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

Is any subculture not a gift economy? Smuggling in 'small' connotations to exclude things like 'the gay community' (though ca. 1960 maybe them too) or 'goths,' but I think it's the default and it's notable when a subculture deviates from it.

Possible places to find exceptions, highly monetizing and/or systematizing, many of which I suspect are as much gift economies as us:

• Anglophone quant traders
• Pro and semi-pro poker players
• Crypto coin boosters
• /r/WallStreetBets

C.S. Lewis is the usual author to cite for the other direction, and I've met both. More common among rationalist types. The Moon Is Harsh Mistress is possibly more effective than Rand.

if we needed correct internal computations for qualia (and not just correct behavior) would mean the overall system would falsely believe to have a quale (like being in pain), it would act, in all ways, like it was in pain, but actually, it wouldn't be in pain.

To all appearances LLMs already do that and have for several years now. So, yes, that is clearly possible for a non-conscious thing to do.

Your definition of qualia is nonstandard, and defines it out of meaningfulness. More standard definitions generally include at least one synonym for 'ineffable' and I believe them to be entirely mysterious answers to mysterious questions.

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).