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Imagine a being very much like a human, with rich conscious experience but no affective conscious states. Call such a creature a Philosophical Vulcan (or p-Vulcan for short.) p-Vulcans differ from the regular Vulcans on Star Trek who are low-affect, hyper-logical beings that nonetheless, presumably feel some pleasure and pain....
[Epistemic status: This is a fictional dialogue which surveys the main moves in the literature between Camp #1 and Camp #2 positions described in Rafael Harth’s post Why it’s so hard to talk about consciousness. The goal of this post is to present both sides as engaging in a charitable...
When 16 year old chess grandmaster Wei Yi defeated Bruzón Batista with a brilliant sequence involving two piece sacrifices and a precise follow-up with a non-forcing Queen move, it was quickly hailed as one of the greatest chess games of all time and an early candidate for best game of...
As a staunch physicalist I’ve spent a long time wondering how anyone could possibly find the zombie argument compelling. The intuition just doesn’t land for me. As Eliezer points out in his article here, a zombie duplicate of yourself would profess that it is conscious, when asked whether it had...
TL;DR The Chinese Room argument implies that computer programs can never really understand language. In this post, I’ll argue that LLM’s have a limited form of language understanding through teleosemantics i.e. the idea that meaning is acquired[1] through optimisation. The Chinese Room The Chinese Room argument, introduced by John Searle...
Elaborating on my comment here in a top-line post. The alignment problem is usually framed as an alignment of moral norms. In other words, how can we teach an agent how it ought to act in a given situation such that its actions align with human values. In this way,...
[Epistemic status: Speculative. I've written this post mostly to clarify and distill my own thoughts and have posted it in an effort to say more wrong things.] Introduction The goal of this post is to discuss a theoretical strategy for AI alignment, particularly in the context of the sharp left-turn...