Anyone have any questions for David Chalmers?

Yeah, it's a complete waste of time, but you know, David Chalmers.

But yeah, we learn the physics used (very badly) and we rehash the same debates a dozen times. It's irritating, but again, David Chalmers.

The response Anna and I give in our forthcoming chapter "Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import" is the following:

Chalmers (2010) suggested that AI will lead to intelligence explosion if an AI is produced by an "extendible method," where an extendible method is "a method that can easily be improved, yielding more intelligent systems." McDermott (2012a, 2012b) replies that if P≠NP (see Goldreich 2010 for an explanation) then there is no extendible method. But McDermott's notion of an extendible method is not the one essential to the possibility of intelligence explosion. McDermott's formalization of an "extendible method" requires that the program generated by each step of improvement under the method be able to solve in polynomial time all problems in a particular class — the class of solvable problems of a given (polynomially step-dependent) size in an NP-complete class of problems. But this is not required for an intelligence explosion in Chalmers' sense (and in our sense). What intelligence explosion (in our sense) would require is merely that a program self-improve to vastly outperform humans, and we argue for the plausibility of this in section 3 of our chapter. Thus while we agree with McDermott that it is probably true that P≠NP, we do not agree that this weighs against the plausibility of intelligence explosion. (Note that due to a miscommunication between McDermott and the editors, a faulty draft of McDermott (2012a) was published in Journal of Consciousness Studies. We recommend reading the corrected version at http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dvm/papers/chalmers-singularity-response.pdf.)

I sent this to Drew and he said he agreed with our rebuttal.

I'd like to ask him for an explanation of what the hard problem is and why it's an actual problem, in a way that I can understand it (without reference to undefinable things like "qualia" or "subjective experience").

Oh yeah, I'd love to see a consciousness for dummies or consciousness 101 written by him. So far I haven't read up on the whole issue but merely thought a few times about consciousness myself and ran into intractable problems rather quickly. To read up on the vast amount of literature on the topic, and the hard problem in particular, won't become a priority any time soon due to the massive amount of time it would take me to digest it, and given that the expected payoff I assign to doing so is virtually zero.

It would also be interested if he is able to circumscribe the problem in layman's terms. It might hint at the possibility that a lot of the literature is made up of language games throwing around mysterious terminology that nobody ever bothered to define.

That's okay. The p-zombies won't feel offended.

In fairness to Chalmers, from here:

I think that most arguments that use zombies can actually be rephrased in a zombie-free way, so that these arguments can be set aside if one prefers; but zombies at least provide a vivid and provocative illustration.

He does believe in the logical possibility of zombies (though I can't understand why) but does not feel that they are necessary to his position. You can certainly read his papers if you want to know anything more specific.

ideally coming up with a mathematical description of the problem.

That would be like asking for a mathematical description of the problem "why is there something rather than nothing?"

One way in which people lose their sensitivity to such questions is that they train themselves to turn every problem into something that can be solved by their favorite formalized methods. So if it can't be turned into a program, or a Bayesian formula, or..., it's deemed to be meaningless.

But every formalism starts life as an ontology. Before we "formalized" logic or arithmetic, we related to the ontological content of those topics: truth, reasoning, numbers... The quest for a technical statement of philosophical hard problems often amounts to an evasion of a real ontological problem that underlies or transcends the formalism or discipline of choice. XiXiDu, you don't strike me as someone who would deliberately do this, so maybe you're just being a little naive - you want to think rigorously, so you're reaching for a familiar model of rigor. But the really hard questions are characterized by the fact that we don't know how to think rigorously about them - we don't have a method, ready at hand, which allows us to mechanically compute the answer. There was a time when there was no such thing as algebra, or calculus, or propositional logic. How were they invented? Look into that question, and you will be investigating how rigor and method was introduced where previously it did not exist. That is the level at which "hard problems" live.

The combination of computationalism and physicalism has become a really potent ossifier of thought, because it combines the rule-following of formalism with the empirical relevance of physics. "We know it's all atoms, so if we can reduce it to atoms we're done, and neurocomputationalism means we can focus on explaining why a question was asked, rather than on engaging with its content" - that's how this particular reductionism works.

There must be a Zen-like art to reawakening fresh perception of reality in individuals attached to particular formalisms, formulas, and abstractions, but it would require considerable skill, because you have to enter into the formalism while retaining awareness of the ontological context it supposedly represents: you have to reach the heart of the conceptual labyrinth where the reifier of abstractions is located, and then lead them out, so they can see directly again the roots in reality of their favorite constructs, and thereby also see the aspects of reality that aren't represented in the formalism, but which are just as real as those which are.

If Turing-completeness is insufficient to compute consciousness then it should be perfectly possible to pinpoint where computer science breaks down.

But that isn't the problem. Chalmers never asserts that you can't simulate consciousness, in the sense of making an abstract state-machine model that imitates the causal relations of consciousness with the world. The question is why it feels like something to be what we are: why is there any awareness. (There are, again, ways to evade the question here, e.g. by defining awareness behavioristically.)

It was probably the 21st Century Monads, Chalmers' favorite band.