LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think this post fails as an explanation of equanimity. Which, of course, is dependent on my opinion about how equanimity works, so you have a pretty easy response of just disputing that the way I think equanimity works is correct. But idk what to do about this, so I'll just go ahead with a critique based on how I think equanimity works. So I'd say a bunch of things:

• Your mechanism describes how PNSE or equanimity leads to a decrease in anxiety via breaking the feedback loop. But equanimity doesn't actually decrease the severity of an emotion, it just increases the valence! It's true that you can decrease the emotion (or reduce the time during which you feel it), but imE this is an entirely separate mechanism. So between the two mechanisms of (a) decreasing the duration of an emotion (presumably by breaking the feedback loop) and (b) applying equanimity to make it higher valence, I think you can vary each one freely independent of the other. You could do a ton of (a) with zero (b), a ton of (b) with zero (a), a lot of both, or (which is the default state) neither.

• Your mechanism mostly applies to mental discomfort, but equanimity is actually much easier to apply to physical pain. You can also apply it to anxiety, but it's very hard. I can reduce suffering from moderately severe physical pain on demand (although there is very much a limit) and ditto with itching sensations, but I'm still struggling a lot with mental discomfort.

• You can apply equanimity to positive sensations and it makes them better! This is a point I'd emphasize the most because imo it's such a clear and important aspect of how equanimity works. One of the ways to feel really really good is to have a pleasant sensation, like listening to music you love, and then applying maximum equanimity to it. I'm pretty sure you can enter the first jhana this way (although to my continuous disappointment I've never managed to reach the first jhana with music, so I can't guarantee it.)

  ... actually, you can apply equanimity to literally any conscious percept. Like literally anything; you can apply equanimity to the sense of space around you, or to the blackness in your visual field, or to white noise (or any other sounds), or to the sensation of breathing. The way to do this is hard to put into words (similar to how an elementary motor command like lifting a finger is hard to put into words); the way it's usually described is by trying to accept/not fight a sensation. (Which imo is problematic because it sounds like equanimity means stopping to do something, when I'm pretty sure it's actively doing something. Afaik there are ~zero examples of animals who learn to no longer care about pain, so it very much seems like the default is that pain is negative valence, and applying equanimity is an active process that increases valence.)

I mean again, you can just say you've talked about something else using the same term, but imo all of the above are actually not that difficult to verify. At least for me, it didn't take me that long to figure out how to apply equanimity to minor physical pain, and from there, everything is just a matter of skill to do it more -- it's very much a continuous scale of being able to apply more and more equanimity, and I think the limit is very high -- and of realizing that you can just do same thing wrt sensations that don't have negative valence in the first place.

Interesting approach, thanks!

Any updates on the API? (thinking of) Playing around with interesting ways to index LW, figure there should be something better than scraping

On this:

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.

I think the problem identified here is in large part a demand problem, in that lots of AI people only wanted AI capabilities, and didn't care for AI interpretability at all, so once the scaling happened, a lot of the focus went purely to AI scaling.

(Which is an interesting example of Goodhart's law in action, perhaps.)

See here:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gXinMpNJcXXgSTEpn/ai-craftsmanship#Qm8Kg7PjZoPTyxrr6 [LW(p) · GW(p)]

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].

I definitely agree that there exist such problems where the scaling with population is pretty bad, but I'll give 2 responses here:
 

1. The differences between a human level AI and an actual human are the ability to coordinate and share ontologies better between millions of instances, so the common problems that arise when trying to factorize out problems are greatly reduced.
2. I think that while there are serial bottlenecks to lots of problem solving in the real world such that it prevents hyperfast outcomes, I don't think that serial bottlenecks are the dominating factor, because the stuff that is parallelizable like good execution is often far more valuable than the inherently serial computations like deep/original ideas.

The short version is that I'm not sold on rationality, and while I haven't read 100% of the sequences it's also not like my understanding is 0%. I'd have read more if they weren't so long. And while an intelligent person can come up with intelligent ways of thinking, I'm not sure this is reversible. I'm also mostly interested in tail-end knowledge. For some posts, I can guess the content by the title, which is boring. Finally, teaching people what not to do is really inefficient, since the space of possible mistakes is really big.

Your last link needs an s before the dot.

Anyway, I respect your decision, and I understand the purpose of this site a lot better now (though there's still a small, misleading difference between the explanation of rationality and in how users are behaving. Even the name of the website gave the wrong impression).

Oops, I meant cellular, and not molecular. I'm going to edit that.

I can come up with a story in which AI takes over the world. I can also come up with a story where obviously it's cheaper and more effective to disable all of the nuclear weapons than it is to take over the world, so why would the AI do the second thing? I see a path where instrumental convergence leads anything going hard enough to want to put all of the atoms on the most predictable path it can dictate. I think the thing that I don't get is what principle it is that makes anything useful go that hard. Something like (for example, I haven't actually thought this through) "it is hard to create something with enough agency/creativity to design and implement experiments toward a purpose without also having it notice and try to fix things in the world which are suboptimal to the purpose."

It was probably thinking of sodium hydroxide rather than elemental sodium.

Wouldn't that conflict with the quote? (Though maybe they're not doing what they've implied in the quote)

I agree that we probably want most theory to be towards the applied end these days due to short timelines. Empirical work needs theory in order to direct it, theory needs empirics in order to remain grounded.

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. So it's 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:

• the easy vs. hard axis, which is essentially about the describing the coarse functional behavior vs. why it exists at all; and
• the [no-prefix] vs. meta axis, which is about explaining the thing itself vs. why people talk about the thing. So for every $X$, the meta problem of $X$ is "explain why people talk about $X$"

(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 [LW(p) · GW(p)] that I'm convinced 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.

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 because I can imagine either one of the problems not existing without 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 meta 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.