xlr8harder writes:

In general I don’t think an uploaded mind is you, but rather a copy. But one thought experiment makes me question this. A Ship of Theseus concept where individual neurons are replaced one at a time with a nanotechnological functional equivalent.

Are you still you?

Presumably the question xlr8harder cares about here isn't semantic question of how linguistic communities use the word "you", or predictions about how whole-brain emulation tech might change the way we use pronouns.

Rather, I assume xlr8harder cares about more substantive questions like:

1. If I expect to be uploaded tomorrow, should I care about the upload in the same ways (and to the same degree) that I care about my future biological self?
2. Should I anticipate experiencing what my upload experiences?
3. If the scanning and uploading process requires

A friend has spent the last three years hounding me about seed oils. Every time I thought I was safe, he’d wait a couple months and renew his attack:

“When are you going to write about seed oils?”

“Did you know that seed oils are why there’s so much {obesity, heart disease, diabetes, inflammation, cancer, dementia}?”

“Why did you write about {meth, the death penalty, consciousness, nukes, ethylene, abortion, AI, aliens, colonoscopies, Tunnel Man, Bourdieu, Assange} when you could have written about seed oils?”

“Isn’t it time to quit your silly navel-gazing and use your weird obsessive personality to make a dent in the world—by writing about seed oils?”

He’d often send screenshots of people reminding each other that Corn Oil is Murder and that it’s critical that we overturn our lives...

Produced while being an affiliate at PIBBSS^[1]. The work was done initially with funding from a Lightspeed Grant, and then continued while at PIBBSS. Work done in collaboration with @Paul Riechers, @Lucas Teixeira, @Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel, and Sarah Marzen. Paul was a MATS scholar during some portion of this work. Thanks to Paul, Lucas, Alexander, Sarah, and @Guillaume Corlouer for suggestions on this writeup.

Introduction

What computational structure are we building into LLMs when we train them on next-token prediction? In this post we present evidence that this structure is given by the meta-dynamics of belief updating over hidden states of the data-generating process. We'll explain exactly what this means in the post. We are excited by these results because

• We have a formalism that relates training data to internal

You have heard and perhaps even used the expression "observable universe", right? What is included in the purportedly observable universe? The moon? The whole of the moon? If you had heard the expression "observable universe" a century ago, would you have been including the far side of the moon in that category?

tl;dr: Recently reported GPT-J experiments [1 2 3 4] prompting for definitions of points in the so-called "semantic void" (token-free regions of embedding space) were extended to fifteen other open source base models from four families, producing many of the same bafflingly specific outputs. This points to an entirely unexpected kind of LLM universality (for which no explanation is offered, although a few highly speculative ideas are riffed upon).

Work supported by the Long Term Future Fund. Thanks to quila for suggesting the use of "empty string definition" prompts, and to janus for technical assistance.

Introduction

"Mapping the semantic void: Strange goings-on in GPT embedding spaces" presented a selection of recurrent themes (e.g., non-Mormons, the British Royal family, small round things, holes) in outputs produced by prompting GPT-J to define...

Daniel Dennett, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tufts University, well-known for his work in philosophy of mind and a wide range of other philosophical areas, has died.

Professor Dennett wrote extensively about issues related to philosophy of mind and cognitive science, especially consciousness. He is also recognized as having made significant contributions to the concept of intentionality and debates on free will. Some of Professor Dennett’s books include Content and Consciousness (1969), Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (1981), The Intentional Stance (1987), Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Breaking the Spell (2006), and From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017). He published a memoir last year entitled I’ve Been Thinking. There are also several books about him and his ideas. You