If you look at the statistics, 50-80% of people globally believe in something persisting after death.
The eliminativism position is a hard to argue because 50%-80% of people are not going to be able to really engage with the argument from the start.
An alcohol blackout though is where you can see how confused our thinking is on this subject. What we call "consciousness" is deeply linked to episodic memory.
We wouldn't say someone who is blacked out on alcohol is "unconscious".
What is the "subjective experience" of being blacked out?
The "proof" of subjective experience only exists in memory.
There still was an embodied person in the world having the experience drunk that they don't remember.
That is why I think it is just ridiculous to talk about the LLM having "consciousness" because we really just mean an embodied person in the world.
It is also why the doomer argument is so ridiculous. It is a type of superstition that is confusing a real danger. We don't need to "align" the nuclear reactor so it doesn't get angry and meltdown. It is just a machine that we need to make sure doesn't malfunction in a way we don't want it to.
The main problem is if you accept we really just mean an embodied person in the world, you have to accept that there is by definition no possibility of subjective experience after death. It seems like we are probably the descendants of delusional primates who simply could not accept this because the idea is so stymieing.
> It is also why the doomer argument is so ridiculous. It is a type of superstition that is confusing a real danger. We don't need to "align" the nuclear reactor so it doesn't get angry and meltdown. It is just a machine that we need to make sure doesn't malfunction in a way we don't want it to.
It's not ridiculous, unless you misinterpret it like you did here, and link it to consciousness.
Doomer argument is just that optimizers gonna optimize, and our own intelligence is just an optimization algorithm too, albeit highly general one -- and once we're building optimizers with comparative generality, we're facing possibility of one that out-thinks us and we can't control it anymore. The "alignment problem" is about how to ensure such sufficiently-smart optimizers end up optimizing for the same things we are, because any significant deviation here ends up in doom for us.
Consciousness never even enters the picture here. And it's not a given than it should.
(Incidentally, while hard sci-fi and not a paper, but also entirely unrelated to AI X-risk crowd, the books Blindsight and Echopraxia sketch a pretty convincing argument that consciousness may be an evolutionary disadvantage and it's not only not necessary, but may be holding us back.)
> Doomer argument is just that optimizers gonna optimize
Right. I don't quite subscribe to the strong doomer argument, but take water:
Water flows downhill. It's not conscious. I don't think it's anthropomorphism to say that water "seeks" the lowest point on the landscape. Often that seeking process is mostly harmless, sometimes it's devastating, and that's where you want levees and dams.
Now expand the same mathematical intuition out to other lowest-point-seekers in a high dimensional space. You don't even need to postulate a mind per se to see how optimizers can cause quite some mischief.
Meanwhile, Kids and Kittens are good examples of this behavior at the intelligent end of the spectrum: Given time, they'll find a way to get through any gap. They don't need to be as smart as the adults, the adults just need to turn their back for one minute too many. O:-)
> Kids and Kittens are good examples of this behavior at the intelligent end of the spectrum: Given time, they'll find a way to get through any gap. They don't need to be as smart as the adults, the adults just need to turn their back for one minute too many. O:-)
As a parent of kids currently aged ~3 thru 7, I concur. Each age has its own ways, but what's worse, they can also coordinate and get you from an angle you wouldn't thought possible, playing your own beliefs about them against you.
The goal is to win the next election but I think the populace is to blame for this more than anything.
The populace is who is too interested in winning politics as a sport that the politicians have really no choice other than to focus entirely on winning the next election.
If the voters treat politics as a constant form of sports entertainment, constantly checking the latest news and events, then voters are actually the fundamental problem as to why the politicians can not do anything in terms of long term planning.
I always hear this accusation of people treating politics like sports, but what do you want? It's a FPTP system, which favors entrenching two parties. In order to maintain the backing (funding, importantly) of one of those two parties, candidates can't fall too far out of line. If you can't get your outsider preferred candidate above 50%, considering there is also likely another main-party candidate with significant policy overlap, you get nothing.
If you want to reduce the spectacle, replace FPTP with a better system that eliminates the need for primaries, and get rid of Citizens United. Good luck.
The one that seems to be working is to treat the system as two-round like the French presidential elections and do the work in the primaries. Worked for Mamdani.
It is essentially a (weird-ass) two-round system when it comes to the presidency (and many lower offices). Party primaries exist, they overwhelmingly gave one of the nominations to a dumpster.
IMO, a runoff or single round instant-runoff wouldn't solve much. Like the sibling says, it's already sort of like that. The way they eliminate candidates still forces/incentivizes people to make choices against their actual preferences. Ideally, you could vote exactly in line with your preferences regardless of who you think has the best chance of winning and not risk making things being worse than they would have been if you "lied." I've heard many times during primaries things like "I like candidate A a lot more, but I don't think they can win the general, so I voted for candidate B". This is also an issue with approval voting, which many people seem to have a very favorable opinion of. If there is an election between <good candidate>, <bad candidate> and <total disaster shitshow candidate>, and you think there's a chance the top two might be Bad and Disaster, do you approve of bad? There's no way for you to indicate that you actually don't like Bad, but are just hoping to prevent the worst.
I think there's risk in not doing it right the first time, if you were ever to get a chance to change it.
Yeah, preference-based voting is better, but you have to play the hand you're dealt in the meantime. Even dealing with gerrymandering seems to be beyond feasible politics.
FPTP isn't wonderful but for those of us looking on for outside the tolerance of gerrymander, deliberate disenfranchisement of some voters and letting corporations spend unlimited amounts of money on getting political outcomes ranks higher. FPTP is merely a bad choice. The others look more like a country deliberately eschewing democracy for something else.
It doesn't seem like there is evidence that LLMs have counterfactual reasoning in the causal graph sense.
It is hard to see how something can have skepticism without counterfactual reasoning.
The part about disbelief I don't really understand. It seems like the same semi-brute force process that solved novel math theory would have exactly this problem of not "knowing" "it" is in a sandbox or not.
The stranger part is that no human is being held accountable for these hacks.
As if a person using an agent swarm to start a business to make money, hacks a bank, drains an account and then blames the software for "misalignment" about what it means to "make money".
Searle's thought experiment just kicks the can down the road.
Since the room as a whole produces fluent Chinese it becomes a language philosophy debate about where meaning comes from. Brandom's inferentialism gets into this more than any normal person would ever care to read about.
LLMs really show the absurdity of the Chinese Room rulebook.
The whole thought experiment should really be left to history at this point.
Searle’s social ontology is much more interesting also but this outdated thought experiment completely overshadows his more interesting stuff.
This is the same social process as to why science tends to progress one funeral at a time.
So many people have their financial and self worth tied to their expertise in phlogiston theory that the truth is second to advancing the field of phlogiston theory.
From that perspective it is hard to think of something worse than a machine that disproves phlogiston theory.
Great stuff. I am really interested in reading some of the books mentioned.
Self involved political gossip that leads to a culture of policing deviant behavior is my worry. It is just hard for me to not see how this all doesn't create a huge bull market in law enforcement. More "crimes" from people having more leisure time, more "crimes" from more surveillance. Most of all though more "crimes" because a culture of policing deviant behavior will start to find more and more behavior as "deviant".
At least the salon had the pretense of high art and philosophy. Our salons would have the pretense of political gossip and the philosophy would be about classifications of deviant behavior.
That is basically all tasks and humans are terrible at these kind of decisions.
I only read about jev an hour ago and this is a real "oh fuck" moment in terms of white collar jobs to me.
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