Where I write up some small ideas that I've been happening that may eventually become their own top level posts. I'll start populating with a few ideas I've posted up as twitter/Facebook thoughts.
I can't wrap my brain around the computational theory of consciousness.
Who decides how to interpret the computations? If I have a beach, are the lighter grains 0 and darker grains 1? What about the smaller and bigger grains? What if I decide to use the motion of the planets to switch between these 4 interpretations.
Surely under infinite definitions of computation, there are infinite consciousnesses experience infinite states at any given time, just from pure chance.
Have you seen Brian Tomasik's page about this? If so what do you find unconvincing, and if not what do you think of it?
4Trinley Goldenberg
He seems to be trying to formalize the intuition about what types of computational consciousness we already intuitively give moral weight to, but the very thing I'm worried about is that our intuitions are wrong (in the same way that our intuitions about physics don't hold when we think about environments much bigger or smaller than our own).
That is, if the computational consciousness theory is true, and computations with higher complexity feel just as much pain and pleasure and dreams and goals etc as things we normally define as conscious, why should we lower their moral weight?
That makes sense, thanks for clarifying. What I've seen most often on LessWrong is to come up with reasons for preferring simple interpretations in the course of trying to solve other philosophical problems such as anthropics, the problem of induction, and infinite ethics. For example, if we try to explain why our world seems to be simple we might end up with something like UDASSA or Scott Garrabrant's idea of preferring simple worlds (this section is also relevant). Once we have something like UDASSA, we can say that joke interpretations do not have much ... (read more)
Where I write up some small ideas that I've been happening that may eventually become their own top level posts. I'll start populating with a few ideas I've posted up as twitter/Facebook thoughts.