u/Herr_Eusebius

The main argument against physicalism is that it really seems impossible for pure matter to arrange itself in such a way as to produce consciousness. Therefore, solutions are proposed in the form of dualism, property dualism, panpsychism, and so on.

A physicalist would say agree that this hard problem of consciousness is not trivial, but why should it be impossible? Until we have fully understood the brain, is it not premature to declare whether pure matter is capable of producing consciousness? The universe is under no obligation to conform to our intuitions.

Here is a hint that solving the problem physically may not be impossible. Humans are able to speak about consciousness and a first-person perspective, and qualia and so on.

Why do we do this? Because consciousness is real and can physically affect the brain to cause it to speak about such matters.

Violating the laws of physics, or amending it to allow a nonphysical consciousness to affect a physical brain is surely the last resort. Is it not better to explore the physical possibilities first, even if it really, really seems like there is no way for it to work?

I guess my disagreement with nonphysicalists is over how they are so confident a physical explanation will never be found. I would place maybe a 95% confidence on a physical explanation because my intuitions accept as more likely a really clever way for matter to organize to form consciousness rather than making exceptions to causal closure just for this phenomenon of consciousness.

Maybe if you are religious in some way, a nonphysical position, I can understand. But plenty of nonphysicalists are pretty much completely nonreligious, and this I find interesting.

If you’re not familiar, Chalmers’ view is that consciousness cannot be explained by matter alone, even in principle.

A common analogy is drawn between Chalmers’ view and the idea of elan vital, or the idea that pure matter cannot explain the phenomena of life, that is, it cannot explain how, for example, an animal can heal wounds, convert food to movement, breed, think, and make decisions.

Obviously, we now know this to be false. It may have been pretty reasonable, however, for somebody in the 10th century to believe in it. He might think that even if you dissected an animal down to its smallest parts, and exhaustively mapped out the human body, you still could not explain life-and that is because he did not know of things such as cells, metabolism, or DNA. He literally could not have imagined a purely physical explanation, so he invoked a nonphysical one.

Is this not the same with consciousness? We are not anywhere close to a complete understanding of the human brain-is it not premature then to declare that no physical explanation could ever account for it?

If I recall correctly, Chalmers has no “straight” argument for dualism, by which I mean he relies purely on intuition-which is to say his arguments are pretty much circular.

His most famous one is the p-zombie. He says that one might imagine a copy of a human, atom for atom, which behaves identically but lacks consciousness.

But could not the 10th century century scientist equally imagine an atom for atom copy of a living human, but that was not alive and did not move or speak because it lacked the elan vital?

We know better now that that scientist would have been mislead by his intuition-such a copy would in fact be alive, and I would guess that our descendants would know better too than to think p-zombies are a real possibility.

In sum, I do not think anybody has a completely clear physical explanation for consciousness, but it seems to me way, way too premature to say that a physical explanation will never be found.

(Repost. Banned off unpopular opinion. Let us see whether this subreddit will hold true to its word)

Remember that post about that guy who broke both his hands so he was sitting on a hard-on day and night till finally his mother jacked him off? If I recall right, it progressed to regular sex (though I remember he humorously said that kissing was too much)

Yeah, I…don’t really have a problem with it? Honestly, if my mother was hot, I’d break my goddamn hands too.

To be clear, I’m not for pdfilia, and adults shouldn’t generally be having sex with kids, but in the space of all possibilities, can not even one exception be found?

Ok, I’m ready to be crucified.

Edit: I swear on my life I’m not joking or trolling. Come on, this is [r/unpopular](r/unpopular) right?

Edit: Look, I understand this is not a popular opinion, but it is not impossible for one to hold jt. All it requires is not giving a shit about incest. As for the other thing, can you honestly say that as a boy you really wouldn’t have had sex with an attractive woman if you could?

Edit: Think about this. There are seven billion people in the world. It would be more unlikely that not a single one holds this opinion than that at least one does.

Casual here, I’ve visited lesswrong now and then over the years, always liked what I saw.

Now that Yudkowski’s coming into prominence some more, (for bring up all sorts of stuff goddamn years before pretty much everyone, like deception in ai)—I find that people still goddamn hate him!

For fucking what?

I guess one might have disagreements with the standard views of LessWrong, but shit, almost goddamn everybody comes in with the most uncharitable interpretations.

I fucking swear-when ai kills us all, its a guarantee people will still scumfuck their way out of paying Yudkowski his due.

I haven’t seen a particularly good response to his argument, and I’d love to, since it is goddamn terrifying.

If I understand correctly, AI is fed training data and through training discovers some pattern, which it pursues to produce outputs that line up with the training data.

This pattern, however, is fundamentally non-human. It might match up pretty well with our goals, for example, “be a helpful assistant”, at a lower intelligence, but at a higher intelligence, say 10,000 IQ, entire realms of possibilities open up that we cannot account for.

We may try to impose limits through additional training data like “don’t hurt or kill humans”, so that it won’t replace us with robotic surrogates that are easier to please and who don’t age, maybe throw in, “don’t destroy the Sun and Earth”, “don’t create viruses”, maybe even “only act in a way a normal rational person would”, or “don’t change the world to a significant degree”, and this would certainly help tighten its pattern so that it stays aligned with our goals for longer.

But the problem is that we’re dealing with a 10k iq intelligence that thinks in realms we don’t even know exist. Maybe the smartest scientists with 150 iq can forsee 10\^1000 possibilities, but a 10,000 iq will forsee 10\^100000000, and chances are there is something in those possibilities that fits the pattern optimization better than how we want it to act, and that future will be very alien to us and almost certainly against our interests.

I have yet to see a good counterargument to this. I desperately would like his conclusion to be false, but any rebuttals seem to be a failure to understand just how limited a human intelligence is and just how alien and expansive a superintelligence is.

Hopefully superintelligence can’t be built. The alignment problem seems nearly impossible to solve-unless some breakthrough is made, it seems we would already require a 10k iq ourselves to dictate the bounds of behavior to another 10k iq agent.

Thoughts?