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All of bcforstadt's Comments + Replies

AI Pause Will Likely Backfire
bcforstadt7mo1
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The point I was trying to make is that natural selection isn't a "mechanism" in the right sense at all. it's a causal/historical explanation not an account of how values are implemented. What is the evidence from evolution? The fact that species with different natural histories end up with different values really doesn't tell us much without a discussion of mechanisms. We need to know 1) how different are the mechanisms actually used to point biological and artificial cognitive systems toward ends and 2) how many possible mechanisms to do so are there... (read more)

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AI Pause Will Likely Backfire
bcforstadt7mo1
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ontological shifts seem likely


what you mean by this? (compare "we don't know how to prevent an ontological collapse, where meaning structures constructed under one world-model compile to something different under a different world model". Is this the same thing?). Is there a good writeup anywhere of why we should expect this to happen? This seems speculative and unlikely to me

evidence from evolution suggests that values are strongly contingent on the kinds of selection pressures which produced various species


The fact that natural selection produced species... (read more)

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RobertM
7mo
Re: ontological shifts, see this arbital page: https://arbital.com/p/ontology_identification. I'm not claiming that evolution is the only way to get those values, merely that there's no reason to expect you'll get them by default by a totally different mechanism. The fact that we don't have a good understanding of how values form even in the biological domain is a reason for pessimism, not optimism.
Principia Qualia: blueprint for a new cause area, consciousness research with an eye toward ethics and x-risk
bcforstadt7y0
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Yes, in fact. Frank Jackson, the guy who came up with the Knowledge Argument against physicalism (Mary the color scientist), later recanted and became a Type-A physicalist. He has a pretty similar approach to morality as consciousness now.

His views are discussed here

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Principia Qualia: blueprint for a new cause area, consciousness research with an eye toward ethics and x-risk
bcforstadt7y1
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Fine, but it's still just a definitional choice. Ultimately, after all the scientific evidence comes in, the question seems to come down to morality,

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CarlShulman
7y
Different ones can seem very different in intuitive appeal depending on how the facts turn out.
Principia Qualia: blueprint for a new cause area, consciousness research with an eye toward ethics and x-risk
bcforstadt7y1
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I think metaphysics is unavoidable here. A scientific theory of consciousness has metaphysical commitments that a scientific theory of temperature, life or electromagnetism lacks. If consciousness is anything like what Brian Tomasik, Daniel Dennett and other Type-A physicalists think it is, "is x conscious?" is a verbal dispute that needs to be resolved in the moral realm. If consciousness is anything like what David Chalmers and other nonreductionists think it is, a science of consciousness needs to make clear what psychophysical laws it is comm... (read more)

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MikeJohnson
7y
This seems reasonable; I address this partially in Appendix C, although not comprehensively. For me, the fact that ethics seems to exist is an argument for some sort of consciousness&value realism. I fear that Type-A physicalists have no principled basis for saying any use of quarks (say, me having a nice drink of water when I'm thirsty) is better than any other use of quarks (a cat being set on fire). I.e., according to Type-A physicalists this would be a verbal dispute, without an objectively correct answer, so it wouldn't be 'wrong' to take either side. This seems to embody an unnecessarily extreme and unhelpful amount of skepticism to me. Do you know of any Type-A physicalist who has tried to objectively ground morality?
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CarlShulman
7y
Not very ridiculous at all? There are definitional choices to be made about viruses after getting deep information about how viruses and other organisms work, but you wouldn't have crafted the same definitions without that biological knowledge, and you wouldn't know which definitions applied to viruses without understanding their properties.
A Defense of Normality
bcforstadt9y1
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On the subject of polyphasic sleep, I strongly suggest reading Dr. Piotr Wozniak's criticism of it at http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm

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