I would be surprised if this is an assumption that Eliezer is actually making. My understanding, and my interpretation of his, is that consciousness doesn’t work because it’s made of quarks and leptons, but you can make a consciousness using nothing but quarks and leptons, and the consciousness won’t be a result of anything else entering in on some other level.
If you want to build a consciousness in our universe, quarks and leptons are the building blocks you’ve got.
that consciousness doesn’t work because it’s made of quarks and leptons, but you can make a consciousness using nothing but quarks and leptons, and the consciousness won’t be a result of anything else entering in on some other level.
This is quite true, but accidental and so irrelevant. Indeed, the intermediate levels between consciousness and quarks can vary wildly: it can be built on neurons or, potentially, on silicon gates. Worse yet, if you get a sandboxed emulated mind, the lowest level they have access to is whatever the host system decides to provide. Such a sandboxed EY would argue that everything is reducible to the API calls, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter.
I don’t think he actually holds the position you’re attributing to him. I don’t know what probability he assigns to the possibility that our universe is a simulation, but I’m confident that he does not believe that as a matter of logical necessity quarks and leptons are the only things out of which one could build a consciousness, just that in our universe, these are the things that there are to build consciousnesses out of.
Hmm, I suppose his position is not that everything is reducible to quarks and leptons, but that everything is reducible to something basic, in a sense that there are no magical “qualia” preventing one from building consciousness from whatever building blocks are available. This is certainly quite reasonable, and all the currently available evidence points that way.
I would be surprised if this is an assumption that Eliezer is actually making. My understanding, and my interpretation of his, is that consciousness doesn’t work because it’s made of quarks and leptons, but you can make a consciousness using nothing but quarks and leptons, and the consciousness won’t be a result of anything else entering in on some other level.
If you want to build a consciousness in our universe, quarks and leptons are the building blocks you’ve got.
This is quite true, but accidental and so irrelevant. Indeed, the intermediate levels between consciousness and quarks can vary wildly: it can be built on neurons or, potentially, on silicon gates. Worse yet, if you get a sandboxed emulated mind, the lowest level they have access to is whatever the host system decides to provide. Such a sandboxed EY would argue that everything is reducible to the API calls, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter.
I don’t think he actually holds the position you’re attributing to him. I don’t know what probability he assigns to the possibility that our universe is a simulation, but I’m confident that he does not believe that as a matter of logical necessity quarks and leptons are the only things out of which one could build a consciousness, just that in our universe, these are the things that there are to build consciousnesses out of.
Hmm, I suppose his position is not that everything is reducible to quarks and leptons, but that everything is reducible to something basic, in a sense that there are no magical “qualia” preventing one from building consciousness from whatever building blocks are available. This is certainly quite reasonable, and all the currently available evidence points that way.