LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Humans often really really want something in the world to happen

This sentence is adjacent to my core concern regarding AI alignment, and why I'm not particularly reassured by the difficulty-of-superhuman-performance or return-on-compute reassurances regarding AGI: we don't need superhuman AI to deal superhuman-seeming amounts of damage. Indeed, even today's "perfectly-sandboxed" models (in that according to the most reliable publicly-available information none of the most cutting-edge models are allowed direct read/write access to the systems which would allow them to plot and attain world domination or the destruction of humanity (or specific nations' interests) have the next-best thing: whenever a new technological lever emerges in the world, humans with malicious intentions are empowered to a much greater degree than those who want strictly the best^[1] for everybody.  There are also bit-flip attacks on aligned AI which are much harder to implement on humans.

1. ^{^}

   Using "best" is fraught but we'll pretend that "world best-aligned with a Pareto-optimal combination of each person's expressed reflective preferences and revealed preferences, to the extent that those revealed preferences do not represent akrasia or views and preferences which the person isn't comfortable expressing directly and publicly but does indeed have" is an adequate proxy to continue along this line of argument; the other option is developing a provably-correct theory of morality and politics which would take more time than this comment by 2-4 orders of magnitude.

My first issue with your post is that this initial ontological assumption is neither mentioned explicitly nor motivated. Nothing in your post can be used as proof of this initial assumption.

There are always going to be many different ways someone could object to a view. If you were a Christian, you'd perhaps be objecting that the existence of incorporeal God-given Souls is the real crux of the matter, and if I were intellectually honest I'd be devoting the first half of the post to arguing against the Christian Soul.

Rather than trying to anticipate these objections, I'd rather just hear them stated out loud by their proponents and then hash them out in the comments. This also makes the post less boring for the sorts of people who are most likely to be on LW: physicalists and their ilk.

Now, what would be the experience of getting copied, seen from a first-person, "internal", perspective? I am pretty sure it would be something like: you walk into the room, you sit there, you  hear say the scanner working for some time, it stops, you walk out. From my agnostic perspective, if I were the one to be scanned it seems like nothing special would have happened to me in this procedure. I didnt feel anything weird, I didnt feel my "consciousness split into two" or something.

Why do you assume that you wouldn't experience the copy's version of events?

The un-copied version of you experiences walking into the room, sitting there, hearing the scanner working, and hearing it stop; then that version of you experiences walking out. It seems like nothing special happened in this procedure; this version of you doesn't feel anything weird, and doesn't feel like their "consciousness split into two" or anything.

The copied version of you experiences walking into the room, sitting here, hearing the scanner working, and then an instantaneous experience of (let's say) feeling like you've been teleported into another room -- you're now inside the simulation. Assuming the simulation feels like a normal room, it could well seem like nothing special happened in this procedure -- it may feel like blinking and seeing the room suddenly change during the blink, while you yourself remain unchanged. This version of you doesn't necessarily feel anything weird either, and they don't feel like their "consciousness split into two" or anything.

It's a bit weird that there are two futures, here, but only one past -- that the first part of the story is the same for both versions of you. But so it goes; that just comes with the territory of copying people.

If you disagree with anything I've said above, what do you disagree with? And, again, what do you mean by saying you're "pretty sure" that you would experience the future of the non-copied version?

Namely, if I consider this procedure as an empirical experiment, from my first person perspective I dont get any new / unexpected observation compared to say just sitting in an ordinary room. Even if I were to go and find my copy, my experience would again be like meeting a different person which just happens to look like me and which claims to have similar memories  up to the point when I entered the copying room. There would be no way to verify or to view things from their first person perspective.

Sure. But is any of this Bayesian evidence against the view I've outlined above? What would it feel like, if the copy were another version of yourself? Would you expect that you could telepathically communicate with your copy and see things from both perspectives at once, if your copies were equally "you"? If so, why?

On the contrary, I would be wary to, say, kill myself or to be destroyed after the copying procedure, since no change will have occured to my first person perspective, and it would thus seem less likely that my "experience" would somehow survive because of my copy.

Shall we make a million copies and then take a vote? :)

I agree that "I made a non-destructive software copy of myself and then experienced the future of my physical self rather than the future of my digital copy" is nonzero Bayesian evidence that physical brains have a Cartesian Soul that is responsible for the brain's phenomenal consciousness; the Cartesian Soul hypothesis does predict that data. But the prior probability of Cartesian Souls is low enough that I don't think it should matter.

You need some prior reason to believe in this Soul in the first place, the same as if you flipped a coin, it came up heads, and you said "aha, this is perfectly predicted by the existence of an invisible leprechaun who wanted that coin to come up heads!". Losing a coinflip isn't a surprising enough outcome to overcome the prior against invisible leprechauns.

and it would also force me to accept that even a copy where the "circuit" is made of water pipes and pumps, or gears and levers also have an actual, first person experience as "me", as long as the appropriate computations are being carried out.  

Why wouldn't it? What do you have against water pipes?

Nuke might miss the moon

• and fall back to earth, where it would detonate, because of the planned design which would explode upon impact
  • in the USSR
  • in the non-USSR (causing international incident)

• and circle sadly around the sun forever

• and circle gleefully about the Earth-Moon Langrange points, wandering around the Earth's Hill sphere, causing consternation for years

I am an Asian (Korean, specifically) man who has suffered from bad cavities all his life and who also suffers from Asian glow to the point of it being uncomfortable to drink; I am also planning to get the Lumina treatment. I do not think that the amount of alcohol produced is particularly relevant; I drink occasionally and eat a ton of fruit, and thus I think that my marginal risk is basically negligible.

I find myself strongly disagreeing with what is being said in your post. Let me preface by saying that I'm mostly agnostic with respect to the possible "explanations" of consciousness etc,  but I think I fall squarely within camp 2. I say mostly because I  lean moderately towards physicalism.

First, an attempt to describe my model of your ontology:

You implicitly assume that consciousness / subjective experience can be reduced to a physical description of the brain, which presumably you model as a classical (as opposed to quantum) biological electronic circuit.  Physically, to specify some "brain-state" (which I assume is essentially the equivalent of a "software snapshot" in a classical computer) you just need to specify a circuit connectivity for the brain, along with the currents and voltages between the various parts of the circuit (between the neurons let's say). This would track with your mentions of reductionism and physicalism and the general "vibe" of your arguments.  In this case I assume you treat conscious experience roughly as "what it feels like" to be software that is self-referential on top of taking in external stimuli from sensors. This software is instantiated on a biological classical computer instead of a silicon-based one.

With this in mind, we can revisit the teleporter scenario. Actually, let's consider a copier instead of a teleporter, in the sense that you dont destroy the original after finishing the procedure. Then, once a copy is made, you have two physical brains that have the same connectivity, the same currents and the same voltages between all appropriate positions. Therefore, based on the above ontology, the brains are physically the same in all the ways that matter and thus the software / the experience is also the same. (Since software is just an abstract "grouping" which we use to  refer to the  current physical state of the hardware)

Assuming this captures your view, let me move on to my disagreements:

My first issue with your post is that this initial ontological assumption is neither mentioned explicitly nor motivated. Nothing in your post can be used as proof of this initial assumption. On the contrary,  the teleporter argument, for example,  becomes simply a tautology if you start from your premise - it cannot be used to convince someone that doesn't already subscribe to your views on the topic. Even worse, it seems to me that your initial assumption forces you to contort (potential) empirical observation to your ontology, instead of doing the opposite.

To illustrate, let's assume we have the copier - say it's a room you walk into, you get scanned and then a copy is reconstructed in some other room far away.  Since you make no mention of quantum, I guess this can be a classical copy, in the sense that it can copy essentially all of the high-level structure, but it cannot literally copy the positions of specific electrons, as this is physically impossible anyways. Nevertheless, this copier can be considered "powerful" enough to copy the connectivity of the brain and the associated currents and voltages. Now, what would be the experience of getting copied, seen from a first-person, "internal", perspective? I am pretty sure it would be something like: you walk into the room, you sit there, you  hear say the scanner working for some time, it stops, you walk out. From my agnostic perspective, if I were the one to be scanned it seems like nothing special would have happened to me in this procedure. I didnt feel anything weird, I didnt feel my "consciousness split into two" or something. Namely, if I consider this procedure as an empirical experiment, from my first person perspective I dont get any new / unexpected observation compared to say just sitting in an ordinary room. Even if I were to go and find my copy, my experience would again be like meeting a different person which just happens to look like me and which claims to have similar memories  up to the point when I entered the copying room. There would be no way to verify or to view things from their first person perspective.

At this point, we can declare by fiat that me and my copy are the same person / have the same consciousness because our brains, seen as classical computers, have the same structure, but this experiment will not have provided any more evidence to me that this should be true. On the contrary, I would be wary to, say, kill myself or to be destroyed after the copying procedure, since no change will have occured to my first person perspective, and it would thus seem less likely that my "experience" would somehow survive because of my copy.

Now you can insist that philosophically it is preferable to assume that brains are classical computers etc, in order to retain physicalism which is preferable to souls and cartesian dualism and other such things. Personally, I prefer to remain undecided, especially since making the assumption brain= classical hardware, consciousness=experience as software leads to weird results. It would force me to conclude that the copy is me even though I cannot access their first person perspective (which defeats the purpose) and it would also force me to accept that even a copy where the "circuit" is made of water pipes and pumps, or gears and levers also have an actual, first person experience as "me", as long as the appropriate computations are being carried out.  

One curious case where physicalism could be saved and all these weird conclusions could be avoided would be if somehow there is some part of the brain which does something quantum, and this quantum part is the essential ingredient for having a first person experience. The essence would be that, because of the no-cloning theorem, a quantum-based consciousness would be physically impossible to copy, even in theory. This would get around all the problems which come with the copyability implicit in classical structures. The brain would then be a hybrid of classical and quantum parts, with the classical parts doing most of the work (since neural networks which can already replicate a large part of  human abilities are classical) with some quantum computation mixed in, presumably offering some yet unspecified fitness advantage. Still, the consensus is that it is improbable that quantum computation is taking place in the brain, since quantum states are extremely "fragile" and would decohere extremely rapidly in the environment of the brain...

Wow - Didn't expect to see that headline (other than 2 weeks ago)

it’s very possible that it could become a practical problem at some point in the future.

I kind of doubt it.  Practical problems will have complexity and details that overwhelm this simple model, making it near-irrelevant.  Alternately, it may be worth trying to frame a practical decision that an individual or small group (so as not to have to abstract away crowd and public choice issues) could make where this is important.

Do you think a logarithmic scale makes more sense than a linear scale?

Yes, but it probably doesn't fix the underlying problem that quantifications are unstable and highly variable across agents.

Wouldn't it follow that in the same way you anticipate the future experiences of the brain that you "find yourself in" (i.e. the person reading this) you should anticipate all experiences, i.e. that all brain states occur with the same kind of me-ness/vivid immediacy?

What's the empirical or physical content of this belief?

I worry that this may be another case of the Cartesian Ghost rearing its ugly head. We notice that there's no physical thingie that makes the Ghost more connected to one experience or the other; so rather than exorcising the Ghost entirely, we imagine that the Ghost is connected to every experience simultaneously.

But in fact there is no Ghost. There's just a bunch of experience-moments implemented in brain-moments.

Some of those brain-moments resemble other brain-moments, either by coincidence or because of some (direct or indirect) causal link between the brain-moments. When we talk about Brain-1 "anticipating" or "becoming" a future brain-state Brain-2, we normally mean things like:

• There's a lawful physical connection between Brain-1 and Brain-2, such that the choices and experiences of Brain-1 influence the state of Brain-2 in a bunch of specific ways.
• Brain-2 retains ~all of the memories, personality traits, goals, etc. of Brain-1.
• If Brain-2 is a direct successor to Brain-1, then typically Brain-2 can remember a bunch of things about the experience Brain-1 was undergoing.

These are all fuzzy, high-level properties, which admit of edge cases. But I'm not seeing what's gained by therefore concluding "I should anticipate every experience, even ones that have no causal connection to mine and no shared memories and no shared personality traits". Tables are a fuzzy and high-level concept, but that doesn't mean that every object in existence is a table. It doesn't even mean that every object is slightly table-ish. A photon isn't "slightly table-ish", it's just plain not a table.

Which just means, all brain states exist in the same vivid, for-me way, since there is nothing further to distinguish between them that makes them this vivid, i.e. they all exist HERE-NOW.

But they don't have the anticipation-related properties I listed above; so what hypotheses are we distinguishing by updating from "these experiences aren't mine" to "these experiences are mine"?

Maybe the update that's happening is something like: "Previously it felt to me like other people's experiences weren't fully real. I was unduly selfish and self-centered, because my experiences seemed to me like they were the center of the universe; I abstractly and theoretically knew that other people have their own point of view, but that fact didn't really hit home for me. Then something happened, and I had a sudden realization that no, it's all real."

If so, then that seems totally fine to me. But I worry that the view in question might instead be something tacitly Cartesian, insofar as it's trying to say "all experiences are for me" -- something that doesn't make a lot of sense to say if there are two brain states on opposite sides of the universe with nothing in common and nothing connecting them, but that does make sense if there's a Ghost the experiences are all "for".

I think that paper is some evidence that there's typically no huge effect from internal activations being optimized for predicting future tokens (on natural language). But I don't think it's much (if any) evidence that this doesn't happen to some small extent or that it could be a huge effect on certain other natural language tasks.

(In fact, I think the myopia gap is probably the more relevant number than the local myopia bonus, in which case I'd argue the paper actually shows a pretty non-trivial effect, kind of contrary to how the authors interpret it. But I haven't read the paper super closely.)

Also, sounds like you're aware of this, but I'd want to highlight more that the paper does demonstrate internal activations being optimized for predicting future tokens on synthetic data where this is necessary. So, arguably, the main question is to what extent natural language data incentivizes this rather than being specifically about what transformers can/tend to do.

In that sense, thinking of transformer internals as "trying to" minimize the loss on an entire document might be exactly the right intuition empirically (and the question is mainly how different that is from being myopic on a given dataset). Given that the internal states are optimized for this, that would also make sense theoretically IMO.

“Imagine a square circle, and now answer the following questions about it…”.

Just use the Chebyshev (aka maximum or $L^{\infty }$) metric.