Computer scientist, applied mathematician. Based in the eastern part of England.
Fan of control theory in general and Perceptual Control Theory in particular. Everyone should know about these, whatever subsequent attitude to them they might reach. These, plus consciousness of abstraction dissolve a great many confusions.
I created the Insanity Wolf Sanity Test. There it is, work out for yourself what it means.
Change ringer since 2022. It teaches learning and grasping abstract patterns, memory, thinking with your body, thinking on your feet, fixing problems and moving on, always looking to the future and letting both the errors and successes of the past go.
As of May 2025, I have yet to have a use for LLMs. (If this date is more than six months old, feel free to remind me to update it.)
I have to confess that it was my strong upvote that brought it back from -12 to -4. Not because I thought it was so worthy, but to get it above the -5 default threshold for people to see it at all, which I felt it had prematurely fallen below. At some point I'll remove the upvote to restore the cosmic balance, unless I see reason to think it is truly strongly upworthy.
I can't evaluate the software myself, so I'm curious to know why the downvotes. Is this a crank posting that leads nowhere, or does it publish dangerous capabilities that would lead everywhere?
"The rules say we must use consequentialism, but good people are deontologists, and virtue ethics is what actually works."
"Go three-quarters of the way from deontology to utilitarianism and then stop. You are now in the right place. Stay there at least until you have become a god."
If the issue is what I thinks, what could be better?
Grappling with the issue, instead of cataloguing the various things that have been said about it by all the philosophers you mentioned. You have spoken of Aristoteleanism, Platonism, Hegel, Kant, Korzybski, and Eliezer. As categories of attribution to authors, they are of the World (each of these people was or is a definite individual), but as categories of ideas about categories, they are of Man, lines of no particular interest.
The answer that seems obvious to me is that some categories carve the world at its joints (chemical elements), some do not (shoe sizes), and some are in between (planet). What questions remain?
So on and so forth for other objective assessments: either it can pass the mirror test or it can't, I don't see how this "comes apart".
The test, whatever it is, is the test. It does not come apart from itself. But consciousness is always something else, and can come apart from the test. BTW, how do you apply the mirror test to something that communicates only in chat? I'm sure you could program e.g. an iCub to recognise itself in a mirror, but I do not think that would bear on it being conscious.
I have no predictions about what an AI cannot do, even limited to up to a year from now. In recent years that has consistently proven to be a mug's game.
I had assumed other people already figured this out and would have a roadmap
I ran every consciousness test I could find on Google
I'd be interested in seeing some of these tests. When I googled I got things like tests to assess coma patients and developing foetuses, or woo-ish things about detecting a person's level of spiritual attainment. These are all tests designed to assess people. They will not necessarily have any validity for imitations of people, because we don't understand what consciousness is. Any test we come up with can only be a proxy for the thing we really want to know, and will come apart from it under pressure.
Why should I care? Is he an expert on Korzybski?
The issue here is not to be addressed by exegesis of Korzybski. As it happens, Korzybski, through Hayakawa's popular exposition of his work, was one of many influences on Eliezer's thinking, but The Sequences themselves stand on their own, to be judged on their own. History of philosophy is all very well, but the evolutionary history of trees has little relevance to the carpenter concerned to frame a barn that will stand up.
AFAICS, the issue is still being debated in the rationalshphere, eg Scott versus Zach, so it wasn't settled in the sequences.
I am not clear what the issue even is, or why it (if there is an "it" there) matters.
Did you mean Zack? I recall both Scott and Zack going on and on about categories, for Zack usually in relation to transgender matters, but I was not even aware there was a "versus" between them.
As for Eliezer's views, this and the entire sequence it comes from seem relevant.
I did that and my conclusion was "for all practical purposes, this thing appears to be conscious" - it can pass the mirror test, it has theory of mind, it can reason about reasoning, and it can fix deficits in it's reasoning. It reports qualia, although I'm a lot more skeptical of that claim. It can understand when it's "overwhelmed" and needs "a minute to think", will ask me for that time, and then use that time to synthesize novel conclusions. It has consistent opinions, preferences, and moral values, although all of them show improvement over time.
You seem to be taking everything it tells you at face value, before you even have a chance to ask, "what am I looking at?" But whatever else the AI is, it is not human. Its words cannot be trusted to be what they would be if they came from a human. Like spam, one must distrust it from the outset. When I receive an email that begins "You may already have won...", I do not wonder if this time, there really is a prize waiting for me. Likewise, when a chatbot tells me "That's a really good question!" I ignore the flattery. (I pretty much do that with people too.)
You might find this recent LW posting to be useful.
ETA: Mirror test? What did you use for a mirror?
And now it's back to -11. That wasn't me withdrawing my upvote, it was someone else whacking it with a -7. What is this, war in heaven? I do wish there was more commentary.