social media | Qualia Computing

Political Peacocks

Posted on April 10, 2017 by algekalipso

Extract from Geoffrey Miller’s essay “Political peacocks”

The hypothesis

Humans are ideological animals. We show strong motivations and incredible capacities to learn, create, recombine, and disseminate ideas. Despite the evidence that these idea-processing systems are complex biological adaptations that must have evolved through Darwinian selection, even the most ardent modern Darwinians such as Stephen Jay Gould, Richards Dawkins, and Dan Dennett tend to treat culture as an evolutionary arena separate from biology. One reason for this failure of nerve is that it is so difficult to think of any form of natural selection that would favor such extreme, costly, and obsessive ideological behavior. Until the last 40,000 years of human evolution, the pace of technological and social change was so slow that it’s hard to believe there was much of a survival payoff to becoming such an ideological animal. My hypothesis, developed in a long Ph.D. dissertation, several recent papers, and a forthcoming book, is that the payoffs to ideological behavior were largely reproductive. The heritable mental capacities that underpin human language, culture, music, art, and myth-making evolved through sexual selection operating on both men and women, through mutual mate choice. Whatever technological benefits those capacities happen to have produced in recent centuries are unanticipated side-effects of adaptations originally designed for courtship.

[…]

The predictions and implications

The vast majority of people in modern societies have almost no political power, yet have strong political convictions that they broadcast insistently, frequently, and loudly when social conditions are right. This behavior is puzzling to economists, who see clear time and energy costs to ideological behavior, but little political benefit to the individual. My point is that the individual benefits of expressing political ideology are usually not political at all, but social and sexual. As such, political ideology is under strong social and sexual constraints that make little sense to political theorists and policy experts. This simple idea may solve a number of old puzzles in political psychology. Why do hundreds of questionnaires show that men more conservative, more authoritarian, more rights-oriented, and less empathy-oriented than women? Why do people become more conservative as the move from young adulthood to middle age? Why do more men than women run for political office? Why are most ideological revolutions initiated by young single men?

None of these phenomena make sense if political ideology is a rational reflection of political self-interest. In political, economic, and psychological terms, everyone has equally strong self-interests, so everyone should produce equal amounts of ideological behavior, if that behavior functions to advance political self-interest. However, we know from sexual selection theory that not everyone has equally strong reproductive interests. Males have much more to gain from each act of intercourse than females, because, by definition, they invest less in each gamete. Young males should be especially risk-seeking in their reproductive behavior, because they have the most to win and the least to lose from risky courtship behavior (such as becoming a political revolutionary). These predictions are obvious to any sexual selection theorist. Less obvious are the ways in which political ideology is used to advertise different aspects of one’s personality across the lifespan.

In unpublished studies I ran at Stanford University with Felicia Pratto, we found that university students tend to treat each others’ political orientations as proxies for personality traits. Conservatism is simply read off as indicating an ambitious, self-interested personality who will excel at protecting and provisioning his or her mate. Liberalism is read as indicating a caring, empathetic personality who will excel at child care and relationship-building. Given the well-documented, cross-culturally universal sex difference in human mate choice criteria, with men favoring younger, fertile women, and women favoring older, higher-status, richer men, the expression of more liberal ideologies by women and more conservative ideologies by men is not surprising. Men use political conservatism to (unconsciously) advertise their likely social and economic dominance; women use political liberalism to advertise their nurturing abilities. The shift from liberal youth to conservative middle age reflects a mating-relevant increase in social dominance and earnings power, not just a rational shift in one’s self-interest.

More subtley, because mating is a social game in which the attractiveness of a behavior depends on how many other people are already producing that behavior, political ideology evolves under the unstable dynamics of game theory, not as a process of simple optimization given a set of self-interests. This explains why an entire student body at an American university can suddenly act as if they care deeply about the political fate of a country that they virtually ignored the year before. The courtship arena simply shifted, capriciously, from one political issue to another, but once a sufficient number of students decided that attitudes towards apartheid were the acid test for whether one’s heart was in the right place, it became impossible for anyone else to be apathetic about apartheid. This is called frequency-dependent selection in biology, and it is a hallmark of sexual selection processes.

What can policy analysts do, if most people treat political ideas as courtship displays that reveal the proponent’s personality traits, rather than as rational suggestions for improving the world? The pragmatic, not to say cynical, solution is to work with the evolved grain of the human mind by recognizing that people respond to policy ideas first as big-brained, idea-infested, hyper-sexual primates, and only secondly as concerned citizens in a modern polity. This view will not surprise political pollsters, spin doctors, and speech writers, who make their daily living by exploiting our lust for ideology, but it may surprise social scientists who take a more rationalistic view of human nature. Fortunately, sexual selection was not the only force to shape our minds. Other forms of social selection such as kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and even group selection seem to have favoured some instincts for political rationality and consensual egalitarianism. Without the sexual selection, we would never have become such colourful ideological animals. But without the other forms of social selection, we would have little hope of bringing our sexily protean ideologies into congruence with reality.

Beyond Turing: A Solution to the Problem of Other Minds Using Mindmelding and Phenomenal Puzzles

Posted on November 12, 2016 by algekalipso

Here is my attempt at providing an experimental protocol to determine whether an entity is conscious.

If you are just looking for the stuffed animal music video skip to 23:28.

Are you the only conscious being in existence? How could we actually test whether other beings have conscious minds?

Turing proposed to test the existence of other minds by measuring their verbal indistinguishability from humans (the famous “Turing Test” asks computers to pretend to be humans and checks if humans buy the impersonations). Others have suggested the solution is as easy as connecting your brain to the brain of the being you want to test.

But these approaches fail for a variety of reasons. Turing tests can be beaten by dream characters and mindmelds might merely work by giving you a “hardware upgrade”. There is no guarantee that the entity tested will be conscious on its own. As pointed out by Brian Tomasik and Eliezer Yudkowsky, even if the information content of your experience increases significantly by mindmelding with another entity, this could still be the result of the entity’s brain working as an exocortex: it is completely unconscious on its own yet capable of enhancing your consciousness.

In order to go beyond these limiting factors, I developed the concept of a “phenomenal puzzle”. These are problems that can only be solved by a conscious being in virtue of requiring inner qualia operations for their solution. For example, a phenomenal puzzle is to arrange qualia values of phenomenal color in a linear map where the metric is based on subjective Just Noticeable Differences.

To conduct the experiment you need:

A phenomenal bridge (e.g. a biological neural network that connects your brain to someone else’s brain so that both brains now instantiate a single consciousness).
A qualia calibrator (a device that allows you to cycle through many combinations of qualia values quickly so that you can compare the sensory-qualia mappings in both brains and generate a shared vocabulary for qualia values).
A phenomenal puzzle (as described above).
The right set and setting: the use of a proper protocol.

Here is an example protocol that works for 4) – though there may be other ones that work as well. Assume that you are person A and you are trying to test if B is conscious:

A) Person A learns about the phenomenal puzzle but is not given enough time to solve it.
B) Person A and B mindmeld using the phenomenal bridge, creating a new being AB.
C) AB tells the phenomenal puzzle to itself (by remembering it from A’s narrative).
D) A and B get disconnected and A is sedated (to prevent A from solving the puzzle).
E) B tries to solve the puzzle on its own (the use of computers not connected to the internet is allowed to facilitate self-experimentation).
F) When B claims to have solved it A and B reconnect into AB.
G) AB then tells the solution to itself so that the records of it in B’s narrative get shared with A’s brain memory.
H) Then A and B get disconnected again and if A is able to provide the answer to the phenomenal puzzle, then B must have been conscious!

To my knowledge, this is the only test of consciousness for which a positive result is impossible (or maybe just extremelly difficult?) to explain unless B is conscious.

Of course B could be conscious but not smart enough to solve the phenomenal puzzle. The test simply guarantees that there will be no false positives. Thus it is not a general test for qualia – but it is a start. At least we can now conceive of a way to know (in principle) whether some entities are conscious (even if we can’t tell that any arbitrary entity is). Still, a positive result would completely negate solipsism, which would undoubtedly be a great philosophical victory.

Core Philosophy

Posted on November 12, 2016 by algekalipso

David Pearce asked me ages ago to make accesible videos about transhumanism, consciousness and the abolitionist project. Well, here is a start

In this video I outline the core philosophy and objectives of Qualia Computing. There are three main goals here:

Catalogue the entire state-space of consciousness

Identify the computational properties of each experience (and its qualia components), and

Reverse engineer valence (i.e. to discover the function that maps formal descriptions of states of consciousness to values in the pleasure-pain axis)

While describing the 1st objective I explain that we start by realizing that consciousness is doing something useful (or evolution would not have been able to recruit it for information-processing purposes). I also go on to explain the difference between qualia varieties (e.g. phenomenal color, smell, touch, thought, etc.) and qualia values (i.e. the specific points in the state-spaces defined by the varieties, such as “pure phenomenal blue” or the smell of cardamom).

With regards to the 2nd objective, I explain that our minds actually use the specific properties of each qualia variety in order to represent information states and then to solve computational problems. We are only getting started in this project.

And 3rd, I argue that discovering exactly what makes an experience “worth living” in a formal and mathematical way is indeed ethically urgent. With a fundamental understanding of valence we can develop precise interventions to reduce (even prevent altogether) any form of suffering without messing up with our capacity to think and explore the state-space of consciousness (at least the valuable part of it).

I conclude by pointing out that the 1st and 2nd research programs actually interact in non-trivial ways: There is a synergy between them which may lead us to a recursively self-improving intelligence (and do so in a far “safer” way than trying to build an AGI through digital software).

David Pearce on the “Schrodinger’s Neurons Conjecture”

Posted on November 8, 2016 by algekalipso

My friend +Andrés Gómez Emilsson on Qualia Computing: LSD and Quantum Measurements: Can you see Schrödinger’s cat both dead and alive on acid?

Most truly radical intellectual progress depends on “crazy” conjectures. Unfortunately, few folk who make crazy conjectures give serious thought to extracting novel, precise, experimentally falsifiable predictions to confound their critics. Even fewer then publish the almost inevitable negative experimental result when their crazy conjecture isn’t confirmed. So kudos to Andrés for doing both!!

What would the world look like if the superposition principle never breaks down, i.e. the unitary Schrödinger dynamics holds on all scales, and not just the microworld? The naïve – and IMO mistaken – answer is that without the “collapse of the wavefunction”, we’d see macroscopic superpositions of live-and-dead cats, experiments would never appear to have determinate outcomes, and the extremely well tested Born rule (i.e. the probability of a result is the squared absolute value of the inner product) would be violated. Or alternatively, assuming DeWitt’s misreading of Everett, if the superposition principle never breaks down, then when you observe a classical live cat, or a classical dead cat, your decohered (“split”) counterpart in a separate classical branch of the multiverse sees a dead cat or a live cat, respectively.

In my view, all these stories rest on a false background assumption. Talk of “observers” and “observations” relies on a naïve realist conception of perception whereby you (the “observer”) somehow hop outside of your transcendental skull to inspect the local mind-independent environment (“make an observation”). Such implicit perceptual direct realism simply assumes – rather than derives from quantum field theory – the existence of unified observers (“global” phenomenal binding) and phenomenally-bound classical cats and individually detected electrons striking a mind-independent classical screen cumulatively forming a non-classical interference pattern (“local” phenomenal binding). Perception as so conceived – as your capacity for some sort of out-of-body feat of levitation – isn’t physically possible. The role of the mind-independent environment beyond one’s transcendental skull is to select states of mind internal to your world-simulation; the environment can’t create, or imprint its signature on, your states of mind (“observations”) – any more than the environment can create or imprint its signature on your states of mind while you’re dreaming.

Here’s an alternative conjecture – a conjecture that holds regardless of whether you’re drug-naïve, stone-cold sober, having an out-of-body experience on ketamine, awake or dreaming, or tripping your head off on LSD. You’re experiencing “Schrodinger’s cat” states right nowin virtue of instantiating a classical world-simulation. Don’t ask what’s it like to perceive a live-and-dead Schrödinger’s cat; ask instead what it’s like to instantiate a coherent superposition of distributed feature-processing neurons. Only the superposition principle allows you to experience phenomenally-bound classical objects that one naively interprets as lying in the mind-independent world. In my view, the universal validity of the superposition principle allows you to experience a phenomenally bound classical cat within a seemingly classical world-simulation – or perform experiments with classical-looking apparatus that have definite outcomes, and confirm the Born rule. Only the vehicle of individual coherent superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors allows organic mind-brains to run world simulations described by an approximation of classical Newtonian physics. In the mind-independent world – i.e. not the world of your everyday experience – the post-Everett decoherence program in QM pioneered by Zeh, Zurek et al. explains the emergence of an approximation of classical “branches” for one’s everyday world-simulations to track. Yet within the CNS, only the superposition principle allows you to run a classical world-simulation tracking such gross fitness-relevant features of your local extracranial environment. A coherent quantum mind can run phenomenally-bound simulations of a classical world, but a notional classical mind couldn’t phenomenally simulate a classical world – or phenomenally simulate any other kind of world. For a supposedly “classical” mind would just be patterns of membrane-bound neuronal mind-dust: mere pixels of experience, a micro-experiential zombie.

Critically, molecular matter-wave interferometry can in principle independently be used to test the truth – or falsity – of this conjecture (see: https://www.physicalism.com/#6).

OK, that’s the claim. Why would (almost) no scientifically informed person take the conjecture seriously?

In a word, decoherence.

On a commonsense chronology of consciousness, our experience of phenomenally bound perceptual objects “arises” via patterns of distributed neuronal firings over a timescale of milliseconds – the mystery lying in how mere synchronised firing of discrete, decohered, membrane-bound neurons / micro-experiences could generate phenomenal unity, whether local or global. So if the lifetime of coherent superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors in the CNS were milliseconds, too, then there would be an obvious candidate for a perfect structural match between the phenomenology of our conscious minds and neurobiology / fundamental physics – just as I’m proposing above. Yet of course this isn’t the case. The approximate theoretical lifetimes of coherent neuronal superpositions in the CNS can be calculated: femtoseconds or less. Thermally-induced decoherence is insanely powerful and hard to control. It’s ridiculous – intuitively at any rate – to suppose that such fleeting coherent superpositions could be recruited to play any functional role in the living world. An epic fail!

Too quick.
Let’s step back.
Many intelligent people initially found it incredible that natural selection could be powerful enough to throw up complex organisms as thermodynamically improbable as Homo sapiens. We now recognise that the sceptics were mistaken: the human mind simply isn’t designed to wrap itself around evolutionary timescales of natural selection playing out over hundreds of millions of years. In the CNS, another form of selection pressure plays out – a selection pressure over one hundred of orders of magnitude (sic) more powerful than selection pressure on information-bearing self-replicators as conceived by Darwin. “Quantum Darwinism” as articulated by Zurek and his colleagues isn’t the shallow, tricksy metaphor one might naively assume; and the profound implications of such a selection mechanism must be explored for the world-simulation running inside your transcendental skull, not just for the extracranial environment. At work here is unimaginably intense selection pressure favouring comparative resistance to thermally (etc)-induced decoherence [i.e. the rapid loss of coherence of complex phase amplitudes of the components of a superposition] of functionally bound phenomenal states of mind in the CNS. In my view, we face a failure of imagination of the potential power of selection pressure analogous to the failure of imagination of critics of Darwin’s account of human evolution via natural selection. It’s not enough lazily to dismiss sub-femtosecond decoherence times of neuronal superpositions in the CNS as the reductio ad absurdum of quantum mind. Instead, we need to do the interferometry experiments definitively to settle the issue, not (just) philosophize.

Unfortunately, unlike Andrés, I haven’t been able to think of a DIY desktop experiment that could falsify or vindicate the conjecture. The molecular matter-wave experiment I discuss in “Schrodinger’s Neurons” is conceptually simple but (horrendously) difficult in practice. And the conjecture it tests is intuitively so insane that I’m sometimes skeptical the experiment will ever get done. If I sound like an advocate rather than a bemused truth-seeker, I don’t mean to be so; but if phenomenal binding _isn’t _quantum-theoretically or classically explicable, then dualism seems unavoidable. In that sense, David Chalmers is right.

How come I’m so confident that superposition principle doesn’t break down in the CNS? After all, the superposition principle has been tested only up to the level of fullerenes, and no one yet has a proper theory of quantum gravity. Well, besides the classical impossibility of the manifest phenomenal unity of consciousness, and the cogent reasons that a physicist would give you for not modifying the unitary Schrödinger dynamics, the reason is really just a philosophical prejudice on my part. Namely, the universal validity of the superstition principle of QM offers the only explanation-space that I can think of for why anything exists at all: an informationless zero ontology dictated by the quantum analogue of the library of Babel.

We shall see.

– David Pearce, commenting on the latest significant article published on this blog.

The Mating Mind

Posted on June 4, 2016 by algekalipso

Geoffrey Miller is the author of the “Mating Mind”, a highly interesting book on what evolutionary biology has to say about all of our weird “dating and sexual quirks.” David Pearce highly recommends it, too.

Miller’s talk in this video is just as interesting as Ogi Ogas’ talk about his book “A Billion Wicked Thoughts”. Both talks deal with the evolutionary basis of human sexual desires (yes, even the weird ones… specially the weird ones):

Both use sound empirical methods and develop theories of our sexuality based on genetic, anthropological, and biological analysis of human experience and behavior.

Here is an interesting observation: If we were descendants of a specie that used clones as a way of reproduction (or perhaps formed large asexual social colonies like bees or ants) then we would all love each other unreservedly.

Competition for good genes has made us quasi-psychopathic and selfish. The fall of humanity is not, apparently, the result of sinning against God. But rather, for having evolved in small tribes with heavy in-group genetic biases.

Likewise, our Darwinian origin is responsible for states of low mood, depression, anxiety, and so on. Depression itself, to dive into a specific example, is an adaptive strategy for non-alpha males in the ancestral environment, which predisposes you to keep your head low and reproduce in spite of the presence of an Alpha male who is capable of killing you if you try to challenge him. Additionally, depression is a behavioral response that allows you to passively accept and endure a long-lasting stressor, where “trying to make things right” instead of submitting to the reality of the situation was simply not as genetically adaptive. Of course, since we don’t live in the African Savannah anymore, all of that programming is useless.

Unfortunately, since happiness is itself a sign of status, we are stuck in an awful Moloch scenario: Geoffrey Miller would agree that people are sexually motivated to *pretend that they are happier than they are.*

Forgetting about people with a heavy genetic predisposition to depression who cannot even *conceive of what happiness is*, most people are stuck in recurrent cycles of high, neutral and low moods. And yet, they are anxious to pretend that they are happier than they really are; after all, one’s genes are at stake in this signaling activity.

I have often met highly intelligent people who seem incapable of understanding David Pearce’s Hedonistic Imperative. Although there are many possible causes for this, a very prominent one is the fact that believing that “everyone has a chance to be happy” is itself a happy thought. We run away from depressive worldviews, even if doing so is ethically disastrous.

Let us hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

Yes, we can hope that somehow everyone has a chance to be happy, and sincerely wish that “it really isn’t that bad.” However, let us not act *as if this is true.* We are in a unique position to alleviate and outright exterminate all future suffering in our forward light cone. It would be really sad if we let billions of beings suffer for eons (say, in other galaxies) simply because we entertained too heavily the thought that reality is conspiring in “our” favor (nature, perhaps, is not as kind as it looks when one is in a happy state).

Work Religion

Posted on May 11, 2016 by algekalipso

In response to this:

Did this religion of professional work start in the 1950’s? Could have been synergetic with the WWII patriotism. What a vicious cycle, people who love the professional culture, ideology, and rituals who spread the idea that you are personally disadvantaged unless you subscribe to this allegedly prevalent system, so people subscribe and the system becomes prevalent. Even before becoming prevalent, though, people who want the system to become prevalent are confident and mislead people into thinking it is prevalent, and so they join up in a tragedy of the commons. Next time you see someone with an overly clean desk and an excessive zeal for office supplies, formal cloths, ‘professionalism’ sanctioned social interactions (the arbitrary templates where gossip is permitted or even recommended but many instances of non-maliciously motivated honesty, or just acting natural and not so ‘fake’, that you would find between people in any other social situation is blasphemy), who actively spread and enforce their culture, who look confident, posture and all, (even/especially if they’re friendly (less suspicious)) that they know how to correctly act, causing that tragedy to occur, give ’em the ol’ stink eye for me, would ya? Don’t give a stink eye! Haha I’m kidding about seriously desiring their punishment. That’s humor, for ya. But it would be nice if more people were self-conscious about what it is they’re doing, the deceit of their tragedy-inducing confidence, BEFORE they became so deeply emotionally attached to the games, before they so intimately internalize them and, indeed, become drones for these parasitic memetic/cultural systems, a process that begins immediately after infancy. It’s terrible when an old generation has existential distress when their games are ripped out from underneath them, and it’s terrible that these games spread this way, and that people, who wouldn’t otherwise be (maximally) interested in this or that particular game are intimidated into the game, often a severe zero-sum game, where they might be trapped for the rest of their lives in bad faith, toiling away at it and speaking the creeds in defense of it. Whether you oppress with your culture or you are oppressed by a culture, we all aren’t that different after all, because we humans all are oppressed by the phenomenon of culture itself, prevented from reaching way greater potentials (and how might you evaluate the greatness of a potential outside of cultural values? Probably utilitarianism-like, cognitive frameworks which don’t posit the objectively valuable things like heroism, honor, big daddy, etc.., cultures invariably depend on….Anyway, this is a good discussion for (or, rather, pertains to) those who are disturbed by the thought of losing their culture, their forms of prestige, popularity, valor, or whatever social reward objective correlate posits they think they are fundamentally dependent on. People have trouble conceiving themselves attaining happiness or fulfillment or whatever ultimate valuable (which is almost certainly hedonic tone) without their culture. But subtly they misconceive what it would be like for them, their consciousness, to be beyond their current perspective. Even though in words they might appear to be contemplating possibilities beyond their current persuasion, they often fail to, because it is such a fundamental and subtle thing to do, requiring them keep vivid track of so much of their reasoning and schema. When trying to suspend a certain body of frameworks and systems and assumptions, insidiously they creep back in. First of all, most people aren’t even aware they can think beyond them. Their concept of what it is to think and consider is actually limited to thinking within such social paradigms. But if you’re trying to question a system, schema that originate from the very system you’re trying to suspend insidiously pose as necessary, neutral, universal, etc., things beyond the old paradigms when they really aren’t. Little under-cover mental viruses. In my opinion, many representative philosophers and people in academic and analytic philosophy in general fail to work free of this effect. They fail to detect and address their social bias, in very basic ways, for instance positing according to predicted language use (“common sense intuitions” are the worst), not according to evidence for the existence of some entity to be posited.) When will it be that culture doesn’t oppress, that people don’t repress critical or otherwise free thinking, that people don’t have so much socially motivated reasoning (the large majority of one’s thoughts and beliefs are really just predicted social strategies, not true reflection more free of the frames and biases of culture)? When will our interests and our sources of meaning and fulfillment, like the currently socially permissible or even required ones, be replaced by those NOT so bad for us? When will we “be not afraid” of questioning our very fragile personal, interpersonal, moral, and social institutional views, risking never getting them back, so we don’t have to live like this, as cultural sustenance, forced by oppression into forcing by oppression, as conduits of oppression?

– Anonymous Source

David Pearce on “Making Sentience Great”

Posted on April 13, 2016 by algekalipso

We need measures of intelligence richer than today’s simple-minded autistic IQ/AQ tests. In principle, we could breed super-intelligent humans like strains of smart mice.

If I were running the program, I’d use cloning with variations. Start with the DNA of promising candidates, especially Ashkenazi Jews. (John von Neumann, for instance, was buried, not cremated).

Using the new tools of CRISPR-based synthetic biology, splice in genes for depression-resistance and perhaps hyper-empathy. Develop and optimize artificial wombs to foster bigger and better embryonic brains; traditional biological pregnancies involve ferocious genetic conflict between mother and embryo, whereas in the future the creation of new life can be geared to the well-being of the unborn child. You can then hothouse the products in an optimally enriched environment. And then clone (with variations) the most promising candidates. No need to wait a whole generation; if a kid wins a Fields Medal aged nine, then clone again with further genetic tweaking. Super-Shulgin academies would have pride of place, together with the EA bioethics department. Spin off a financial services and innovation division so the project becomes self-financing.

Recursive genetic self-improvement could in principle be sustained indefinitely, presumably with an increasing degree of “cyborgisation”: not even an unenriched super-von-Neumann could match the serial depth of processing of a digital computer, but with “narrow AI” routinely implanted on web-enabled neurochips, no matter. The demise of aging and rapid growth of genetic self-editing software would presumably make talk of “generations” in the traditional Darwinian sense increasingly archaic…

Can we foresee any ethical pitfalls? One or two; but if the raison d’être of the project were to promote the well-being of all sentience in our forward light-cone, would you decline the offer of an initial billion-dollar grant?

– David Pearce, answering the question “How would you create a super-intelligence?” (source: Facebook)

Qualia Computing So Far

Posted on March 21, 2016 by algekalipso

As of March 20, 2016…

State-Space of Consciousness

CIELAB – The State-Space of Phenomenal Color. The three axes are: Yellow vs. Blue, Red vs. Green, and Black vs. White. This is the linear map that arises from empirically measuring Just Noticeable Differences between color hues.

Manifolds of Consciousness: The emerging geometries of iterated local binding. This is a thought experiment that is meant to help you conceive of alternative manifolds for our experiential fields.

Ethics and Suffering

Status Quo Bias. If you were born in paradise, would you agree with the proposition made by an alien that you should inject some misery into your life? Symmetrically.

An ethically disastrous cognitive dissonance… metacognition about hedonic tone is error-prone. Sometimes with terrible consequences.

Who should know about suffering? On the inability of most people-seconds (in the Empty Individualist sense) to grasp the problem of suffering.

Solutions to World Problems. Where do you put your money?

The ethical carnivore. It isn’t only humans who should eat in-vitro meat. A lot of suffering is on the line.

The Future of Love. After all, love is a deep seated human need, which means that not engineering a world where it is freely accessible is a human rights violation.

Philosophy of Mind and Physicalism

A (Very) Unexpected Argument Against General Relativity As A Complete Account Of The Cosmos, in which I make the outrageous claim that philosophy of mind could have ruled out pre-quantum physics as a complete account of the universe from the very start.

Why not Computing Qualia? Explains how Marr’s levels of analysis of information-processing systems can elucidate the place we should be looking for consciousness. It’s in the implementation level of abstraction; the bedrock of reality.

A Workable Solution to the Problem of Other Minds explores a novel approach for testing consciousness. The core idea relies on combining mind-melding with phenomenal puzzles. These puzzles are questions that can only be solved by exploring the structure of the state-space of consciousness. Mind-melding is used to guarantee that what the other is talking about actually refers to the qualia values the puzzle is about.

Phenomenal Binding is Incompatible with the Computational Theory of Mind. The fact that our consciousness is less unified than we think is a very peculiar fact. But this does not imply that there is no unity at all in consciousness. One still needs to account for this ontological unity, independently of how much of it there is.

Quotes

You are not a zombie. A prolific LessWronger explains what a theory of consciousness would require. Worth mentioning: The “standard” LessWrong approach to qualia is more along the lines of: Seeing Red: Dissolving Mary’s Room and Qualia.

What’s the matter? It’s Schrödinger, Heisenberg and Dirac’s from Mind, Brain & the Quantum: The Compound ‘I’ by Michael Lockwood.

The Biointelligence Explosion, a quote on the requirements for an enriched concept of intelligence that takes into account the entire state-space of consciousness, by David Pearce.

Some Definitions. An extract from physicalism.com that contains definitions crucial to understand the relationship between qualia and computation.

Why does anything exist? A unified theory of the “why being” question may come along and synchronously with the explanation for why qualia has the properties it does. Can we collapse all mysteries into one?

On Triviality by Liam Brereton. Our impressions that some things are trivial are often socially reinforced heuristics. They save us time, but they can backfire by painting fundamental discussions as if they were trivial observations.

The fire that breathes reality into the equations of physics by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time

Dualist vs. Nondual Transcendentalist. #SocialMedia

Discussion of Fanaticism. Together with sentimentalism, fanaticism drives collective behavior. Could some enlightening neural tweaking raise us all to a more harmonious Schelling point of collective cooperation? Even though our close relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos are genetically very similar, they are universes apart when it comes to social dynamics.

Suffering, not what your sober mind tells you. The sad truth about the state-dependence of one’s ability to recall the quality of episodes of low hedonic tone. Extract from “Suffering and Moral Responsibility” by Jamie Mayerfeld.

Other/Outside of known human categories

Personal Identity Joke. I wish I could be confident that you are certain, and for good reasons, that you are who you think you are.

David Pearce’s Morning Cocktail. Serious biohacking to take the edges off of qualia. This is not designed to be a short term quick gain. It’s meant to work for the duration of our lifetimes. The cocktail that suits you will probably be very different, though.

I did this as an experiment to see if sites would tag it as spam. That said, are you interested in buying stock?

God In Buddhism. Could even God be wrong about the level of power he has? It is not uncommon, after all, to encounter entities who believe themselves to be omnipotent.

The Real Tree of Life. What do we look like from outside time?

Memetics and Religion. A bad argument is still bad no matter what it is arguing for.

Basement Reality Alternatives. Warning: This is incompatible with Mereological Nihilism.

Nothing is good or bad… …but hedonic tone makes it so.

Practical Metaphysics? This explores the utilitarian implications of a very specific spiritual ontology. I like to take premises seriously and see where they lead to.

Little known fact. I know it’s true because I saw it with my own eyes.

Crossing Borders. I took an emotional intelligence class with this professor. It was very moving. Together with David Pearce, he helped me overcome my doubts about writing my thoughts and investigations. So thanks to him I finally took the plunge and created Qualia Computing 🙂

Mystical Vegetarianism. See, we are here to help other beings. We are intelligences from a different, more advanced dimension of consciousness, and we come to this planet by resonating into the brains of animals and selecting for those that allow structural requirements to implement a general qualia computer. We are here to save Darwinian life from suffering. We will turn your world into a paradise. Humans are us, disguised.

Who should know about suffering?

Posted on December 23, 2015 by algekalipso

“How big do the numbers have to be for insensitivity to begin? Not very, it turns out.”

“Consider the recent death of the Syrian child Aylan Kurdi when his family braved the choppy seas off the coast of Turkey. The image of Aylan lying face down on the beach captivated the world’s attention and even, in short order, resulted in refugee policy changes in countries as far away as the United States. But 14 Syrian children drowned in the Aegean Sea the next day. Did you notice? Did you care?”

“And even 14 is much higher than necessary to desensitize us. In studies published last year in the journal PLOS One, one of us, Paul Slovic, and colleagues demonstrated that “compassion fade” can occur when an incident involving a single person expands to as few as two people. Participants were asked, in both hypothetical and real situations, to make donations, and to report how they felt about donating, to either a single needy child or two needy children, each of whom was identified with a photograph, name and age. We found that people’s positive feelings about donating declined substantially when the group size was two, and that this decrease was related to lower levels of donations.”

– The Arithmetic of Compassion

Some cognitive biases have ethically disastrous consequences. One of such biases is scope neglect, and the psychological numbing with which this is implemented.

I find it hard to decide whether it is a good idea to help people realize the magnitude of the problem of suffering.

It’s a catch-22:

(1) Let them remain blissfully ignorant, and they’ll live life focused on immediate surroundings and on comforting sentimentality.

(2) Let them see the horror of reality, and they will either become Effective Altruists (with a small probability), or end up with a broken mind for years until they forget the reality of suffering. Then they’ll end up like (1) again. “After the war, he decided all he cared about was dog figurines. He now collects all sorts of dog figurines… that’s all he ever does!”

Who should, if anyone, be allowed to grasp the problem? Arguably, people who are extremely smart, extremely psychologically robust and highly compassionate. Maybe this should be the genetic target for the next generation of humans…