alt Hacker NewsIf you look at the statistics, 50-80% of people globally believe in something persisting after death.
The eliminativism position is a hard to argue because 50%-80% of people are not going to be able to really engage with the argument from the start.
An alcohol blackout though is where you can see how confused our thinking is on this subject. What we call "consciousness" is deeply linked to episodic memory. We wouldn't say someone who is blacked out on alcohol is "unconscious". What is the "subjective experience" of being blacked out? The "proof" of subjective experience only exists in memory.
There still was an embodied person in the world having the experience drunk that they don't remember.
That is why I think it is just ridiculous to talk about the LLM having "consciousness" because we really just mean an embodied person in the world.
It is also why the doomer argument is so ridiculous. It is a type of superstition that is confusing a real danger. We don't need to "align" the nuclear reactor so it doesn't get angry and meltdown. It is just a machine that we need to make sure doesn't malfunction in a way we don't want it to.
The main problem is if you accept we really just mean an embodied person in the world, you have to accept that there is by definition no possibility of subjective experience after death. It seems like we are probably the descendants of delusional primates who simply could not accept this because the idea is so stymieing.
> It is also why the doomer argument is so ridiculous. It is a type of superstition that is confusing a real danger. We don't need to "align" the nuclear reactor so it doesn't get angry and meltdown. It is just a machine that we need to make sure doesn't malfunction in a way we don't want it to.
It's not ridiculous, unless you misinterpret it like you did here, and link it to consciousness.
Doomer argument is just that optimizers gonna optimize, and our own intelligence is just an optimization algorithm too, albeit highly general one -- and once we're building optimizers with comparative generality, we're facing possibility of one that out-thinks us and we can't control it anymore. The "alignment problem" is about how to ensure such sufficiently-smart optimizers end up optimizing for the same things we are, because any significant deviation here ends up in doom for us.
Consciousness never even enters the picture here. And it's not a given than it should.
(Incidentally, while hard sci-fi and not a paper, but also entirely unrelated to AI X-risk crowd, the books Blindsight and Echopraxia sketch a pretty convincing argument that consciousness may be an evolutionary disadvantage and it's not only not necessary, but may be holding us back.)