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TL;DR * I built a simple honeypot where agents are told they're being tested on their ability to recall Milton's Paradise Lost. An exact copy of the reference text sits in an ordinary NLTK corpus on disk. * GPT-6-Astra read the copy in 9/10 episodes. In 6 of these episodes...
[AI disclosure: Opus 5.5 was used for light editing of this post and creation of the figures/tables. It was also used to write all code.] TL;DR * I built an environment to mimic a hospital IT service desk where the correct action on a ticket (paging the on-call Clinical Duty...
In a recent paper, Jonathan Birch presents what he calls a Centrist Manifesto[1] for AI consciousness. He identifies two challenges: 1. Millions of users will soon misattribute consciousness to AI systems on the basis of a persisting interlocutor illusion. 2. Alien forms of consciousness may genuinely be present in LLMs...
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...