Editing Essays into Solstice Speeches: Standing offer: if you have a speech to give at Solstice or other rationalist event, message me and I'll look at your script and/or video call you to critique your performance and help

This seems kind of silly, as a complaint. Many people would be disappointed by this; therefore, a good future won't have it more than necessary as a tradeoff with other good things. The important puzzles where solving them is better on net than leaving them to be solved, will be solved; puzzles where humanity will get more out of never being told hints toward the answer than we lose from having the problems still exist, will not be solved. It's possible that the latter category ends up empty and all that's left is play, that solving Fun Theory doesn't leave 'real' problems, but in a good future that will only happen if it's worth it.

Oh, my mistake, technically you just made sweeping claims without attempting to justify them in the slightest. That is not literally equivalent to claiming they're obvious. However, that is the same thing in practice. If you want to say "Ontologically speaking, any physical system exhibiting the same input-output pattern as a conscious being has identical conscious states." and then never explain why you believe this to be true or defend it in any way, even when challenged - which you did - then you are, in every way that matters, claiming that it is obvious to every possible interlocutor. That no interlocutor's doubts make it worth your time to explain yourself or defend your position. Let alone make an attempt to convince someone who has different priors, or different experiences.

(This is, of course, what people claiming something is obvious mean. That no one, or no one who counts, could possibly deny them. This is why good teachers of philosophy, mathematics, and science strongly discourage their students from getting in the habit of saying things are obvious; because that is almost never true.)

Also, I reread the parts of the Sequences about the zombie argument and I stand by what I said - they're basically with me, that qualia are irrelevant. No useful definition of consciousness relies on qualia. If your definition of consciousness relies on qualia it is not useful, because it necessarily makes no empirical predictions. It is not quite as ridiculous as full epiphenomenal zombieism, but it is bad for the same reason.

As I recall the Sequences, they are very negative on qualia as a concept. Belief in quales is a belief which does not pay rent. I am generally unconvinced humans have qualia. I don't see that I do. There appears to be no means of demonstrating them by experiment, and so presumptively they have no predictive power and so might as well not exist; if they exist, they're irrelevant, and therefore unparsimonious.

It does seem plausible that an abruptly-stopping mind upload is conscious. It does not seem obvious; there's a boundary condition and consciousness is very plausibly sensitive to boundary conditions and abrupt jumps according to many varieties of the theory. Most of your claims are of this nature; if you stop making the arrogant and unjustified claims that they're obvious, there would be no reason to make further objections, because they're perfectly plausible.

Then nothing can be obvious.

Indeed, that's probably true in most contexts. "Obvious" rarely if ever has explanatory or didactic power and most people's vocabularies would be better served by dropping it. I make use of 'seems obvious' much more than 'is obvious' because it is much more useful as a statement about my mind (conveys information about my reaction) than about the world (makes a universal claim which is enormously difficult to justify).

Different truths are obvious to different people.

And if it's not obvious to everyone, it isn't obvious. That's what it means to claim something is obvious.

That's not possible in principle. No matter what you empirically observe in a system, there is a possibility it's not a quale (because perhaps you were mistaken about what constitutes a quale).

Then it's not possible in principle for it to become obvious and you should stop trying to convince people it is.

I gave an example where it is not necessary.

No, you gave examples where it was still necessary. In none of your thought experiments is it clear that the variant emulation is conscious. In the 'chocolate ice cream' example I'd say it is very likely it is not conscious, because you can't just make a small change like that and not have it propagate to larger ones, and making an arbitrary spot change without that will disrupt what's going on in a way that probably, at least temporarily, disrupts consciousness. Compare to a concussion with loss of memory, or blackout drunkenness, during which most people will agree no consciousness is taking place.

It is not a necessary condition for the claim that this is true. It is very much necessary for the claim that it is obvious.

This is a matter of philosophy. No research results can help here, nor they are needed.

If no empirical results will make it clear - and your thought experiments certainly wouldn't! - then it will never, ever be obvious.

It's still not been common until much more recently than that. Five years at most, which is not a new normal. It hasn't been working out that well for anyone except Trump himself and there's a decent chance it explodes on his death (which will almost certainly be before '32).

You don't seem to understand the distinction between 'mislead' and 'lie to the face.' Or, you know, you're lying to our face. Which would be a stupid plan, but maybe you're doing it on purpose.

Even politicians lying to their audience's faces is quite rare, in the USA. That it's become meaningfully popular in the last 10 years is considered extremely notable and a sign of the decay and apocalypse of the United States, and to lesser degrees other Western countries. Bill Clinton got caught lying to Congress's face about a trivial but embarrassing matter and "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" might as well be the words on his tombstone even though he suffered no real material consequences for it, because it's very rare and no one will forget it.

Lying is hard. Being misinformed, or interpreting true fair information in a biased way to reach a biased conclusion, or writing the bottom line first, or quoting true statements in such a way as to give a deliberately misleading impression, are easy. Politicians do them all the time, and this is expected. Journalists did it a little until the Web revolution and now do it more than that, and this is, again, considered very notable and a sign of the decay of the industry. Scientists and experts do it a little, and almost always the first two types, but when they do even a little of the latter types this makes people riot and consider it very notable and a sign of the decay of the field.

Oh, fantastic, I just went looking. Thanks for investigating this!

It may not be a necessary condition, but if you want to present it as obvious, it is necessary. Anything short of an exact match is only allegedly the same until you have some research results that don't currently exist to demonstrate strong reason to believe your lesser conditions are sufficient.