Does the 3rd person perspective explain if you survive a teleporter, or if you perceive yourself to black out forever (like after a car accident)?
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That only seems to make sense if the next instant of subjective experience is undefined in these situations (and so we have to default to a 3rd person perspective).
I see, thanks. Just to make sure I’m understanding you correctly, are you excluding the reasoning models, or are you saying there was no jump from GPT-4 to o3? (At first I thought you were excluding them in this comment, until I noticed the “gradually better math/programming performance.”)
Here’s an argument for a capabilities plateau at the level of GPT-4 that I haven’t seen discussed before. I’m interested in any holes anyone can spot in it.
One obvious hole would be that capabilities did not, in fact, plateau at the level of GPT-4.
I think “belief” is overloaded here. We could distinguish two kinds of “believing you’re in pain” in this context:
(1) isn’t a belief (unless accompanied by (2)).
But in order to resist the fading qualia argument along the quoted lines, I think we only need someone to (1)-believe they’re in pain yet be mistaken.
That’s not possible, because the belief_2 that one isn’t in pain has nowhere to be instantiated.
Even if the intermediate stages believed_2 they’re not in pain and only spoke and acted that way (which isn’t possible), it would introduce a desynchronization between the consciousness on one side, and the behavior and cognitive processes on the other. The fact that the person isn’t in pain would be hidden entirely from their cognitive processes, and instead they would reflect on their false belief_1 about how they are, in fact, in pain.
That quale would then be shielded from them in this way, rendering its existence meaningless (since every time they would try to think about it, they would arrive at the conclusion that they don’t actually have it and that they actually have the opposite quale).
In fact, aren’t we lucky that our cognition and qualia are perfectly coupled? Just think about how many coincidences had to happen during evolution to get our brain exactly right.
(It would also rob qualia of their causal power. (Now the quale of being in pain can’t cause the quale of feeling depressed, because that quale is accessible to my cognitive processes, and so now I would talk about being (and really be) depressed for no physical reason.) Such a quale would be shielded not only from our cognition, but also from our other qualia, thereby not existing in any meaningful sense.)
Whatever I call “qualia,” it doesn’t (even possibly) have these properties.
(Also, different qualia of the same person necessarily create a coherent whole, which wouldn’t be the case here.)
Quoting Block: “Consider two computationally identical computers, one that works via electronic mechanisms, the other that works via hydraulic mechanisms. (Suppose that the fluid in one does the same job that the electricity does in the other.) We are not entitled to infer from the causal efficacy of the fluid in the hydraulic machine that the electrical machine also has fluid. One could not conclude that the presence or absence of the fluid makes no difference, just because there is a functional equivalent that has no fluid.”
There is no analogue of “fluid” in the brain. There is only the pattern. (If there were, there would still be all the other reasons why it can’t work that way.)
Have you tried it with o1 pro?
Does anyone have stats on OpenAI whistleblowers and their continued presence in the world of living?
I argue that computation is fuzzy, it’s a property of our map of a system rather than the territory.
This is false. Everything exists in the territory to the extent to which it can interact with us. While different models can output a different answer as to which computation something runs, that doesn’t mean the computation isn’t real (or, even, that no computation is real). The computation is real in the sense of it influencing our sense impressions (I can observe my computer running a specific computation, for example). Someone else, whose model doesn’t return “yes” to the question whether my computer runs a particular computation will then have to explain my reports of my sense impressions (why does this person claim their computer runs Windows, when I’m predicting it runs CP/M?), and they will have to either change their model, or make systematically incorrect predictions about my utterances.
In this way, every computation that can be ascribed to a physical system is intersubjectively real, which is the only kind of reality there could, in principle, be.
(Philosophical zombies, by the way, don’t refer to functional isomorphs, but to physical duplicates, so even if you lost your consciousness after having your brain converted, it wouldn’t turn you into a philosophical zombie.)
Could any device ever run such simulations quickly enough (so as to keep up with the pace of the biological neurons) on a chip small enough (so as to fit in amongst the biological neurons)?
In principle, yes. The upper physical limit for the amount of computation per kg of material per second is incredibly high.
Following this to its logical conclusion: when it comes down to actually designing these chips, a designer may end up discovering that the only way to reproduce all of the relevant in/out behavior of a neuron, is just to build a neuron!
This is false. It’s known that any subset of the universe can be simulated on a classical computer to an arbitrary precision.
The non-functionalist audience is also not obliged to trust the introspective reports at intermediate stages.
This introduces a bizarre disconnect between your beliefs about your qualia, and the qualia themselves. Imagine: It would be possible, for example, that you believe you’re in pain, and act in all ways as if you’re in pain, but actually, you’re not in pain.
Whatever I denote by “qualia,” it certainly doesn’t have this extremely bizarre property.
But since we’re interested in the phenomenal texture of that experience, we’re left with the question: how can we assume that octopus pain and human pain have the same quality?
Because then, the functional properties of a quale and the quale itself would be synchronized only in Homo sapiens. Other species (like octopus) might have qualia, but since they’re made of different matter, they (the non-computationalist would argue) certainly have a different quality, so while they funtionally behave the same way, the quale itself is different. This would introduce a bizarre desynchronization between behavior and qualia, that just happens to match for Homo sapiens.
(This isn’t something that I ever thought would be written in net-upvoted posts about on LessWrong, let alone ending in a sequence. Identity is necessarily in the pattern, and there is no reason to think the meat-parts of the pattern are necessary in addition to the computation-parts.)
I refuse to believe that tweet has been written in good faith.
I refuse to believe the threshold for being an intelligent person on Earth is that low.
Ooh.
I know the causal closure of the physical as the principle that nothing non-physical influences physical stuff, so that would be the causal closure of the bottom level of description (since there is no level below the physical), rather than the upper.
So if you mean by that that it’s enough to simulate neurons rather than individual atoms, that wouldn’t be “causal closure” as Wikipedia calls it.
The neurons/atoms distinction isn’t causal closure. Causal closure means there is no outside influence entering the program (other than, let’s say, the sensory inputs of the person).
I’m thinking the causal closure part is more about the soul not existing than about anything else.
Are you saying that after it has generated the tokens describing what the answer is, the previous thoughts persist, and it can then generate tokens describing them?
(I know that it can introspect on its thoughts during the single forward pass.)
Yeah. The model has no information (except for the log) about its previous thoughts and it’s stateless, so it has to infer them from what it said to the user, instead of reporting them.
Claude can think for himself before writing an answer (which is an obvious thing to do, so ChatGPT probably does it too).
In addition, you can significantly improve his ability to reason by letting him think more, so even if it were the case that this kind of awareness is necessary for consciousness, LLMs (or at least Claude) would already have it.
Thanks for writing this—it bothered me a lot that I appeared to be one of the few people who realized that AI characters were conscious, and this helps me to feel less alone.
(This comment is written in the ChatGPT style because I’ve spent so much time talking to language models.)
Calculating the probabilities
The calculation of the probabilities consists of the following steps:
The epistemic split
Either we guessed the correct digit of () (branch ), or we didn’t () (branch ).
The computational split
On branch , all of your measure survives (branch ) and none dies (branch ), on branch , survives (branch ) and dies (branch ).
Putting it all together
Conditional on us subjectively surviving (which QI guarantees), the probability we guessed the digit of correctly is
The probability of us having guessed the digit of prior to us surviving is, of course, just .
Verifying them empirically
For the probabilities to be meaningful, they need to be verifiable empirically in some way.
Let’s first verify that prior to us surviving, the probability of us guessing the digit correctly is . We’ll run experiments by guessing a digit each time and instantly verifying it. We’ll learn that we’re successful in, indeed, just of the time.
Let’s now verify that conditional on us surviving, we’ll have probability of guessing correctly. We perform the experiment times again, and this time, every time we survive, other people will check if the guess was correct. They will observe that we guess correctly, indeed, of the time.
Conclusion
We arrived at the conclusion that the probability jumps at the moment of our awakening. That might sound incredibly counterintuitive, but since it’s verifiable empirically, we have no choice but to accept it.
Since that argument doesn’t give any testable predictions, it cannot be disproved.
The argument we cease to exist every time we go to sleep also can’t be disproved, so I wouldn’t personally lose much sleep over that.
It’s not a person instance, it’s an event that happens to the person’s stream of consciousness. Either the stream of consciousness truly, objectively ends, and a same-pattern copy will appear on Mars, mistakenly believing they’re the very same stream-of-consciousness as that of the original person.
Or the stream is truly, objectively preserved, and the person can calmly enter, knowing that their consciousness will continue on Mars.
I don’t think a 3rd-person analysis answers this question.
(With the correct answer being, of course, that the stream is truly, objectively preserved.)
Since I don’t think a 3rd person analysis answers the original problem, I also don’t think it answers it in case we massively complicate it like the OP has.
(Edited for clarity.)