a “logically possible” but fantastic being â a descendent of Ned Block’s Giant Lookup Table fantasy...
First, I haven’t seen how this figures into an argument, and I see that Eliezer has already taken this in another direction, but...
What immediately occurs to me is that there’s a big risk of a faulty intuition pump here. He’s describing, I assume, a lookup table large enough to describe your response to every distinguishable sensory input you could conceivably experience during your life. The number of entries is unimaginable. But I suspect he’s picturing and inviting us to picture a much more mundane, manageable LUT.
I can almost hear the Chinese Room Fallacy already. “You can’t say that a LUT is conscious, it’s just a matrix”. Like ”...just some cards and some rules” or ”...just transistors”. That intuition works in a common-sense way when the thing is tiny, but we just said it wasn’t.
And let’s not slight other factors that make the thing either very big and hairy or very, very, very big.
To work as advertised, it needs some sense of history. Perhaps every instant in our maybe-zombie’s history has its own corresponding dimension in the table, or perhaps some field(s) of the table’s output at each instant is an additional input at the next instant, representing one’s entire mental state. Either way, it’s gotta be huge enough to represent every distinguishable history.
The input and output formats also correspond to enormous objects capable of fully describing all the sensory input we can perceive in a short time, all the actions we can take in a short time (including habitual, autonomic, everything), and every aspect of our mental state.
This ain’t your daddy’s 16 x 32 array of unsigned ints.
First, I haven’t seen how this figures into an argument, and I see that Eliezer has already taken this in another direction, but...
What immediately occurs to me is that there’s a big risk of a faulty intuition pump here. He’s describing, I assume, a lookup table large enough to describe your response to every distinguishable sensory input you could conceivably experience during your life. The number of entries is unimaginable. But I suspect he’s picturing and inviting us to picture a much more mundane, manageable LUT.
I can almost hear the Chinese Room Fallacy already. “You can’t say that a LUT is conscious, it’s just a matrix”. Like ”...just some cards and some rules” or ”...just transistors”. That intuition works in a common-sense way when the thing is tiny, but we just said it wasn’t.
And let’s not slight other factors that make the thing either very big and hairy or very, very, very big.
To work as advertised, it needs some sense of history. Perhaps every instant in our maybe-zombie’s history has its own corresponding dimension in the table, or perhaps some field(s) of the table’s output at each instant is an additional input at the next instant, representing one’s entire mental state. Either way, it’s gotta be huge enough to represent every distinguishable history.
The input and output formats also correspond to enormous objects capable of fully describing all the sensory input we can perceive in a short time, all the actions we can take in a short time (including habitual, autonomic, everything), and every aspect of our mental state.
This ain’t your daddy’s 16 x 32 array of unsigned ints.