After finishing the sequence, I'm in the odd position where most of my thoughts aren't about the sequence itself, but rather about why I think you didn't actually explain why people claim to be conscious. I think it's worth explaining why I think this, but it's also strange because it means I'm gonna talk a whole bunch about what you didn't write about, rather than what you did write about. I do think it's still worth writing this comment, but with the major disclaimer/apology that I realize most of this isn't actually a response to the substance of your arguments.
First to clarify, the way I think about this is that there's two relevant axes along which to decompose the problem of consciousness:
(So this gives four problems: the easy problem, the hard problem, the easy meta problem, and the hard meta problem.)
I've said in this comment that I'm convined the meta problem is sufficient to solve the entire problem. And I very much stand by that, so I don't think you have to solve the hard problem -- but you do have to solve the hard meta problem! Like, you actually have to explain why people claim to be conscious, not just why they report the coarse profile of functional properties! And (I'm sure you see where this is going), I think you've only addressed the easy meta problem throughout this sequence.
Part of the reason why this is relevant is because you've said in your introductory post that you want to address this (which I translate to the meta problem in my terminology):
STEP 1: Explain the chain-of-causation in the physical universe that leads to self-reports about consciousness, free will, etc.—and not just people’s declarations that those things exist at all, but also all the specific properties that people ascribe to those things.
Imo you actually did explain why people talk about free will,[1] so you've already delivered on at least half of this. Which is just to say that, again, this is not really a critique, but I do think it's worth explaining why I don't think you've delivered on the other half, at least not on the parts that I think lead to the juicy conclusions.
Alright, so why do I think that you didn't address the hard meta problem? Well, post #2 is about conscious awareness so it gets the closest, but you only really talk about how there is a serial processing stream in the brain whose contents roughly correspond to what we claim is in awareness -- which I'd argue is just the coarse functional behavior, i.e., the macro problem. This doesn't seem very related to the hard meta problem to be because I can imagine either one of the problems not existing without affecting the other. I.e., I can imagine that (a) people do claim to be conscious but in a very different way, and (b) people don't claim to be conscious, but their high-level functional recollection does match the model you describe in the post. And if that's the case, then by definition they're independent.
A possible objection to the above would be that the hard and easy meta problem aren't really distinct -- like, perhaps people do just claim to be conscious because they have this serial processing stream, and attempts to separate the two are conceptually confused...
... but I'm convinced that this isn't true. One reason is just that, if you actually ask camp #2 people, I think they'll tell you that the problem isn't really about the macro functional behavior of awareness. But the more important reason is the hard meta problem can be considered in just a single sensory modality! So for example, with vision, there's the fact that people don't just obtain intangible information about their surroundings but claim to see continuous images.
Copying the above terminology, we could phrase the hard problem of seeing as explaining why people see images, and the hard meta problem of seeing as explaining why people claim to see images.[2] (And once again, I'd argue it's fine/sufficient to only answer the meta problem -- but only if you do, in fact, answer the meta problem!) Then since the hard meta problem of seeing is a subset of the hard meta problem of consciousness, and since the contents of your post very much don't say anything about this, it seems like they can't really have conclusively addressed the hard problem in general.
Again, not really a critique of the actual posts; the annoying thing for me is just that I think the hard meta problem is where all the juicy insights about the brain are hidden, so I'm continuously disappointed that no one talks about it. ImE this is a very consistent pattern where whenever someone says they'll talk about it, they then end up not actually talking it, usually missing it even more than you did here (cough Dennett cough). Actually there is at least one phenomenon you do talk about that I think is very interesting (namely equanimity), but I'll make a separate comment for that.
Alas I don't view Free Will as related to consciousness. I understand putting them into the same bucket of "intuitive self-models with questionable veridicality". But the problem is that people who meditate -- which arguably is like paying more attention -- tend to be less likely to think Free Will is real, but I'd strongly expect that they're more likely to say that consciousness is real, rather than less. (GPT-4 says there's no data on this; would be very interesting to make a survey correlating camp#1 vs. camp#2 views by how much someone has meditated, though proving causation will be tricky.) If this is true, imo they don't seem to belong into the same category. ↩︎
Also, I think the hard meta problem of seeing has the major advantage that people tend to agree it's real -- many people claim not to experience any qualia, but everyone seems to agree that they seem to see images. Basically I think talking about seeing is just a really neat way to reduce conceptual confusion while retaining the hard part of the problem. And then there's also blindsight where people claim not to see and retain visual processing capabilities -- but much very much reduced capabilities! -- so there's some preliminary evidence that it's possible to tease out the empirical/causal effects of the hard meta problem. ↩︎
Looking at behaviour is conceptually straightforward, and valuable, and being done
I would push back against this. I agree with Apollo Research that evals isn't really a science yet. It mostly seems to be conducted according to vibes. Model internals could help with this, but things like building experience or auditing models using different schemes and comparing them could help make this more scientific.
Similarly, a lot of work with Model Organisms of Alignment requires a lot of careful thought to get right.
camille-berger on Basics of Handling Disagreements with PeopleHi! Thank you for writing this comment. I understand it can be a bit worrying to feel like your points might not be understood, but I'll give it a try nonetheless. I really genuinely want to fix any serious flaw in my approach.
However, I find myself in a slightly strange situation. Part of your feedback is very valuable. But I also believe that you misunderstood part of what I was saying. I could apply the skills I described in the post on your comment as a performative example, but I'm sensing that you could see it as a form of implied sarcasm, and it'd be unethical, so I'll refrain from doing that. There is a last part of me that just feels like your point is "part of this post is poorly written". I've made some minor edits in the hope that it accomodates your criticism.
My suggestion would be for you to watch real-life examples of the techniques I promote (say https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2WdbXsqj0M and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tdjtFRdbAo ) then comment on those examples instead.
Alternatively, you can just read my answers:
Rephrasing is often terrible;
Agree, I've added the detail on "genuinely asking your interlocutor if this is what they mean, and if not, feel free to offer a correction" (e.g. "If I got you right, and feel free to correct me if I didn't.... "). I think that this form makes it almost always a pleasant experience and I somehow forgot this important detail.
Your suggestion for attacking personal experience [...]
You're referring to point 4, not 5, right ?
If yes, I think this is extrapolating beliefs I don't actually have. I admit however I didn't choose a good example, you can refer to the Street Epistemology video above for a better one.
I'll replace the example soonish. In the mean time, please note that I do not suggest to "attack" personal experiences. I suggest to ask "What helps us distinguish reliable personal experiences from unreliable ones ?". This is a valid question to ask, in my view. For a bunch of reasons, this question has more chances to bounce off, so I prefer to ask "How do you distinguish personal experiences from [delusions]?", where "[delusions]" is a term that has been deliberately imported by the conversation partner. I think most interlocutors will be tempted to answer something in the lines of intersubjectivity, repeatability or empirical experiments. But I agree this is a delicate example and I'd better off pointing to something else.
Stories need to actually be short, clear, and to the point or they just confuse the matter more.
This was part of the details I was omitting. I'll add it.
Caring about their underlying values is useful, but it needs to be preceeded by curiousity about and understanding of, or it does no good.
Agree. This was implied in several parts of the post, i.e "Be genuinely truth-seeking" in the ethical caveats. But I don't think it is that hard.
A working definition may or may not be better than a theoretical one.
Please note that I'm talking about conversations that happen between rationalists and non-rationalists on entry-level arguments. E.g. "We can't lose control of AI because it's made of silicon", not "Davidad has a promising alignment plan" (please note that I'm not making the argument to apply these techniques to AI Safety Outreach and Advocacy, this is just an example). I think we really should not spend 15 minutes with someone not acquainted with LessWrong or even AI to define "losing control" in a way that is close to mathematically formal. I think that "What do you mean with losing control? Do you mean that, if we ask to do something specific, then it won't do it? Or do you mean something else?" is a good enough question. I'd rather discuss the details when the said person is more acquainted with the topic.
There will, of course, be situations where this isn't true. Law of equal and opposite advice applies. But in most entry-level arguments, I'd rather have people spend less time problematizing definitions as opposed to asking to their interlocutor what are their reasons.
People don't generally use Bayes rule!
Of course. I'm not suggesting to mention Bayes' Rule out loud. Nor am I suggesting people actually use Baye's Rule in their everyday life. I'm noting that techniques I think are more robust are the ones that lead people to apply an approximation thereoff, usually by contrasting one piece of evidence under two different hypotheses. The reference to 'Bayes' comes from Bayesian psychology reasoning, my model is closest to the one described in The Erotetic Theory of reasoning (https://web-risc.ens.fr/~smascarenhas/docs/koralus-mascarenhas12_erotetic_theory_of_reasoning.pdf)
Something said in point 8 seems like the key.
It is the key, I thought I hade made it clear with "Yet the mindset itself is the key".
However I don't want to make a post on it without explaining the ways in which it manifests, because healing myself made no sense, up until I started analyzing the habits of healed people. Some people who were already healed didn't want to "give the secrets away" or scoughed at my attempts. They came up to me as snob and preventing me to actually learn, I actually really got a lot out of noting down recurrent patterns in their conversations, if only because it allowed me to do Deliberate Practice.
Finally, please remember that this post is an MVP. It is not meant to be exhaustive and cover all the nuances of the techniques -it's just that I'd rather write a post than nothing at all, and the entire sequence will take time before publication.
If you feel like I completely misunderstood your points, and are open to have my skills applied to our very conversation, feel free to DM me a calendly link and we can sort it out live. I'd describe myself as a good conversation partner and I would put quite low the probability for the exchange to go awry.
PS: It would help me out if you could quote the [first sentence of the] parts you are reacting to, in order to make clear what you are talking about. I hope I'm right in understanding what parts of the post you are reacting to.
There are no properties of brain which define that brain is "you", except for the program that it runs.
lesswronguser123 on Does the "ancient wisdom" argument have any validity? If a particular teaching or tradition is old, to what extent does this make it more trustworthy?Honestly majority of the points presented here are not new and already been addressed in
https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality [? · GW]
or https://www.readthesequence.com/
I got into this conversation because I thought I would find something new here. As an egoist I am voluntarily leaving this conversation in disagreement because I have other things to do in life. Thank you for your time.
habryka4 on johnswentworth's ShortformI think the comment more confirms rather than disconfirms John's comment (though I still think it's too broad for other reasons). OP "funding" something historically has basically always meant recommending a grant to GV. Luke's language to me suggests that indeed the right of center grants are no longer referred to GV (based on a vague vibe of how he refers to funders in plural).
OP has always made some grant recommendations of grants to other funders (historically OP would probably describe those grants as "rejected but referred to an external funder"). As Luke says, those are usually ignored, and OP's counterfactual effect on those grants is much less, and IMO it would be inaccurate to describe those recommendations as "OP funding something". As I said in the comment I quote below, most OP staff would like to fund things right of center, but GV does not seem to want to, as such the only choice OP has is to refer them to other funders (which sometimes works, but mostly doesn't).
As another piece of evidence, when OP defunded all the orgs that GV didn't want to fund anymore, the communication emails that OP sent said that "Open Philanthropy is exiting funding area X" or "exiting organization X". By the same use of language, yes, it seems like OP has exited funding right-of-center policy work.
(I think it would make sense to taboo "OP funding X" in future conversations to avoid confusion, but also, I think historically it was very meaningfully the case that getting funded by GV is much better described as "getting funded by OP" given that you would never talk to anyone at GV and the opinions of anyone at GV would basically have no influence on you getting funded. Things are different now, and in a meaningful sense OP isn't funding anyone anymore, they are just recommending grants to others, and it matters more what those others think then what OP staff thinks)
harfe on johnswentworth's ShortformA related comment from lukeprog [EA(p) · GW(p)] (who works at OP) was posted on the EA Forum. It includes:
jeremy-gillen on Evaluating Stability of Unreflective AlignmentHowever, at present, it remains the case that most of the individuals in the current field of AI governance and policy (whether we fund them or not) are personally left-of-center and have more left-of-center policy networks. Therefore, we think AI policy work that engages conservative audiences is especially urgent and neglected, and we regularly recommend right-of-center funding opportunities in this category to several funders.
Intelligence/IQ is always good, but not a dealbreaker as long as you can substitute it with a larger population.
IMO this is pretty obviously wrong. There are some kinds of problem solving that scales poorly with population, just as there are some computations that scale poorly with parallelisation.
E.g. project euler problems [LW · GW].
When I said "problems we care about", I was referring to a cluster of problems that very strongly appear to not scale well with population. Maybe this [LW · GW] is an intuitive picture of the cluster of problems I'm referring to.
habryka4 on Bogdan Ionut Cirstea's ShortformOne of these types of orgs is developing a technology with the potential to kill literally all of humanity. The other type of org is funding research that if it goes badly mostly just wasted their own money. Of course the demands for legibility and transparency should be different.
jeremy-gillen on Context-dependent consequentialismI buy that such an intervention is possible. But doing it requires understanding the internals at a deep level. You can't expect SGD to implement the patch in a robust way. The patch would need to still be working after 6 months on an impossible problem, in spite of it actively getting in the way of finding the solution!