That explanation is too simple for those who think/feel subjective states exist, however. While someone may be fooled about what they're perceiving, they can't be fooled about that they're perceiving, from a first person view. It's much harder to know if someone else is perceiving or just behaving like they are.
But there seems to be something of a fundamental divide between those who find consciousness obvious and those who don't. ISTR Chalmers, after on a boat trip with one of the eliminative materialists (might have been Dennett or Dawkins) said that all the experiences he had had while on the trip just confirmed that he was conscious and thus the existence of consciousness, and the eliminative materialist said he still had no idea what Chalmers was on about.
Dennett, in his gloriously titled book Consciousness Explained seems to suggest we're merely tricked by our perceptual apparatus into believing we have conscious experience, similarly to how a succession of still frames, 24 per second, fools movie audiences into believing they see moving pictures (I may be a little unfair, but that's more or less what I took away from my reading) which makes me wonder if Dennett actually is (or is indulging in literary cosplaying as) a philosophical zombie.[1]
That's like saying movies technically don't exist because they're just a series of still frames. That sequence of still frames is a real thing in its own right, and it has a name.
The movie is more analogous to the conscious person, or perhaps “the mind,” and no one is proposing that those things don’t exist.
Insisting that consciousness must be real because it feels undeniably real is analogous to insisting that the way movies work is by showing continuous motion because that’s undeniably what it feels like when you’re watching a movie.
The difference would be that in the movie case, there is a you that is being tricked, that is present even through the trickery. You're having the experience of something moving, but it's really your senses being tricked into constructing this experience out of something else.
But for the case of consciousness, the "what's being tricked" is having experience at all. So the claim "insisting that consciousness is real because it feels real" rests on the cogito-ergo-sum like observation that if there were no experience, there would be nobody to feel it was real to begin with because feeling is an experience. That you are feeling it (in a first person sense) is evidence in itself, although frustratingly, not evidence that can be communicated.
That's what makes it so hard, though. Either "cogito ergo sum" seems self-evidently true, or it seems self-evidently false, and there's no way of getting to the position by indirect means. And because it can't be communicated, there's seemingly no way to unambiguously show someone else what you mean.
> That explanation is too simple for those who think/feel subjective states exist, however.
Normally good faith pursuits of knowledge don’t explicitly start with the pursuer having already decided that only one conclusion is acceptable even if that conclusion feels like it must be the correct conclusion.
> Pick any human. I claim there exists some subject that ChatGPT has a better understanding of than this human, based on a surface-level evaluation.
Isn't that a low bar, though? For any human, you can find some subject that that human knows next to nothing about. It's kind of like saying "Google is smarter than humanity because for any human, I can find some fact that a Google search will reveal that that human doesn't know".
Maybe it is a low-bar, that's subjective. But I do mean understanding, not just knowing some facts. You could say that google was the point where we could say "Pick any human. I claim there exists some subjects that Google has more factual knowledge of than this human, based on a pure reproduction based evaluation."
With ChatGPT I claim that it beats humans in real "understanding" of at least some subject
From the Wikipedia article about the multi-armed bandit problem:
>Originally considered by Allied scientists in World War II, it proved so intractable that, according to Peter Whittle, the problem was proposed to be dropped over Germany so that German scientists could also waste their time on it.[13]
"General, the Allies have dropped pamphlets containing what our top scientists are calling a memetic infohazard."
"An infohazard? Have the eggheads come up with a new term for propaganda, we've got people to handle this stuff, why are you bringing it up to me?"
"Well, sir, they say this time it's different. It's not propaganda for ordinary citizens, it's a distraction for scientists and technical personal."
"Okay ... do they have any recommendations?"
"Yes sir, they say the only thing we need to do is make sure that the eggheads don't read it."
"That's it? Well, these are men of science and discipline, that should be easy. Issue the order. I wonder why they thought it was so important that you would have to interrupt me."
"I couldn't say, sir. They seemed quite agitated."
Meanwhile, in the lab.
"So, this folder contains an enemy memetic infohazard. In order to prevent it from taking effect we've been ordered to not read it."
Several scientists give knowing glances to each other.
"A real memetic infohazard? I wonder how they accomplished that?" The scientist moves towards the folder.
"Wait, what are you doing? We're not supposed to read it."
"It's fine. I'll be the only one reading it and then I'll let you guys know what I find." The scientist opens the folder and looks at the papers within while making several 'hmm' sounds. "Hey, Frank, what do you think of this."
"No, you said you would be the only one!"
"Just me and Frank. Don't be a wet blanket."
Frank begins to look over the papers, "You know, I bet this applies to what Sarah has been working on. Let's go talk to her."
"Wait, no. You just said ..."
"Me, Frank, and Sarah, no big deal." The scientists leave the room with the folder.
Hello fellow SCP agents. We're supposed to keep our involvement with the SCP foundation hidden. This antimemetic sentence will take care of any leaks ;-)
Yudkowskyist rationalism is a prime example that what you simply banish out of hand may percolate back up through your ideas -- unless you know enough about whatever it is you're trying to banish to recognize it.
The thing they tried to banish is religion: it simply morphed into another form. "Those who do not learn about religion are doomed to repeat it", as it were.
I'm always mildly surprised when I encounter people on the internet talking about Roko's basilisk as something that Eliezer Yudkowsky / "the rationalists" believe in. Very few people ever took it seriously, and Yudkowsky wasn't one of them.
Another one that comes up a lot is the idea that "AGI ruin is vanishingly unlikely, but it would be so bad that we should be worried about it anyway". I don't think I've ever seen anyone make that argument with a straight face. Yudkowsky himself thinks that AGI ruin is very likely indeed. (As in, it has a >50% chance of ending life on Earth within a century.)
Of course that group does hold many wacky beliefs. Things like the entire universe splitting into pieces billions of times a second, people's brains being a kind of generalized refrigerator, the wisdom of not taking a free $1000, and the possibility of bringing sufficiently well preserved dead people back to life. Also, thinking that there's a high chance of AGI ruin is, if anything, an even wackier belief than thinking it's very unlikely. So there's still plenty of room to make an argument that Yudkowsky and many of his readers have ended up believing wacky things despite their disdain for religion.
I do find it very odd, though, that those two misconceptions are so popular. It's like Gell-Mann amnesia: If people can be so wrong about this particular internet subculture that I happen to know something about, how can I trust anything said by anyone about a culture they aren't a member of?
I didn't say the community at large believes in it. I did say that it's a repackaged idea that originated from their community, and that's 100% true.
Maybe you're interpreting when I said they could "get behind" the idea as to mean I was implying that the entire community endorsed it, but that's not what I had intended to convey. What I meant to say was that some members of that community came up with this idea and then engaged with it in a way they would not engage with God or Jesus and Hell solely because of the framing of the deity as a technology instead of a spirit, and Hell as a simulation instead of another dimension.
Probably not at all, although it's hard to think/talk in a general fashion about such large systems.
The Axis Powers strike me as fighting a more reasonable war than (for instance) their WWI aggressor predecessors if you view it as simply a grab for land and resources. It's a thing that a Khanate or a Roman governor would understand and appreciate. I'd say that the actions of the Germans and Japanese would make perfect sense to the ruling class of most pre-modern states.
If you want to summarize it in one sentence: yes, they were. In a nutshell, the argument is that the world wars were so destructive because the economic calculus changed, but people required the horrors of the wars to realize that the change had happened.
Because the world is impure and the link between the real world and the mathematical domain will never be ironclad.
For instance, say that Joe makes a deepfake and then signs it with his key. Sure, it's beyond doubt (assuming keys weren't leaked, etc) that Joe either took or created the picture, but that doesn't in itself tell you whether Joe made a deepfake or not.
It's the same as in supposed blockchain logistics operations. If Fred the farmer says he harvested x bags worth of grain but some were stolen before he could ship them, there's no way to mathematically verify whether the theft actually took place or the harvest just came up short.
In both cases you're going to need some kind of monitoring, and that's the purpose deepfake detection algorithms would serve.
> We are FAR beyond such coarse distinctions in the era of surveillance capitalism. Isn't that the point these days? To market at such a fine granularity that it becomes individuals?
As long as the marketing algorithms still go "hey, I see you bought a fridge. Here are ten more fridges you may be interested in", let me express some skepticism at their supposed intelligence.
Such algorithms don't necessarily KNOW that you bought a fridge. They certainly change tack, however, when you stop clicking on those ads or click on others, or any of countless and unknowable other cues.
Other than some small number of exceptions(). I am not convinced that marketing budgets are fluff.
() Huy Fong Foods (Siracha Hot Sauce) -- that's literally the only product company I can think of that doesn't do marketing, apparently?
Huy Fong marketed by networking within the Vietnamese immigrant communities of Southern California. Marketing is literally every action taken that results in sales - not merely paid advertising alone.
Doesn't that prove too much? For any coin you can imagine a more deflationary version of that coin. Bitcoin has had plenty of such forks. The argument above would indicate that the most deflationary would win, but it doesn't. So it can't be the whole truth.
I think that assumes we're in a state where people are buying coins for their supposed use. But at the moment, demand is mostly speculative.
There's also a very crowded market for coins right now. Most will not take off. Even if coin X has perfect fundamentals, there's a self-fulfilling equilibrium where nobody buys it but instead buys coin Y which is slightly worse.
My argument is that in the long run, a very inflationary coin would not be attractive. Using it for transactions would rely on greater fool theory. You buy it so you can sell it immediately. But that means you must sell it to either (a) someone who holds it and loses half his money, or (b) someone who buys it and sells it immediately, again to either (a) or (b)....
The intent is to be outcompeted as an investment vehicle. The goal is approaching zero investment.
I'm thinking that inflation would be priced in as platform fees for exchanges. Thinking of transactions in terms of throughput, the question is "how long do I have to store EUR in INF to be able to match an EUR sell with a buy." The transaction fee would be (at least) the inflation over that range.
The notion that blockchains should produce value by competing for investment is exactly the wrong idea that I'm trying to avoid.
An inflation half-life of a week is probably excessive. It really only has to be bigger than the IRL currencies it interfaces with. (Which in turn only have to be bigger than the value growth in their market.) But proposing a high inflation like that puts the focus of efficiency and monetary gain on improving transaction performance, which is imo where it should be.
Also having a high inflation lets you limit the size of the ledger - eventually, old transactions simply become irrelevant by being too comparatively small to matter. You could even reward people for erasing their historic transactions - ie. allow them to roll several historic transactions into one, as a way to reduce the inflation tax. (Or phrased differently, tax ledger entries.)
I understand that you don't want people to buy it for investment. My point is that even buying a coin for transactions relies on having someone to sell it to later. Take an equilibrium in which everybody uses InflationCoin for transactions, paying the cost implicit in the inflation rate. Why would somebody not offer FixedCoin as an alternative, identical except for having lower inflation and hence a smaller cost? Why would FixedCoin usage not then spread to replace VanishingCoin?
Well, the idea is people would use LessInflatyCoin as long as the inflation was still high enough to make it unviable as an investment vehicle. But once inflation was high enough to make the coin usable as an investment vehicle, it would become a worse unit of transaction because you'd expose yourself to Bitcoin's attendant bubble risk. For instance, if you were to sell something for FixedCoin 1mil, you might have a hard time predicting how much your FC 1mil were worth tomorrow, or in a week, and your incentive would be to keep the money and gamble that it goes up, whereas IC's value development is highly predictable (ie. just slightly negative) because it's only driven by current use. I'd expect this to make IC more appealing to "boring" corporations.
