So Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote this 1600 page long series-of-essays-which-was-then-collected-into-the-book-"Rationality: From AI to Zombies"-but-is-colloquially-most-commonly-referred-to-as-"The Sequences". (Also the first link in my signature.) As far as I recall, they consist of something like
- Discussion of commonly known biases from the literature (Conjunction Fallacy, Scope Insensitivity, Availability Heuristic, Confirmation Bias, etc etc etc etc etc.)
- Text book introductions to relevant fields (basic probability theory, very basic statistics, Meta Logic, construction of natural numbers, , some causal modeling, some physics including Thermodynamics, probably a bunch of other fields that I can't name right now)
- A bunch of philosophy about what truth is and related matters
- Game Theory and Decision Theory that includes the novel contributions from EY and Miri
- Some stuff specific to AI
- Some non-empirical essays about the world, like stuff about signaling, playing roles, being happier, and probably lots of others that I don't remember. (The part about signaling had an extremely large impact on me specifically, probably more than everything else combined.)
- A bunch of stuff about ethics
- A few posts about consciousness
- The sequence on Quantum Physics
- Some stuff about cryonics
I've read almost all of that several years back and found it extremely valuable. Recently, it's been mentioned in discussions that beneath all of the surface-level content, the Sequences try to convey the sense that "humans are algorithms", which is meant as contrary to "humans are immortal souls" or "humans are atoms" or anything else that you might ultimately identify as.
I think this is wrong. Humans aren't algorithms because algorithms aren't conscious. Algorithms aren't conscious because they're not a thing, fundamentally speaking. Algorithms are an abstraction to describe how heaps of atoms move over time. They're an incredibly useful and powerful abstraction, but still an abstraction. They're not part of the fundamental stuff of the universe. You cannot be an algorithm any more than you can be the process of mating.
I think the fundamental stuff of the universe is matter. Matter is inherently conscious (this view is called panpsychism). If you combine a lot of matter, you can build more complex structures (like houses or humans) and more complex consciousnesses (like animals or humans). Very simple. Thus, humans are atoms.
As far as I remember, believing that humans are atoms is compatible doesn't pose a lot of conflict with The Sequences. I wasn't a fan of the part on ethics, but even that doesn't seem all that related. But it's difficult to know for sure because I didn't have those views when I read them.
Hence I now decided to read it all again, which is probably a worthwhile project anyway. So far, I'm a couple of posts in, and it's all about common biases, which is not only compatible with believing humans are atoms but also probably totally uncontroversial (and all backed by studies anyway (though who knows if they replicate (not sure if anyone ever went back and fixed this after the replication crises began)))