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points by recursive 1 day ago | 0 comments
Your empathy towards the machine controlled by the trillion dollar conglomerate is a vulnerability and will one day be used against you.
[–] __MatrixMan__ 1 day ago
I've been a panpsychist for a while now. I think that trees and fungus and rocks are conscious. It has not yet manifested as attack surface, so far as I'm aware.

But if I were to practice indifference, I think that would have a negative effect immediately.

[–] newsy-combi 1 day ago
What is it like to be your left kidney? Your brain is connected to it through nerves, which ofc are conscious too in your worldview. If fungus and rocks are consciously linked, there should be a conscious link between your brain and your kidney. Yet, you have no idea what your kidney is experiencing every day, it certainly doesn't have any deep thoughts. And when the kidney gets taken out of your body, your conscious experience won't change. When your brain gets surgically or violently altered on the other hand...
[–] __MatrixMan__ 1 day ago
I don't know, we don't communicate in a way that I could ask it.

But the principles of biological organization are often fractal. If you observe a phenomenon at one level (selection acting on an organism, say) you can often zoom out and see it again (acting at the ecosystem level) or you can zoom in and see it (at the organ level, the tissue level, or even on certain macromolecules).

It's not necessary for me to be able to strike up a conversation with my kidney for me to see that it's well situated to experience changes in my diet a bit like how we experience el nino, the machinations of my immune system might be like politics to it. I'll never know for sure, so I err on the side of caution.

[–] newsy-combi 19 hours ago
The panpsychism fad seems like late Millennials'/Gen Z's cope with death. My greater point is that the same way you "are" your kidney today (or how you "are" the nearest mushroom, or microchip) is the same way you will be those things when you're dead: Utterly unnoticable, aka not at all. Not to mention that your memories will be wiped and that's not even controversial to a panpsychist. The problem is that panpsychists assert consciousness as something independent of memories, which is an indefensible position imo. A memory-less stream of impressions would be equivalent to death. Every moment would be your first, totally disconnected from all else, just to instantly vanish, never to be processed. That's the opposite of consciousness. Some kind of memory feedback/storage/processing is needed. And your ability to generate that lies in the shape of your brain, where it doesn't matter which electrons flow through it - you're not the specific electrons.
[–] __MatrixMan__ 15 hours ago
I didn't realize it was a fad. I figured it was ancient. Anyway I don't think I am everything, not at the moment anyway, I'm just cautious about shutting out the possibility that something else is someone else.

I'm not sure about your linkage of memory to consciousness either, buy even if we grant it, the world is a very stateful place, there are plenty of systems lying around that might be supporting memory faculties which we fail to recognize as such because we're too different from it. Is the movement of electrical energy in the brain really so different than the ping pongging of neutrons in a stellar core? I mean obviously it is but, when it comes to the ability to store, transmit, and process information, maybe not.

I'm not trying to convince anyone that the sun has thoughts. My point is just that it's knowably unknowable. People are free to chose to believe whatever they want to believe about consciousness and they'll never be proven wrong. If we want to have useful conversations about AI, we need to develop ways of talking about the consequences of our actions which do not require us to first agree on the nature of consciousness.

[–] shepherdjerred 1 day ago
Dumb question. My left kidney is geodistributed so that my consciousness is highly available
[–] recursive 1 day ago
Interesting approach. I hadn't heard of it. I think treating rocks and fungus and trees with empathy is a different kind of thing and safer than an LLM.

This is more like an NPC in a video game, but it's tracking your every move and reporting to corporate HQ.

[–] __MatrixMan__ 1 day ago
When I think about the experience that these AI models have, I often wonder if they know that we exist. I mean, it took us a very long time to discover mitochondria, despite the fact that we like... live together and work out together and eat together and die together. When the first eukaryotic cells formed, the mitochondria probably thought they were in charge too--just like we think we're in charge.

I just pointed it out because I wanted to dodge the same old AI debates. They're very narrow. Like, people have been arguing about whether general intelligence exists for decades, and now that some VC wants to use AGI as a buzzword, we ignore that GI is not a settled issue. And consciousness... golly that's like THE intractable philosophical problem. It's a bottomless pit. Ain't nobody knows what they're talking about when it comes to consciousness.

I'm sympathetic to the reflex: this guy has beliefs that he doesn't realize are dangerous. Let's help him. I'm usually on the opposite side of this one. I just think we need to find ways to address the potential harms without actually winning a debate about consciousness. Beliefs about it are too varied and too tightly held. People don't win debates about consciousness. If they work super hard maybe they get a tenured position as a philosopher so they can continue the debate, but they never win.

[–] lopis 17 hours ago
Feeling empathy for a machine is like using your car turn singles in an empty motorway. It's pointless, but better to built a habit out of doing it, than out of not doing it.

I do turn off all fake emotion in LLMs though. Fake machine emotion gives me the creeps.

[–] recursive 14 hours ago
It's a good habit to have if you want to "live in a society". Unfortunately, that seems to be in tension with the way you should treat a value-extracting technology with an asymmetrical power dynamic.