My expectation, which I may have talked about before here, is that the LLMs will eat all of the software stack between the human and the hardware. Moreover, they are already nearly good enough to do that, the issue is that people have not yet adapted to the AI being able to do that. I expect there to be no OS, no standard UI/UX interfaces, no formal programming languages. All interfaces will be more ad hoc, created by the underlying AI to match the needs of the moment. It can be star trek like “computer plot a course to...” or a set of buttons popping up on your touchscreen, or maybe physical buttons and keys being labeled as needed in real-time, or something else. But not the ubiquitous rigid interfaces of the last millennium. For the clues of what is already possible but not being implemented yet one should look to the scifi movies and shows, unconstrained by the current limits. Almost everything useful there is already doable or will be in a short while. I hope someone is working on this.
Shmi
Just a quote found online:
SpaceX can build fully reusable rockets faster than the FAA can shuffle fully disposable paper
It seems like we are not even close to converging on any kind of shared view. I don’t find the concept of “brute facts” even remotely useful, so I cannot comment on it.
But this faces the same problem as the idea that the visible universe arose as a Boltzmann fluctuation, or that you yourself are a Boltzmann brain: the amount of order is far greater than such a hypothesis implies.
I think Sean Carroll answered this one a few times: the concept of a Boltzmann brain is not cognitively stable (you can’t trust your own thoughts, including that you are a Boltzmann brain). And if you try to make it stable, you have to reconstruct the whole physical universe. You might be saying the same thing? I am not claiming anything different here.
The simplest explanation is that some kind of Platonism is real, or more precisely (in philosophical jargon) that “universals” of some kind do exist.
Like I said in the other reply, I think that those two words are not useful as binaries real/not real, exist/not exist. If you feel that this is non-negotiable to make sense of philosophy of physics or something, I don’t know what to say.
I was struck by something I read in Bertrand Russell, that some of the peculiarities of Leibniz’s worldview arose because he did not believe in relations, he thought substance and property are the only forms of being. As a result, he didn’t think interaction between substances is possible (since that would be a relation), and instead came up with his odd theory about a universe of monadic substances which are all preprogrammed by God to behave as if they are interacting.
Yeah, I think denying relations is going way too far. A relation is definitely a useful idea. It can stay in epistemology rather than in ontology.
I am not 100% against these radical attempts to do without something basic in ontology, because who knows what creative ideas may arise as a result? But personally I prefer to posit as rich an ontology as possible, so that I will not unnecessarily rule out an explanation that may be right in front of me.
Fair, it is foolish to reduce potential avenues of exploration. Maybe, again, we differ where they live, in the world as basic entities or in the mind as our model of making sense of the world.
Thanks, I think you are doing a much better job voicing my objections than I would.
If push comes to shove, I would even dispute that “real” is a useful category once we start examining deep ontological claims. “Exist” is another emergent concept that is not even close to being binary, but more of a multidimensional spectrum (numbers, fairies and historical figures lie on some of the axes). I can provisionally accept that there is something like a universe that “exists”, but, as I said many years ago in another thread, I am much more comfortable with the ontology where it is models all the way down (and up and sideways and every which way). This is not really a critical point though. The critical point is that we have no direct access to the underlying reality, so we, as tiny embedded agents, are stuck dealing with the models regardless.
By “Platonic laws of physics” I mean the Hawking’s famous question
What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe…Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
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Current physics, if anything else, is sort of antiplatonic: it claims that there are several dozens of independent entities, actually existing, called “fields”, which produce the entire range of observable phenomena via interacting with each other, and there is no “world” outside this set of entities.
I am not sure if it actually “claims” that. A HEP theorist would say that QFT (the standard model of particle physics) + classical GR is our current best model of the universe, with a bunch of experimental evidence that this is not all it is. I don’t think there is a consensus for an ontological claim of “actually existing” rather than “emergent”. There is definitely a consensus that there is more to the world that the fundamental laws of physics we currently know, and that some new paradigms are needed to know more.
“Laws of nature” are just “how this entities are”. Outside very radical skepticism I don’t know any reasons to doubt this worldview.
No, I don’t think that is an accurate description at all. Maybe I am missing something here.
Yeah, that was my question. Would there be something that remains, and it sounds like Chalmers and others would say that there would be.
Thank you for your thoughtful and insightful reply! I think there is a lot more discussion that could be had on this topic, and we are not very far apart, but this is supposed to be a “shortform” thread.
I never liked The Simple Truth post, actually. I sided with Mark, the instrumentalist, whom Eliezer turned into what I termed back then as “instrawmantalist”. Though I am happy with the part
“Necessary?” says Inspector Darwin, sounding puzzled. “It just happened. . . I don’t quite understand your question.”
Rather recently Devs the show, which, for all its flaws, has a bunch of underrated philosophical highlights, had an episode with a somewhat similar storyline.
Anyway, appreciate your perspective.
Thank you, I forgot about that one. I guess the summary would be “if your calibration for this class of possibilities sucks, don’t make up numbers, lest you start trusting them”. If so, that makes sense.
Isn’t your thesis that “laws of physics” only exist in the mind?
Yes!
But in that case, they can’t be a causal or explanatory factor in anything outside the mind
“a causal or explanatory factor” is also inside the mind
which means that there are no actual explanations for the patterns in nature
What do you mean by an “actual explanation”? Explanations only exist in the mind, as well.
There’s no reason why planets go round the stars
The reason (which is also in the minds of agents) is the Newton’s law, which is an abstraction derived from the model of the universe that exists in the minds of embedded agents.
there’s no reason why orbital speeds correlate with masses in a particular way, these are all just big coincidences
“None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence” https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Unsong
“Coincidence” is a wrong way of looking at this. The world is what it is. We live in it and are trying to make sense of it, moderately successfully. Because we exist, it follows that the world is somewhat predictable from the inside, otherwise life would not have been a thing. That is, tiny parts of the world can have lossily compressed but still useful models of some parts/aspects of the world. Newton’s laws are part of those models.
A more coherent question would be “why is the world partially lossily compressible from the inside”, and I don’t know a non-anthropic answer, or even if this is an answerable question. A lot of “why” questions in science bottom out at “because the world is like that”.
… Not sure if this makes my view any clearer, we are obviously working with very different ontologies.
That is a good point, deciding is different from communicating the rationale for your decisions. Maybe that is what Eliezer is saying.
I think you are missing the point, and taking cheap shots.
So, is he saying that he is calibrated well enough to have a meaningful “action-conditional” p(doom), but most people are not? And that they should not engage in “fake Bayesianism”? But then, according to the prevailing wisdom, how would one decide how to act if they cannot put a number on each potential action?
I notice my confusion when Eliezer speaks out against the idea of expressing p(doom) as a number: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1823529034174882234
I mean, I don’t like it either, but I thought his whole point about Bayesian approach was to express odds and calculate expected values.
Hmm, I am probably missing something. I thought if a human honestly reports a feeling, we kind of trust them that they felt it? So if an AI reports a feeling, and then there is a conduit where the distillate of that feeling is transmitted to a human, who reports the same feeling, it would go some ways toward accepting that the AI had qualia? I think you are saying that this does not address Chalmers’ point.
I am not sure why you are including the mind here, maybe we are talking at cross purposes. I am not making statements about the world, only about the emergence of the laws of physics as written in textbooks, which exist as abstractions across human minds. If you are the Laplace’s demon, you can see the whole world, and if you wanted to zoom into the level of “planets going around the sun”, you could, but there is no reason for you to. This whole idea of “facts” is a human thing. We, as embedded agents, are emergent patterns that use this concept. I can see how it is natural to think of facts, planets or numbers as ontologically primitive or something, not as emergent, but this is not the view I hold.
Well, what happens if we do this and we find out that these representations are totally different? Or, moreover, that the AI’s representation of “red” does not seem to align (either in meaning or in structure) with any human-extracted concept or perception?
I would say that it is a fantastic step forward in our understanding, resolving empirically a question we did not known an answer to.
How do we then try to figure out the essence of artificial consciousness, given that comparisons with what we (at that point would) understand best, i.e., human qualia, would no longer output something we can interpret?
That would be a great stepping stone for further research.
I think it is extremely likely that minds with fundamentally different structures perceive the world in fundamentally different ways, so I think the situation in the paragraph above is not only possible, but in fact overwhelmingly likely, conditional on us managing to develop the type of qualia-identifying tech you are talking about.
I’d love to see this prediction tested, wouldn’t you?
The testing seems easy, one person feels the quale, the other reports the feeling, they compare, what am I missing?
Thanks for the link! I thought it was a different, related but a harder problem than what is described in https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness. I assume we could also try to extract what an AI “feels” when it speaks of redness of red, and compare it with a similar redness extract from the human mind. Maybe even try to cross-inject them. Or would there be still more to answer?
How to make dent in the “hard problem of consciousness” experimentally. Suppose we understand brain well enough to figure out what makes one experience specific qualia, then stimulate the neurons in a way that makes the person experience them. Maybe even link two people with a “qualia transducer” such that when one person experiences “what it’s like”, the other person can feel it, too.
If this works, what would remain from the “hard problem”?
Chalmers:
To see this, note that even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?
If you can distill, store and reproduce this experience on demand, what remains? Or, at least, what would/does Chalmers say about it?
What are the issues that are “difficult” in philosophy, in your opinion? What makes them difficult?
I remember you and others talking about the need to “solve philosophy”, but I was never sure what it meant by that.