Ok, thanks for helping me understand. Hmm. I hypothesize the most fundamental part of why I disagree with them is basically what Eliezer talked about here as “explaining” vs.”explaining away”. I think they’re looking for an explanation, i.e. a thing in the world whose various properties match the properties of consciousness and qualia as they seem to us. I’m much more expecting that there is no thing in the world meeting those criteria. Rather I think that this is a case where our perceptions are not neutrally reporting on things in the world, and thus where “the way things seem to us” is different than the way things are.
Or maybe I just narrowly disagree with QRI’s ideas about rhythms and harmony and so on. Not sure. Whenever I try to read QRI stuff it just kinda strikes me as totally off-base, so I haven’t spent much time with it, beyond skimming a couple articles and watching a talk on Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves on YouTube a few months ago. I’m happy to have your help here :-)
As for valence, yes I think that valence is in an input to the neocortex subsystem (just as vision is an input), although it’s really the neocortex subsystem observing the activity of other parts of the brain, and incidentally those other parts of the brain also depend in part on what the neocortex is doing and has been doing.
PrincipiaQualia is definitely the thing to read if you want to engage with QRI. It reviews the science and explains the core theory that the research is structured around. I’m not sure if you want to engage with it—I begin from the strong intuition that qualia is real, and so I’m delighted that someone is working on it. My impression is that it makes an excellent case, but my judgment is severely limited since I don’t know the literature. Either way, it doesn’t have a lot of overlap with what you’re working on.
Ok, thanks for helping me understand. Hmm. I hypothesize the most fundamental part of why I disagree with them is basically what Eliezer talked about here as “explaining” vs.”explaining away”. I think they’re looking for an explanation, i.e. a thing in the world whose various properties match the properties of consciousness and qualia as they seem to us. I’m much more expecting that there is no thing in the world meeting those criteria. Rather I think that this is a case where our perceptions are not neutrally reporting on things in the world, and thus where “the way things seem to us” is different than the way things are.
Or maybe I just narrowly disagree with QRI’s ideas about rhythms and harmony and so on. Not sure. Whenever I try to read QRI stuff it just kinda strikes me as totally off-base, so I haven’t spent much time with it, beyond skimming a couple articles and watching a talk on Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves on YouTube a few months ago. I’m happy to have your help here :-)
As for valence, yes I think that valence is in an input to the neocortex subsystem (just as vision is an input), although it’s really the neocortex subsystem observing the activity of other parts of the brain, and incidentally those other parts of the brain also depend in part on what the neocortex is doing and has been doing.
PrincipiaQualia is definitely the thing to read if you want to engage with QRI. It reviews the science and explains the core theory that the research is structured around. I’m not sure if you want to engage with it—I begin from the strong intuition that qualia is real, and so I’m delighted that someone is working on it. My impression is that it makes an excellent case, but my judgment is severely limited since I don’t know the literature. Either way, it doesn’t have a lot of overlap with what you’re working on.
There’s also an AI alignment podcast episode.