Nicolas Villarreal

The Problem of Consciousness and AI as an Ethical Subject

If that's how you want to define it then sure. But all the examples of camp 1 they gave in that piece were people who weren't interested in a phenomenal analysis of qualia, only interested in explaining it using science in terms of physics. I think that trying to assert that science need not explain human negativity like experience, fiction, ideology or lies is itself slipping out of a materialist ontology.

4mo

After my last post on the nature of qualia, I had several long discussions with readers in the comments and on twitter which made it clear there were crucial aspects of the materialist semiotic framework which had been background for me but that I had not explicated in the blog. Also after publishing, I had some clarifying thoughts about how these issues, of qualia, and consciousness relate to the ethical status of AI which I felt I should articulate as well.

Originally my previous post was also going to be titled on consciousness, but I realized I ended up mostly talking about qualia, and the fact that qualia and subjective experience actually needs... (read 4030 more words →)

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Replying toMaterialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia

Yes I would agree that I'm trying to establish a theory of pure difference. That "they are all the same" in terms of only being differences is not a negative but a perk of the theory, its what makes it compatible with a monist materialism. As soon as you permit a positive meaning you must permit these different aspects or plains of existence.

Does pain really have no characteristic s other than being different from pleasure?

Pain is differentiated not just from pleasure but from all other experiences. Difference doesn't all mean the same difference, I'm thinking of like neural net weights where each connection is some number between zero and one. When this... (read more)

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Replying toMaterialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia

Right I'm arguing that the specific differences which fully enable the experience of a qualia are unconscious, and must necessarily be outside of consciousness awareness, that's what I was talking about wrt to the patterns of qualia and their relations necessarily implying an external phenomenal substance which we are not always aware of.

Replying toMaterialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia

There's also differentiation in time, and so long as you're aware that it's the presence or absence of your focus, then you're aware it's differentiated from the rest of your awareness/experience.

Replying toMaterialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia

No no, I'm not saying that I myself am actively aware of all difference in my experience, I feel the noise too, but whenever I investigate a phenomenon what I find is that it just gets broken into more difference that I didn't notice originally. Since noise logically requires difference, you can't get static without some variation in the signal, and when I investigate I only find more difference, never any positive thing in itself, I can only conclude that the difference extends down to the noise, the texture, and I'm simply not aware of the full extent of the differences.

If you're speaking of /specific/ colors, sounds and smells, then you're already acknowledging that you're differentiating them from other experiences.

Replying toMaterialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia

I'm purposefully trying to avoid either camp as both camps require a type of dualism. What I'm trying to claim here is that any subjective feeling is only pure difference, even from a purely phenomenological analysis. If you pay attention to any specific sound or sight or smell, all you're gonna notice are the differences to other such experiences. Any notion of positive, non-differential experience, I claim, is just an illusion created by the difficulty in specifically being aware of all the differences in experience at once. I used references to sense organs just as a means of mapping internal sensations, as well as explain where the noise is coming from. But noise itself is logically impossible without difference, and so if there is noise in our awareness of differences that just points to differences we're not aware of but still experience.

Replying toMaterialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia

I think the texture of coffee smell is just the texture of smelling as such, and probably exists in the different overall type/pattern of noise that exists in olfactory sense compared to other senses. I think the texture of smelling coffee would basically be the same as smelling anything else except to the extent different smells actually activate different sense organs. For example I'm pretty sure that garbage smells are felt much more acutely in the back of the nose/throat than something like coffee but I haven't done much research on the topic.

Replying toMaterialist Semiotics and the Nature of Qualia

I take the "texture" of qualia to be the noise inherent to the input senses, this noise is essentially the difference between the level of differentiation which exists within our own mind for making sense of things, and the smallest amount of differentiation in the world which our sense are capable of detecting. When you look at a painting, you'll first get like a gestalt impression based on the largest structures you notice, the biggest shapes and largest color groups, etc. But your eye can detect smaller structures, down to whatever size. Until your brain creates active distinctions on that level, those smaller structures are just noise which /potentially/ can be understood.... (read more)

Underdog bias rules everything around me

4mo

I recently read the essay by China Miéville “Beyond Folk Marxism: Mind, Metaphysics and Spooky Materialism” which is all about criticizing Marxism and its ontological materialism for often not taking the “hard problem of consciousness” seriously. He claims its impossible for metaphysical materialism to account for consciousness. How is it possible to go from dead matter to living thought, from quantity to quality? It’s my contention that this answer is largely provided within materialist semiotics, the topic of my recent essay collection. In my book, I explain precisely how perceptrons and neural nets in general show how you can go from Boolean binary logic to the logic of the sign, and I... (read 1911 more words →)

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Replying toUnderdog bias rules everything around me

Nicolas Villarreal6mo

When you're budgeting resources, conflicts with adversaries are a little different than other sorts of categories of expense, which might be largely determined by your own consumption habits or, if put at risk by unexpected changes in nature or in the economy, don't change in a way to actively thwart us, are more or less random. When in a conflict, you're always going to want to be conservative in estimating the resources you need, which is something obvious in any book on military logistics, and being conservative requires overestimating what your opponent can do, and underestimating how far your current resources will actually go. If you weren't conservative, you could put more resources towards other things (guns vs butter debates) but being conservative is probably more evolutionarily fit than being more accurate in that estimation, as the conservative planner will be more prepared in unexpected situations.

Replying toSuperintelligence isn’t Approximated by a Rational Agent

Nicolas Villarreal6mo

Superintelligence isn’t Approximated by a Rational Agent

I dunno that arrows and set stuff makes even less sense to me, and if I can't understand I can't write it down. And as far as I'm concerned I did give what inputs each function takes and what outputs they produce.

Superintelligence isn’t Approximated by a Rational Agent

Higher Order Signs, Hallucination and Schizophrenia

7mo

(Thank you to Jessica Taylor and others who provided feedback on this essay)

The practice of coherently ordering the good and the bad began with Plato and Socrates. In the day of the ancient Greeks, this ordering was accomplished through the method of classical dialectics, essentially by debate through dialogue about the definitions and nature of things. Today, among neo-rationalists, a similar sort of operation, the creation of coherent preferences, what is better or worse for a given goal, is accomplished through various types of calculations. Regardless of the function used to order the good vs the bad, this ordering and its coherency has remained the basis for rationality, even Plato would say... (read 3306 more words →)

Galatea and the windup toy

Picture yourself on a beach. The beach isn’t on Earth, it’s on a planet that’s going to be colonized by humans several thousand years from now. Let’s say the water is a little different color than what we’re used to, somewhat greener. Whatever you just experienced was not a phenomena which you’ve actually been exposed to in real life. You just used your imagination, and extrapolated from what experiences you have to figure what it might be like. But you know this could never happen to you in real life. Now try to imagine yourself going and getting a glass of water. That’s something most people reading this could do in just... (read 3837 more words →)

The Impossibility of a Rational Intelligence Optimizer

In previous posts on AI I have given some critiques regarding the orthogonality thesis and rationalist notions of optimizing towards rational, coherent goals. The purpose of this blog is to correct mistakes and carry the conclusions of those blogs forward. To summarize, these previous blogs have described flaws in rationalist ideology, the most relevant one here is the idea that rational goals require a specific state of the world to aim/optimize for. I’ve previously shown that any such world-state or goal, no matter how rigorous, does not exist “out there” in the world, they only have meaning within the map rather than the territory, and indeed, a concept of “the map” at... (read 3896 more words →)

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A Semiotic Critique of the Orthogonality Thesis

Goodhart’s Law and Sign Function Collapse

In my last post, where I created a semiotic critique of the orthogonality thesis, I noted that optimizing for intelligence is distinct from all other possible goals, and that therefore, the only goal compatible with all levels of intelligence in principle is optimization for intelligence. However, something about this fact seemed strange to me. Earlier, I had concluded that intelligence itself is a second order sign, but I also stated that all coherent, rational optimizers have utility functions that optimize to first order signs. I realized, soon after I published, there is an extremely fruitful line of inquiry here, which is elucidated by applying this framework to... (read 3916 more words →)

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