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[MiX]

Yeah, I know what the Game of Life is, I was just very disappointed it didn't wait to stabilize before looping. And I was wondering if it had a really big loop of stabilization that was so complex I missed it and that gif only looped it once before going to the start.

I guess now I'm wondering why you posted that.

[silverspawn]

I guess now I'm wondering why you posted that.

GoL is Turing Complete, which means you can run any computable function it, including the simulation of a human brain. If you take the functionalist perspective, you're forced to say that this is conscious.

This means GoL has to solve the phenomenal binding problem, i.e. there has to be some mechanism to decide which cells constitute unified entities. E.g., if you run two brain simulations in GoL, they have to form two unified entities, just as they do IRL. This seems rather impossible. I mean I think it's also impossible to solve the binding problem in the real world if you think that consciousness is about computation, but in GoL it's more obviously impossible. Everything is just a unified grid.

Well, that's why I was writing about it. I posted it because it looks cool :-)

[silverspawn]

I'm genuinely considering asking Joscha Bach for a conversation about functionalism. He's this incredibly bright intellectual who supposedly just so nice that he takes interview requests from people he's ever met even if they have a tiny platform. That's why there are so many conversations with him on youtube. (Usually the other person is totally outclassed and can't follow what he's saying.) Now I have a nonexistent platform, but I bet if I just offer him 100$ up front, he'd agree to a two hour conversation anyway.

[jotheonah]

I feel like any God worth believing in should be able to see through a schoolyard-level trick like deathbed conversion.

It seems unlikely that God doesn't care about your life as long as you're a believer at the moment of your death, and even more unlikely that a self-serving deathbed conversion constitutes true belief in God's eyes.

[silverspawn]

Agreed with both. The problem is that (much less likely than much less likely) * (eternal suffering) = infinite value

[faust]

Agreed with both. The problem is that (much less likely than much less likely) * (eternal suffering) = infinite value

Though it feels like you should account for the possibilty that there is a God and they don't like people playing tricks on them and punish the people who try deathbed conversion with eternal damnation

[silverspawn]

Yeah, but probably this is a lower probability event than the interpretation by which the last minute conversion saves you

[silverspawn]

Switching to this hopefully simpler overview:



It's a theme at this point that I first use the common terminology (Atoms) and explain why the reader should replace it with the more accurate one (matter) before eventually deciding to just use the accurate one instead. It's almost always the better choice.

[silverspawn]

The complete but abridged case against functionalism (and functionalist reductionism in particular) has five parts and goes as follows:

1. The Binding Problem.
If all you see is computation, there is no principled mechanism to determine which parts of computation form unified entities, or alternatively put, no way to draw boundaries around computational processes. There's no way to explain why there is one consciousness in the human brain observing one unified visual field, as supposed to 10000 consciousnesses each observing one pixel.

2. The Interpretation problem
If all you see is computation, there is no way to decide what is being computed. Consider the Glider Gun, for example:



A thing that produces the 5-pixel "glider" thingies? Or a machine that counts up forever? Or a calculator that computes 2+3=5 once (and then the rest is ill-defined)? Or that computes 5*5=25? Each of these interpretations, and infinitely more, are valid given the appropriate input/output mapping (E.g., if the output is the number of pixels in the gliders, it outputs 5.)

3. The Abstraction Problem
GoL inherently consists of non-material computational units (cells). But in the real world, there is no ground truth as to what even constitutes a Bit. Could a single person pushing rocks simulate the universe (because they implement a Turing Machine)? Is the united states phenomenally conscious (because people/groups implement computational units)? Are fictional characters phenomenally conscious? Companies? If you simulate a Turing Machine on a computer, do the TM's steps or the computer's steps count? In a normal computer, who decides that "magnetic charge" and "no magnetic charge" correspond to 1 and 0, as supposed to "high magnetic charge" and "all but high magnetic charge"? No principled way to answer any of these questions.

4. The Plausibility Argument
If you forget all the reasons why you think consciousness is tied to intelligence and whatnot, the claim that this made-up concept "Bit" is the source of consciousness, rather than matter, seems not a-priori plausible.

5. The Alternative
I think in practice, people like Functionalism because of groupthink because there appear to be knock-down arguments against all alternatives. And I agree with almost all of them, except that the knock-down argument against panpsychism is

Scan a human brain. Build a neuron-level simulation. It will run exactly the same computational steps as the original. If the original wrote papers about consciousness, the simulation will write papers about consciousness. It's absurd to claim that the second one does this without being conscious.

Which I would agree with UNLESS computations in the brain are substrate dependent, in which case the simulation *doesn't* have the same input/output behavior

[silverspawn]

I think this is the most extreme case of a U shaped information curve, i.e., a case where smarter people have dumber opinions on average because the good arguments overwhelmingly point into the wrong direction, and only the very good arguments point into the correct direction again. Ask a normal person whether a company is conscious, and they'll say no; ask a philosopher, and they may be genuinely unsure. I've heard people make this argument on podcasts and whatnot. And it must be respected because it follows from taking functionalism seriously. Companies do. in fact, behave a lot like computer programs. They are little optimization processes optimizing for profit. If consciousness is about computation, it's not easy to explain why a company wouldn't be conscious.

[jotheonah]

Interestingly though, even though a normal person would say a company is definitely not conscious, that same person might find themselves anthropomorphising that company and assigning it features of consciousness in the course of daily life. Saying something like "I know my bosses all care about me, but at the end of the day all the company cares about is the bottom line".

[silverspawn]

LessWrong Thread on Ukraine

[LaLight]

i can not believe this is happening

[silverspawn]

I'm utterly unqualified to have any opinion on this. Does the assessment from the thread I linked seem correct to you? I guess I'm glad to read that WW3 seems not likely

[LaLight]

I'm utterly unqualified to have any opinion on this. Does the assessment from the thread I linked seem correct to you? I guess I'm glad to read that WW3 seems not likely

i might be even more unqualified. I don't know, i have tons of information to process and this article is one of many. I can hardly believe anything right now tbh

[faust]

I'm utterly unqualified to have any opinion on this. Does the assessment from the thread I linked seem correct to you? I guess I'm glad to read that WW3 seems not likely

Not that I'm particularly qualified... but I have an opinion still!

I think the article downplays the likelihood of a large-scale war a bit. Sure, it does not seem like the EU or US are likely to get involved in Ukraine right now. But a lot of what's happening now seems to mirror the events that lead up to WW2 to a concerning degree. Here's a country that has relatively recently (historically speaking) lost a great deal of territory, now lead by a strongman authoritarian leader that has a stranglehold on the media and public opinion. That leader has clear amibition to restore his country to "glory", and believes to have a claim on independent countries' territory. The rest of the world is hesitant to punish the aggressive behavior. In this analogy, the invasion of Ukraine would be like the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938; not exactly when WW2 started, but right now I don't see a reason why Putin would stop with Ukraine.

[silverspawn]

I think the important disanalogy is that Putin is smart in a way Hitler was not. One of the nontrivial beliefs I do have about history (must have talked about that before) is that competence of world leaders is good.

Like if you just think about a game theory matrix of all nations that may go to war, the "wolrdwar" columns are going to look quite bad, so it shouldn't happen if the decision makers are in the same page, but might happen if one of them is delusional. Invading Urkaine does not seem like a sign of that since Putin correctly assessed that he can get away with it.

[Awaclus]

I'm utterly unqualified to have any opinion on this. Does the assessment from the thread I linked seem correct to you? I guess I'm glad to read that WW3 seems not likely

Not that I'm particularly qualified... but I have an opinion still!

I think the article downplays the likelihood of a large-scale war a bit. Sure, it does not seem like the EU or US are likely to get involved in Ukraine right now. But a lot of what's happening now seems to mirror the events that lead up to WW2 to a concerning degree. Here's a country that has relatively recently (historically speaking) lost a great deal of territory, now lead by a strongman authoritarian leader that has a stranglehold on the media and public opinion. That leader has clear amibition to restore his country to "glory", and believes to have a claim on independent countries' territory. The rest of the world is hesitant to punish the aggressive behavior. In this analogy, the invasion of Ukraine would be like the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938; not exactly when WW2 started, but right now I don't see a reason why Putin would stop with Ukraine.

Yeah, I don't think there is no reason for concern about a greater conflict. There are many ways this situation could play out that don't lead to WWIII, but there are too many that do for "I'm not worried" to be a reasonable position, given how massively bad it would be.

At this point, it might be too early to make any useful predictions. To me, the situation currently doesn't make any sense. If the estimation of 150 000 – 200 000 Russian soldiers near Ukraine's border is roughly correct, it's nowhere near enough to beat Ukraine's active military, let alone reserves, let alone all the new soldiers they're training as fast as they can, let alone all the civilians with firearms. In general, defending is so much easier than attacking that the attacking army needs to be roughly three times as big for the fight to be even, and while there are some factors here that skew it in Russia's favor like the air/missile strikes, there are others that skew it in Ukraine's favor like the fact that their soldiers are likely substantially more motivated. Why is Putin invading Ukraine with a force that isn't sufficiently large to succeed?

[faust]

I think the important disanalogy is that Putin is smart in a way Hitler was not. One of the nontrivial beliefs I do have about history (must have talked about that before) is that competence of world leaders is good.

Like if you just think about a game theory matrix of all nations that may go to war, the "wolrdwar" columns are going to look quite bad, so it shouldn't happen if the decision makers are in the same page, but might happen if one of them is delusional. Invading Urkaine does not seem like a sign of that since Putin correctly assessed that he can get away with it.

I think here's where you are wrong.

I cannot judge on the relative intelligence of Putin vs Hitler. I also don't think it matters a lot. No single person is smart enough to lead a country on their own. The similarity between Putin and Hitler is that they have replaced any advisors that might disagree with them from time to time.

But on a more general level, here's also a problem with autocracies. You say the "world war" column looks bad, and for Russia as a nation that's certainly true, but for Putin personally? He's not going to be affected all that much. And even if it would, it's very much possible that he values the idea of making his mark on world history higher than his own life.

[silverspawn]

To be clear I definitely *am* worried, I'm arguing for probably a <10% chance, not a <1% chancec

[silverspawn]

I do think the personality and savyness of Putin specifically matters a great deal, especially since he doesn't listen to advisors. And I don't think "it's not bad for him personally" works because i think he cares about Russia. His utility function values "power" rather than "well-being" or whatever, but that still gives a low value in the world war column.

[silverspawn]

Like I think he wants people to look at his legacy and conclude that he strengthened Russia's position on the world stage.

[Awaclus]

To be clear I definitely *am* worried, I'm arguing for probably a <10% chance, not a <1% chancec

I would argue for like a >30% chance for WWIII within like the next 10 years.

[silverspawn]

What's the chance for nukes being used? You could have WW3 without that.

[Awaclus]

What's the chance for nukes being used? You could have WW3 without that.

I don't really have much of an idea about nukes, but I feel like it's very low. Multiple countries have them, so everyone is super reluctant to use any.