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[silverspawn]

Let's try another Netflix run.

I also tried that anime where the main character is an idiot in a dystopian world, but it couldn't really keep my interest.

Gonna try TV show and Thriller

1/n The Alienist

[silverspawn]

So I have a question. I see this iin movies all the time where someone knocks on a door and then just keeps knocking again and again.

Do other people do this? I always knock once and then politely wait.

2/n Deadwind

[silverspawn]

Seems like I've tried this already so it doesn't count

2/n Travellers

[Awaclus]

So I have a question. I see this iin movies all the time where someone knocks on a door and then just keeps knocking again and again.

Do other people do this? I always knock once and then politely wait.

If I knock and there's no reaction after a while, I might knock again in case the first knock wasn't heard.

[silverspawn]

I think this show may be good!

I hope it's not like The society that barely was ok for an episode

So I have a question. I see this iin movies all the time where someone knocks on a door and then just keeps knocking again and again.

Do other people do this? I always knock once and then politely wait.

If I knock and there's no reaction after a while, I might knock again in case the first knock wasn't heard.

yeah this is still in the realm of normalcy, but it's not the knocking again frantically every three seconds thing

[silverspawn]

hm or maybe not

[silverspawn]

yes ok no.

sometimes shows can hide bad writing with an inspired opening

3/n The Penthouse even though Korean shows never seem to work out

[silverspawn]

every korean show is like way more inspired than american shows, but also totally over the top and crazy

[silverspawn]

And they all do this thing of playing obnoxious silly music when a scene gets comedic. But film music only works when it blends in so that you don't notice it.

I don't get korean culture

4/n Anatomy of a scandal

[silverspawn]

I've also seen my share of korean ads from watching professional starcraft and they're likewise over the top. More entertaining than american ads for sure.

[silverspawn]

On the bright side this show really is good

[Awaclus]

I also tried that anime where the main character is an idiot in a dystopian world, but it couldn't really keep my interest.

Out of curiosity, how far did you get?

[silverspawn]

finished episode 1

[Awaclus]

finished episode 1

Cool, that means I get to illustrate the point since there are some subtle things by episode 1 already that you can figure out are noteworthy with just real world knowledge and common sense.

So the multiculturalism is pretty wild. This is pretty easy to notice even though no particular attention is drawn to it because it's everywhere all the time, but just to get that out of the way: they're using (a dramatically deflated) yen as currency, they're speaking French, the city is literally the Spanish city of Cuenca, they're celebrating the Southeast Asian Water Festival (although they have invented a new backstory for it), they're using East Asian signature seals, they're calling their country Helvetia, and Kanata's platoon uses an insignia with a picture of an African owl species which also appears to be a common wild animal around there. And probably a bunch of other things I forgot or didn't notice. As far as I can tell, the show never even directly hints at what this means, but common speculah supported by circumstantial evidence is that most of the earth is uninhabitable, so whoever has been able to move to this inhabitable area has done so. It is probably also worth noting that while there are African birds around, there doesn't seem to be very many African-looking people.

There's also an ongoing war, although there has been an armistice for about six months. The armistice is directly mentioned in a brief comment by one of the soldiers in the train, so this is also one of the easier things to notice, but they definitely don't hammer home the point, and I for example either missed it or quickly forgot about it on the first watch.

Upon encountering dolphin figurines in a store, Kanata calls them "fish figurines", i.e. not only does she not know that dolphins are mammals, she doesn't even know they're dolphins — otherwise she would just call them dolphins like normal people do. She may be a bit simple, but this would be beyond ridiculous from a 15-year-old girl IRL. The reason why she doesn't recognize a dolphin is that dolphins have gone extinct so people normally don't know about them anymore. This will be implied again with some more detail in a later episode; this here is sufficient to figure out that people normally don't know about dolphins, but not whether it's because of their extinction or just people being poorly educated. This one is actually a great example of what there's a ton of.

And then there is the fact that Kanata is joining the military just to learn music while there is an ongoing war, and when she tells people this, they just think her reason for joining is funny, and nobody at any point thinks it's anything other than completely normal for a 15-year-old girl to be a soldier while there is an ongoing war. And she's not the only one either. There's of course a lot of anime where you're just supposed to suspend your disbelief when it comes to cute girls doing ridiculous things, and Sora no Woto intentionally blends in with them, so even though this should be pretty obvious in a vacuum, in that context it's kind of easier to take it for granted and ignore it than to question it.

[silverspawn]

Ya, I think the issue for me is that the show failed to make me interested in figuring any of this out. The setting has plenty of riddles in it, and then the way people react to the main character also feels like something that has complexity behind it, but like I don't care? It's not like I don't want to care, but I didn't.

[silverspawn]

So, laws of consciousness.

You'd think that we don't know anything about them, but actually we do! We know (by virtue of having eliminated all alternatives to the [Matter ≙ C.] model) that those laws are an alternate view on the laws of physics. And this tells us a great deal. It means that some laws are possible while others are not.

For example, there cannot be a law that says "if 99 or fewer neurons fire in the brain, C. looks like x, but when there's 100 or more, it radically changes into y". There is nothing in the laws of physics that privileges hard thresholds of this kind, so it can't exist in the laws of C. either.

[silverspawn]

I'm not sure how to best introduce/call this principle. Andres from QRI talks about "strong emergence" (and that it must be avoided). You can't have entirely new elements appear out of nowhere. But I don't think that's the right framing; threshold functions are also not ok and that's not technically a new elemnt. Maybe principle of continuity or something.

[silverspawn]

Anyway, among the things that are not ok is caring counter-factuals. Say you have a system that can be modeled as a causal graph with nodes A-L. The right part of the graph is something like J -> L <- K or something (e.g., and AND gate), involving only the last 3 nodes. Currently, only J and K in the system are on, and together they cause L to be on due to the connection. In describing the C. of this system, you're not allowed to look at connections that didn't matter, like an edge from node A to node B. Since consciousness has causal effect but the connection from A to B didn't play a causal role in what just happened, in can't have affected the system's consciousness.

More generally, only the things that are happening right now are allowed to matter. If a brain reacts to input x, you can't look at [how it would have reacted to input y] to figure out what its consciousness is like. You can only look at the computation that actually took place.

[silverspawn]

This seems reasonable straight-forward, but actually IIT violates this principle! IIT (integrated information theory) explicitly and unambiguously cares about the entire causal structure of the system, including the parts that don't matter right now. According to IIT, you can change connections in the brain that don't do anything right now, and this changes what the human feels like. TODO: figure out how proponents of IIT would disagree with the above argument.

[silverspawn]

Maybe an easier way to put this is that everything influencing your experience *is doing something*. It's doing something by virtue of changing your experience. This is the entire point of the Meta Problem; we can, miraculously, just report what we experience. So saying that our experience is modified by connections that don't have causal effect right now is a nonstarter.

[silverspawn]

On the other hand, if you accept that counter-factuals can't matter, this leads to massive problems. Most importantly, it means the C. of a system has to be determined by just a small segment of some calculation. Like, if register A holds bit string 10011010 and register B shows holds string 11110000, and then some operation is performed and A changes to 11110110 whereas B changes to 11000000, this can mean absolutely anything, in fact I just pulled all of these out of my hat. But you can write a program such that these strings represent arbitrary values! In fact, given any calculation that actually does something practical, you can always change the rules and get an equivalent calculation that does the same thing but uses different bit strings. The easiest way is just to exchange the role of 0s and 1s. In this forum post, some translator somewhere will just use a fixed table to translate each symbol into a sequence of bits, probably UTF-8 encoding.

So Computation only makes sense in the context of what the inputs and outputs mean. Or could many more steps be enough to somehow constrain it? Here it gets complicated.

Anyway, I see why IIT wants to care about counter-factuals; it makes it much easier to get a formalism that doesn't look blatantly absurd.

[silverspawn]

So all of the above could be another line of attack that I've not used so far. Of course it would have to be explained about 100 times better.

[silverspawn]

Not related: EY on why almost all alignment research is worthless (and he's the only person who can write).

[silverspawn]

(Unintentionally linked to the comment section.)

[faust]

So, laws of consciousness.

You'd think that we don't know anything about them, but actually we do! We know (by virtue of having eliminated all alternatives to the [Matter ≙ C.] model) that those laws are an alternate view on the laws of physics. And this tells us a great deal. It means that some laws are possible while others are not.

For example, there cannot be a law that says "if 99 or fewer neurons fire in the brain, C. looks like x, but when there's 100 or more, it radically changes into y". There is nothing in the laws of physics that privileges hard thresholds of this kind, so it can't exist in the laws of C. either.

IDK, there are thresholds in physics, no? Like the boiling point of water or something.