ... but I find it makes the same... (read 813 more words →)
"it" isn't a single theory.
The argument that Everettian MW is favoured by Solomonoff induction, is flawed.
If the program running the SWE outputs information about all worlds on a single output tape, they are going to have to be concatenated or interleaved somehow. Which means that to make use of the information, you gave to identify the subset of bits relating to your world. That's extra complexity which isn't accounted for because it's being done by hand, as it were..
By far the best definition I’ve ever heard of the supernatural is Richard Carrier’s: A “supernatural” explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities.
Physicalism, materialism, empiricism, and reductionism are clearly similar ideas, but not identical. Carrier's criterion captures something about a supernatural ontology, but nothing about supernatural epistemology. Surely the central claim of natural epistemology is that you have to look...you can't rely on faith , or clear ideas implanted in our minds by God.
it seems that we have very good grounds for excluding supernatural explanations a priori
But making reductionism aprioristic arguably makes it less scientific...at least, what you gain in scientific ontology, you... (read 925 more words →)
"– it’s not as though epistemic rationality can be traded off for gains in instrumental rationality. Only apparently, and to think one should do this is a trap."
Has this been proven, anywhere?
The Deutsch-Yudkowsky argument for the Many Worlds Interpretation states that you can take the core of Quantum Mechanics -- the Schrödinger wave equation, and the projection postulate -- remove the projection postulate (also known as collapse and reduction ), and end with a simpler theory that is still adequate to explain observation. The idea is that entanglement can replace collapse: a scientist observing a superposed state becomes becomes entangled with it, an effectively splits into two, each having made a definite observation.
Moreover Yudkowsky, following David Deutsch, holds the many worlds interpretation to be obviously correct, in contrast to the majority of philosophers and physicists, who regard the problem of interpreting QM as... (read 1257 more words →)
"Politics is the mind-killer" is a special case of "tribalism is the mind killer".
- It’s impossible to reach that world from ours, it’s entirely causally disconnected, and
- That world “really exists
That's exactly what decoherent many worlds asserts!
@Saul Schleimer
Except in the view of society, the law etc. You wake up with the same name, social security number, property, debts etc. The fact there is a lot of tension between our intuitions about identity , and what a physically based theory can offer is why there is as I'd born if identity.
@MarkelKori
Because... (read more)