All of kewlcats's Comments + Replies

ha I see. Your advice might be right but I don't think "consciousness is quantum". I wonder if you could say what you mean by that? Of course I've heard that before. In the past when I have heard people say that before, it's by advocates of free will theories of consciousness trying to propose a physical basis for consciousness that preserves indeterminacy of decision-making. Some objections I have to this view: 1. Most importantly, as I pointed out here: consciousness is roughly orthogonal to intelligence. So your view shouldn't give you reassurance about AGI. We could have a formal definition of intelligence, and causal instantiations of it, without any qualia what-its-like-to-be subjective consciousness existing in the system. There is also conscious experience with minimal intelligence, like experiences of raw pleasure, pain, or observing the blueness of the sky. As I explain in the linked post, consciousness is also orthogonal to agency or goal-directed behavior. 2. There's a great deal of research about consciousness. I described one account in my post, and Nick Humphrey does go out on a limb more than most researchers do. But my sense is most neuroscientists of consciousness endorse some account of consciousness roughly equivalent to Nick's. While probably some (not all or even a majority) would concede the hard problem remains, based on what we do know about the structure of the physical substrates underlying consciousness, it's hard to imagine what role "quantum" would do. 3. It fails to add any sense of meaningful free will, because a brain that makes decisions based on random quantum fluctuations doesn't in any meaningful way have more agency than a brain that makes decisions based on pre-determined physical causal chains. While a [hypothetical] quantum-based brain does avoid being pre-determined by physical causal chains, now it is just pre-determined by random quantum fluctuations. 4. Lastly I have to confess a bit of prejudice against this view.

I feel like I should be writing and reading posts about AI but honestly I am too intimidated to go near that topic.

Thanks for this - we definitely agree that there needs to be more work in the field. However, I think it's unlikely that we are best positioned to do that work. This is the reason that academic field building is such a major part of our focus. Both WASR and UF tried this for the last year (UF has a write up on this here - https://www.utility.farm/words/academic-outreach. Neither had much success with this, both through offering funding for research directly and trying to shift values. We are taking a new approach to this now, working with early career academics who are less likely to have their reputation staked on certain approaches, etc. Hopefully, this will be a lot more fruitful for generating novel and relevant lab and field research. Also, this research would likely be funded outside EA / animal advocacy, which adds additional value. Lab research is significantly more expensive than literature reviews / things within our capabilities. Since we don't have a strong sense of what the most important questions are to answer first, shifting those costs to external organizations reduces risk in some ways for us, while allowing us to still help shape the direction of the research to some extent.