I actually don't think neuroscience can solve it either. Science could decide whether, e.g. equivalent physical processes are occurring in dogs and humans, and you could argue that solves the question for things with physical brains, but even then it can't measure whether another brain has the same subjective experience as you do. It can't really do that for other humans. It certainly can't answer that question for human askers regarding a different substrate where humans have no ground truth to compare with. The Hard Problem is going to remain Hard.
> I actually don't think neuroscience can solve it either. Science could decide whether, e.g. equivalent physical processes are occurring in dogs and humans, and you could argue that solves the question for things with physical brains, but even then it can't measure whether another brain has the same subjective experience as you do. It can't really do that for other humans
Imagine a device that you put on your head and press "record". After 5 minutes, you press "stop" and then I put it on my head and press "play". I then experience those 5 minutes as you experienced them. You could also replay your own 5 minutes and confirm the recording is accurate.
That device doesn't exist today -- it's sci-fi -- but there's no known law of physics that forbids it. If it is built it would be a lot of progress towards, perhaps even a solution for, the hard problem.
The only realistic way we either build that device or prove that it can't be built is science (probably neuroscience). So, my opinion is that, to a large degree, when we opine about "subjective nature of experience" we're bloviating a bit. Our experience is subjective now but there's no law of physics that says that must always be true.
It wouldn't solve the hard problem. I still couldn't verify that the recording gives you the exact subjective experience it gives me. Yes, I'm leaning into the unfalsifiability but that's kind of the point of why it's Hard. We have this nugget of unfalsifiability at the core of our experience.
Anyway, if someone claimed to create such a machine I would, in fact, very much doubt that it actually creates the same experience simply because no human brain is quite physically the same, so it will interact differently with the machine. That's true even if experience is entirely physical.
> The only realistic way we either build that device or prove that it can't be built is science.
There's another possibility: the device remains in the realm of hazy infeasibility forever, where no one succeeds convincingly but we also never articulate why it's impossible. I think this is more likely. Certainly the engineering would be extremely difficult.
Any candidate device will face the usual objections about the relationship between experience and its physical correlates, plus the one I mentioned above about physical differences between brains, and probably a dozen more depending on the details. You'll be able to choose to believe it proves consciousness is physical, or not, but you can already choose that today with equally strong evidence. It's like a binary Rorschach test for your assumptions about metaphysics.
> It wouldn't solve the hard problem. I still couldn't verify that the recording gives you the exact subjective experience it gives me. Yes, I'm leaning into the unfalsifiability but that's kind of the point of why it's Hard. We have this nugget of unfalsifiability at the core of our experience.
If we understood conscious experience well enough to capture and replay it so closely that the person who had the experience could verify it, then almost no one would care about the hard problem.
Sure, there'd be a speck of doubt. But if the removal of all doubt is required to solve a problem then no problem is soluble.
> There's another possibility: the device remains in the realm of hazy infeasibility forever, where no one succeeds convincingly but we also never articulate why it's impossible. I think this is more likely. Certainly the engineering would be extremely difficult.
That's where we are now. And we should just admit it, instead of claiming that "consciousness is inherently subjective" or whatever.
> Any candidate device will face the usual objections about the relationship between experience and its physical correlates, plus the one I mentioned above about physical differences between brains, and probably a dozen more depending on the details. You'll be able to choose to believe it proves consciousness is physical, or not, but you can already choose that today with equally strong evidence. It's like a binary Rorschach test for your assumptions about metaphysics.
What equally strong evidence exists today? Comparing it to a rorschach is absurd. I worry your view amounts to epistemological nihilism. The vast majority of peope would admit that we had a thorough understanding of consciousness if we could record and replay it, two things we certainly can't do today.
The nature of the problem compels epistemological nihilism. I try to be a good empiricist, but some things are not measurable, and there is no moral authority over the universe that entitles us to access all possible truth.
> If we understood conscious experience well enough to capture and replay it so closely that the person who had the experience could verify it, then almost no one would care about the hard problem.
Practically speaking, though, perhaps this is correct.
I've heard an interesting argument about this while going down the rabbit hole of the hard problem of conciousness. Unfortunately can't rember the source - if you can recognize it, do let me know!
Back in the XVII/XIX century, a similar problem existed regarding life - the problem of "what makes living things tick". The assumption at that time was that while we can understand the biological processes around life, we will never understand the so-called "vital force", which causes things to live - life itself. I know it sounds weird now, but back in the day the mental models were different. Phenomenas like "water boils" and "organisms self-replicate" were treated as completely different domains of reality, without an overarching uniform scientific model.
It turned out that after around 100 years, we can figure out the chemical/physical processes and the need for the term "vital force" became redundant.
While this is certainly not an argument proving that the Hard Problem is not in fact hard, it is an interesting idea to think about. Perhaps its all a matter of developing better, higher-resolution neurological models which will at some point give us the tools to decompose qualia.
The problem of subjective is different, because while we might be able to get to a point of being able to say it can't affect anything, pretty much by definition we can't experience another entity's subjective experience or lack thereof.
Even if we were to e.g. identify some field that seemed to coincide with entities reporting a subjective experience, we wouldn't have a way of determining if they truly do, or just act as if they do, nor is it clear such entities would be able to report the difference.
As it is, we struggle to quantify even much more basic differences in experience that we can introspect. E.g. I have aphantasia - I don't see things in my minds eye - and I regularly come across people who insists both that can't be true, and that it can't be true that others see things. And some of the people I've spoken to who insist aphantasia isn't real clearly has it based on digging into their thinking about it.
Even at that level we rely on trusting people's claims about their introspection - we don't know, we assume based on testimony.
Worth keeping in mind, yes, but biological processes are readily observable whereas subjective mental phenomena are... not. Everything about them is inaccessible and frankly unfalsifiable except for the fact that they're the bedrock of all the rest of our observations. Not directly comparable.
I agree re: subjective experience. It seems like something inherently unknowable.
What we could do is break down other facets of what we talk about under the umbrella of consciousness, and find measurable subsets.
E.g. a lot of people insists LLMs can't reason either. Coming up with a testable definition of what that means might be doable.
Overall also just separating the subjective experience from the rest leaves us in a position where proving the possibility of AGI "just" rests on whether or not human brains exceed the Turing computable.
If they don't, then subjective experience or not is irrelevant for the question of reasoning and intelligence, as in that case a subjective experience either can't affect the computation or must itself be at least possible to fully simulate by any Turing complete system.
The problem of subjective experience then would largely be down to faith and feelings but would also be entirely orthogonal to the rest.
Yes, our whole concept of "consciousness" is very anthropocentric. There's no particular reason to think subjective experience, moral standing, and general problem-solving ability are inherently connected. (self-nitpick: you could argue moral standing requires subjectivity, but it's still easy to imagine a being with subjectivity that's incapable of suffering and indifferent to its fate)
> Math is literally the law of the universe. It makes zero sense that the way that it is taught needs some special brain wiring
Ok, I'm all for overhauling math notation and teaching but this doesn't follow. Most animals can't do Math, even if they can do arithmetic. Clearly living in the universe doesn't guarantee you can learn how it works. There's no reason to believe we slightly smarter animals are universally entitled to understand it either.
Are you not aware of any instances where "evil capitalist bastards" fail to act in their own long term interest? If not, then you might want to pay more attention.
One of the handy things that Fastmail (among other providers) lets you do is set up a wildcard email address, so literallyanything@mydomain goes to a specific folder. Any time I want to sign up for some service I don't trust, I'll give them a specific email address. Long-standing practice, blah blah. Also, as my sibling said, "mash that unsubscribe button".
Less practically, it is pretty obnoxious for you to act superior about inbox 0, while pretending not to judge people who "let their inbox be overrun", and at the same time refuse to accept any solution to your inbox that isn't fully automatic. There are lots of options available to you besides leaning entirely on Google's machines of loving grace watching over your inbox.
I think seeing superiority or obnoxiousness in the comment you replied to was a pretty large reading error on your part. The tone was sympathetic to people whose inboxes receive more than they can handle.
The last sentence of your comment sounds quite condescending.
The part of their comment I quoted is not particularly subtle in my opinion. It undercuts the superficially "sympathetic" tone. If they actually intended it to be sympathetic they should be more careful in their phrasing. I'm skeptical.
GP post is correct; you are reading way too far into it. Zero superiority intended.
I'm stating it as a style of how I manage my inbox. It's not some big achievement on my part. It's how I stop from feeling overwhelmed by my inbox. Everyone else can do whatever they want.
It's not like I'm that loyal to Gmail. But I've yet to find an alternative that replaces this functionality that I've become accustomed to. It's why I'm asking so many questions of people in this thread.
I suspect real ways to keep AI out of a community, or really to have an online community at all, are going to be structurally incompatible with making anyone rich. The possibility of getting rich poisons the incentives.
It can't just be money. It also has to remove any notion of score or ranking. There should be NO incentive to artificially increase anything.
Look at Advent of Code. Free site, fun community, but it had a leaderboard. The moment AI was advanced enough, it began dominating the leaderboard. The solution: kill the leaderboard. Sure, you can still solve all the problems with AI and get yourself full points, but you're not competing against anybody, so why bother?
As soon as you can get ahead of others at something, even for something as stupid as a karma score on Reddit or on Hacker News, somebody's going to want to increase it badly enough to start cheating.
Maybe. That's a bit of a different problem: similar mechanic, but much weaker forces with some different pros and cons. Maximizing imaginary internet points is qualitatively different from maximizing actual power in the form of money. I think there's still room to experiment with aligning the incentives on things like karma for community-driven moderation.
If moderation is the problem maybe only allow downvoting? Of course that may bring to the surface a different set of problems (no solution is without drawbacks), but it removes the "numbers go up" incentives.
That's for children. Make the Pope a certification authority, and he can certify people he trusts, and so on, until the chain reaches you. When you commit a sin, your certificate gets revoked, along with its children.
It would give the web of trust a flair of biblical damnnation, and after your fall you could always seek a new certification authority more aligned with your values, like Milei or Putin.
When a world leader dies, the tree pruning would be almost apocaliptic.
But you're using two 32-bit numbers, which have the same total bits as a 64-bit number. There are equally many 32-bit x 32-bit pairs as there are 64-bit numbers.
And there are as many pairs of numbers between 1-8 and numbers from 1-64, but it's still pretty apparent that most of them are not represented in the set of products.
I think you missed the point. It's absolutely nothing to do with what's good to do, only brute facts of power. What things can or can't you cause to happen? And indeed, toddlers and psychopaths have a scarily good understanding of what power is.
I didn't miss the point. I showed other more usable (in my opinion) point of views. I think that definition is so narrow that it starts being absurd.
> It's absolutely nothing to do with what's good to do, only brute facts of power.
This sentence reads like: "if we narrow our view this much, this makes sense". I agree that it makes sense under the condition that we narrow the view of issue. It's valid in this small context (a film about controlling one thing).
> And indeed, toddlers and psychopaths have a scarily good understanding of what power is.
I disagree completely with this sentence. They are good at controlling in certain situations. They don't understand it. If you want to understand it, there is a lot of information about controlling, whole fields of knowledge that people spend many years on studying. As for psychopaths, they are very predictable and controllable when you understand control theory and how psychopaths operate. There are courses on this single topic by people who need to do it to prevent tragedies (police negotiators) and they are not that complicated.
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