tananan

I generally work on internal-use Python codebases. I would much rather do some basic validation and fail loudly if anything I didn’t account for happens.

One of the issues I run into is that agents are predisposed to write extremely defensive, odd-case-handling code, and that makes me recoil when I have to look into it: the SNR ratio is very low. You get a spaghetti that is unlikely to crash, but really hard to extract the gist of. And finding more global bugs can be difficult because what should be structural impossibilities can be coerced into silent skips.

The article made me think that maybe what I’d like is a language where validation doesn’t triple the lines of code you have to write.

If OP said the important thing is to be appropriately generous with your blamelessly earned wealth as you safeguard it against future perils, I would not have replied.

A society where the only people with stability are those who parasitize on a increasingly emaciated wealth-producing population surely doesn't seem like a stable society, nor one that would be pleasant to live in.

There's no true stability in the world, but if the only option for "safety" we see is to be one of the few who snatch self-perpetuating generational wealth, aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the very system off of which we desire to subsist on?

Thanks for sharing. It is especially interesting to hear the factors that contributed to the decline of fish sauce use in the west.

One thing I am “stealing” from SEA is fish sauce in scrambled eggs. Feels almost like a cheat code.

Forgive me if I ramble for too long. I've been seeing a lot of comments in this vein and the thoughts have accumulated.

Tacit in your question is the notion that the inquiries that are important are those that can result in predictive models of phenomena encountered in the world — hence feelings, intentions & perceptions turn into a shorthand for reported accounts of the same — and that given enough reports (data), we could build a dictionary that maps a bundle of reports to a(n equivalence class) of physical system(s).

But when we speak of having feelings, or acting on intentions, most often we are not using these as stand-ins for our failure to pin down the current state of our physical system to another. If I am exposed to fire, I want to get away — I am unconcerned with how well I could translate my report of the pain to a patterns of neural activations. The reality of pain for me is unaffected by the fidelity of my "experience report dictionary". And it is there whether it's a brush fire or a neuralink streaming fire bits to my cortex.

If you decide that primacy ought to always be given to things as they can be modeled, you can choose to elevate the "experience report dictionary" and make the reality of experience a second-class citizen. Then you end up with an eliminativist ontology where indeed, we can rightly be called a mechanism.

But that is a "world-making" decision, a value judgement: "this is how things should be seen". It might be sponsored by our recent history, where we got high on the fruits of applied scientific modelling, nursed by the education which taught us that being a good engineer can have us continue in line with that, and pushed on us by impoverished modern eschatologies promising eternal youth, experience machines and what-not at this point. And it might seem preferable or more dependable than whatever equally impoverished, inhumane eschatologies we may have been presented with before.

It doesn't mean there isn't a whole world of places where we can go instead. But in general, we don't change our value judgements until the current one seems inadequate for some reason.

If we created a molecule by molecule synthesis of a human being, you'd agree it is conscious and the same thing as a human created via typical reproduction, right?

Sure.

If the question is what is there about us that's not covered by the body, we can mention things like: feelings, intentions, perceptions, acts of consciousness.

Or however else you want to divide up things that have to do with the mind.

Eliminativists/illusionists may completely deny such things. The rest can fall into many camps, some of them religious.

It's not like there are any surprising new parts. It's about how one chooses to interpret/conceive those we are familiar with.

How are we machines?

I don’t hold to that view. If I did, I might have that problem.

Which leads me to conclude that it wouldn't necessarily matter whether an AI like SkyNet has subjective awareness or not. What matters is what kind of long-term plans it could pull off and how much it could reshape the world.

Absolutely. Thanks for the references :)

In discussions like this, we're always going to bottom out at certain assumptions we bring with us, so I agree.

One reason I like bringing up examples like this (the xkcd in sister reply is also good) is that it makes really visible what our assumptions are. The scales are big both in space and time in order to emphasize what weight is given to functional equivalence.

I feel pretty confident most people wouldn't presume that doing a bunch of math by hand on paper can create glacial ephiphenomenal experiences (though I like the term).

Another thing that's interesting to me is that the converse assumption, i.e. one with a strong allegiance to functionalism, ends up feeling far more idealistic than you might expect. A box of gas, left on its own for long enough, will engage in a pattern of collisions that in a certain interpretative framework correspond to an LLM forward pass. In another, it can be a game of minesweeper.

The individual particles of course, couldn't care less whether you see them as part of one or the other. Yet your ability to see them in light of the first one is perhaps enough for the lights to truly turn on, if transiently, in some mind somewhere.

Well, then we both assume very different views on the matter, and that’s fine.

When we speak of the “despair vectors”, we speak of patterns in the algorithm we can tweak that correspond to output that we recognize as despairing language.

You could implement the forward pass of an LLM with pen & paper given enough people and enough time, and collate the results into the same generated text that a GPU cluster would produce. You could then ask the humans to modulate the despair vector during their calculations, and collate the results into more or less despairing variants of the text.

I trust none of us would presume that the decentralized labor of pen & paper calculations somehow instantiated a “psychology” in the sense of a mind experiencing various levels of despair — such as might be needed to consider something a sentient being who might experience pleasure and pain.

However, to your point, I do think that there is an ethics to working with agents, in the same sense that there is an ethics of how you should hold yourself in general. You don’t want to — in a burst of anger — throw your hammer because you cannot figure out how to put together a piece of furniture. It reinforces unpleasant, negative patterns in yourself, doesn’t lead to your goal (a nice piece of furniture), doesn’t look good to others (or you, once you’ve cooled off), and might actually cause physical damage in the process.

With agents, it’s much easier to break into demeaning, cruel speech, perhaps exactly because you might feel justified they’re not landing on anyone’s ears. But you still reinforce patterns that you wouldn’t want to see in yourself and others, and quite possibly might leak into your words aimed at ears who might actually suffer for it. In that sense, it’s not that different from fantasizing about being cruel to imaginary interlocutors.

Fortunately, as you mention in your last sentence, stress is introspectable.

How exactly stress corresponds to biomarkers doesn’t matter if your desire is to lower it.

The issue is that many of us don’t pay attention to how we keep our body & mind throughout the day, or do so on a very superficial level. So strain on the body can accumulate for a long time.

“Stress management” is a lifetime skill. It doesn’t come in bulletpoints, it’s as broad as “living happily”.

Edit: That said, this can make the advice “be less stressed” a bit vacuous.

But people do get scared when random health issues flare up and become more conscious of how they deal with stress in life.

So it’s not bad to keep reminding people either :)

It would be really cool if it could highlight the parts of the speech that gave you away your accent. It guesses mine correctly most of the time (though not the first time I tried), but also lets me know my accent is pretty light.

What strikes me as interesting about the idea that there is a class of computations that, however implemented, would result in consciousness, is that is is in some way really idealistic.

There's no unique way to implement a computation, and there's no single way to interpret what computation is even happening in a given system. The notion of what some physical system is computing always requires an interpretation on part of the observer of said system.

You could implement a simulation of the human body on common x86-64 hardware, water pistons, or a fleet of spaceships exchanging sticky notes between colonies in different parts of the galaxy.

None of these scenarios physically resemble each other, yet a human can draw a functional equivalence by interpreting them in a particular way. If consciousness is a result of functional equivalence to some known conscious standard (i.e. alive human being), then there is nothing materially grounding it, other than the possibility of being interpreted in a particular way. Random events in nature, without any human intercession, could be construed as a veritable moment of understanding French or feeling heartbreak, on the basis of being able to draw an equivalence to a computation surmised from a conscious standard.

When I think along these lines, it easy to sympathize with the criticism of functionalism a la Chinese Room.

I like this post.

What I find a practical, related advice is “If you want to get good at something, you have to make yourself glad that you’re doing it.”

This involves reminding yourself why it is that you want to get better at it, perceiving the process of learning as an interesting challenge, and in general generating interest.

There is a lot of creativity in how you actually do this. It is a skill in itself, and a very useful one, especially for skills where you find yourself lacking patience and motivation.

That ‘glorious hope’ was quickly dashed, however. In Anaxagoras’s account, it seemed to Socrates, Mind had no agency other than initially setting things in motion, and no morality. ... For this reason, Socrates tells us plainly, he completely lost interest in the heavens, in science, and in physical reality (ta onta, ‘the things that are’).

And so (as I’ve argued in more detail elsewhere) the first global franchise [Christian faith] was set up on an anti-science basis.

Supposedly, Socrates wasn't disenchanted with the disenchantment because he thought it was nonsense, but because it didn't address existential/moral issues that he found pertinent.

I'm not sure this drive is best characterized as anti-science. There's a difference between denying scientific research as today understood and denying a inherently materialistic worldview as one's overarching context of life. The latter is often married to science, but it doesn't have to be.

No shortage of science was and is done by deeply religious individuals. And indeed religions co-opted science in various ways. And we had materialist* views pretty far back (clearly in both Greece and India).

What's changed recently IMO, is that at those ancient times, a materialistic worldview was a sort of "Yeah, and?" sort of deal, since it offered little in terms of giving a direction to the life of an individual. Nowadays, there is at least a technological eschatology, with people expecting or looking forward to luxuries, longevity, and other such things as have usually been the promises of religions. Funnily enough, insofar as this eschatology contains a place for human agency, its mostly been taken up by organizations and corporations few would see as anything but morally corrupt. It's a weird eschatology where the idea is that if you pump enough juice in the greed machine, at some point a phase transition occurs and all of it can be converted in stable welfare for all.

You don't write something like this without being enchanted thoroughly by the language.

There actually is a “The Nag’s Head” in the Balkans - it’s in Montenegro

You are reading into something that isn't there. The study doesn't have to do with music making you more capable of socializing.

The hypothesis being tested is that in the absence of social interaction, people will turn to surrogates in order to make up for the perceived lack. Specifically, they test if music can be such a surrogate. They do some surveys and a kind of silly experiment to provide evidence that yes- it can.

The reason it is rightly called pointless is that it brings nothing actionable to the table.

You cannot extract advice from showing evidence for a common-sense observation: If you feel a certain lack, activities you find pleasurable can diminish that lack.

And look at the experimental setup: They make people play an online game with others where certain people are excluded from playing. It turns out that people who are hyped from listening to their favorite song found this less jarring, hence showing that music can be a "social buffer", i.e. make up for a perceived social exclusion.

Let everyone individually conclude how insightful this experiment is.

EDIT: Misunderstood the nature of the "Cyberball" experiment, fixed

Study finds you enjoy doing things you like. If there's something you particularly like, you seem to enjoy it even more.

If you are missing on some form of pleasure in your life, substituting it for another pleasure can help alleviate the pain.

Woah.

Ime it's not just being blindsided but also simply preferring to do research in other areas.

The whole thing with Chalmer's hard problem is pointing out that reduction doesn't get you very far. But here he formulates a reductive panpsychist proposal (though only "in theory"). What part this piece plays within his broader thought - I am not sure.

Nonetheless, it is far from compelling even as a "weak-problem" hypothesis and is an abstract angels-on-hairpin musing that truly puts experience outside of the bounds of investigation. Because, after all, if experience is an empty epiphenomenon which exists for any, anyhow-delineated physical system out there, where does that get us? We've made an assumption we cannot prod scientifically, yet it hides behind the scientific veneer of reductivism.

This kind of panpsychistic talk to me ends up feeling more closer to a reductive materialism than what I would firstly associate Chalmers with ("hey, did you forget you can experience stuff?"), which is probably just my ignorance with his work.

Because yes, you acknowledge "experience", but you make it a function of a physical state described in such and such a way. In the same way that a set of particles at points A, B, C, .. correspond to such and such a (e.g. electric) field strength at point Z, we now imagine it could correspond also to such and such an experience.

It's just barely "experience" on its own terms. and elicits a kind of epiphenomenalism and powerlesness. The thermostat*, after all, doesn't choose anything nor does it profess to have any agency. So agency ought to end up some kind of ephiphenomenal "observable" of a system.

But besides being deflationary in this distasteful way, what bothers me with pictures like this is that they make use of entirely subject-made divisions between objects and their environments, and presume that they might correspond to experiences because - why not? Why not thing of the bottom and upper half of thermostat as corresponding to two fields of experience? Or the quarters, sixtheents, and so on until we get to individual atoms.

The thermostat doesn't "care" if I think of it as the wax and glass separately, or as a single object containing both. But we do have a unified field of experience, and it doesn't matter how another person "cuts us up" in their mind, whether it is as atoms interacting, organs behaving in unison, or just as a "body".

It seems silly to say that between me and Bob having our separate experiences, there is an experience corresponding to "me and Bob", supposedly free-floating somewhere just by virtue of the two of us being cognizable as a physical system.

It turns "experience" and that infamous "qualia" from something that's the most direct and obvious to a weird phantom as the output of a presumed equation which maps some description of a physical state to an "experience".

No wonder you'll find people who'll retort that they don't experience things or that their consciousness is illusory - they have these weird detached notions of experiences to fight against.

* I imagined a thermometer throughout reading this piece, hence the mention of wax and such. It doesn't really change the point so I'm leaving it.

Too much! hope it's not marketed like that.

A pilgrimage whose completion you are rewarded for by an ultra rare pasta, love it.

Is this controversial in some way?

It’s not “controversial”, it’s just not a given that the universe is to be thought a deterministic machine. Not to everyone, at least.

Unless you believe in determinism and an overseeing god

Or perhaps, determinism and mechanistic materialism - which in STEM-adjacent circles has a relatively prevalent adherence.

Worldviews which strip a human being of agency in the sense you invoke crop up quite a lot today in such spaces. If you start of adopting a view like this, you have a deflationary sword which can cut down most any notion that's not mechanistic in terms of mechanistic parts. "Meaning? Well that's just an emergent phenomenon of the influence of such and such causal factors in the unrolling of a deterministic physical system."

Similar for reasoning, etc.

Now obviously large swathes of people don't really subscribe to this - but it is prevalent and ties in well with utopian progress stories. If something is amenable to mechanistic dissection, possibly it's amenable to mechanistic control. And that's what our education is really good at teaching us. So such stories end up having intoxicating "hype" effects and drive fundraising, and so we get where we are.

For one, I wish people were just excited about making computers do things they couldn't do before, without needing to dress it up as something more than it is. "This model can prove a set of theorems in this format with such and such limits and efficiency"

Many people probably do this already, somewhat intuitively. If you look around, descriptions of such problems and similar advice is found in many contemplative traditions. I've heard an sermon recently that was named something like "pay no mind to the evil thoughts". Now in the tradition of that priest (mainstream/Orthodox Christianity) they overly attribute some things to demons, but you'll find similar advice elsewhere without that baggage.

It is nice to see it in secular medicine as well, though.

Sometimes you just have to weather the storm. I don’t think it makes sense to speak of therapies in such times.