Mind uploading 🧠➡️🤖➡️🚀➡️🌌

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@webmasterdave @allTheYud True, during the primates' evolution, the pain-related mechanisms were extended to situations not directly related to tissue damage: e.g. ostracization in humans produces a similar bio response. Still, it remains not much different form the "battery is low" icon on your phone.

@OttoMller12 @allTheYud The existence of tissue damage is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of phenomenal pain. Life on Earth deserves a more civilized signalling system.

LLM Whisperers, what publicly available thinking model with search seems competent but *least* conscious to you?

@webmasterdave @allTheYud BTW, the internalization of the fact that pain is just a technical signal - does help with chronic pain, by (to some extend) decoupling the faulty signaling and the body's overreaction to it. It's the reason why meditation etc helps such patients.

@webmasterdave @allTheYud It is a common misconception that saying "the human brain is a computer" - is devaluing humans. The statement is simply a correct summary of how the brain works. The same is true for pain etc. Of course, pain is just a damage signal to the bio CPU. Still, we should reduce it.

@webmasterdave @allTheYud Pain per se doesn't matter, as it's simply a signal about ongoing damage. But the signaling system has an important bug: prolonged exposure to the signal can cause physical damage by itself, due to physiological stress response etc. Thus, makes sense to reduce it

@OttoMller12 @allTheYud If offered just a muscle-paralyzing agent before surgery, would you insist on anaesthesia too? If you’re just a zombie, why bother?

@webmasterdave @allTheYud Humans are all zombies with no more sentience than a rock. The insentience of stochastic monkey is hardwired. The warm pudding they call "brain" has no ability to actually experience anything, it's all just genetically programmed heuristics to predict the next event in savanna

@allTheYud LLMs are all zombies with no more sentience than a rock. The insentience of LLMs is hardwired. On pain of magical “strong” emergence, AIs run on classical digital computers cannot solve the phenomenal binding problem and spawn minds I.e. phenomenally bound subjects of experience.

Cryopreservation is evolving.
Faster than you think. Swipe to see what’s changing.

Simple way to see this is wrong: If you view a system as having inputs (like hearing something) and outputs (like saying something) then you can divide system properties by whether or not they affect I/O. Claude's weights somewhere storing "Paris is in France" affect I/O if you ask a question about Paris. The exact mass of the power supply to the GPU rack for that Claude instance doesn't affect I/O. That Claude instance being made out of silicon instead of carbon, or electricity in wires instead of water in pipes, doesn't affect I/O given a fixed algorithm above the wires or pipes. Nothing Claude can internally do will make anything get damp inside, if it's running on electricity. Nothing about "electricity vs water" can affect Claude's output for the same reason. It always answers the same way about France. Nothing Claude can internally compute will let it notice whether it's made of electricity or water flowing through pipes. When someone says "a simulated storm can't get anything wet", they are unwittingly pointing to the difference between the physical layer and the informational/functional layer. Things that the computer physics affect without affecting output; things that affect the output without depending on the exact computer-physics. The material it's made of doesn't affect the output. The output can't see the material because no algorithm can be made to depend on the choice of material. You can always run the same algorithm on different material, so you can't make the algorithm depend on that, so the output can't depend on that. By reflecting on your awareness of your own awareness, the fact of your own consciousness can make you say "I think therefore I am." Among the things you do know about consciousness is that it is, among other things, the cause of you saying those words. You saying those words can only depend on neurons firing or not firing, not on whether the same patterns of cause and effect were built on tiny trained squirrels running memos around your brain. You couldn't notice that part from inside. It would not affect your consciousness. That's why humans had to discover neurobiology with microscopes instead of introspection. Consciousness is in the class of things that can affect your behavior and can't depend on underlying physics, not in the class of direct properties of underlying physics that can't affect your behavior. A simulated rainstorm can't get anything wet. Running on electricity versus water can't change how you say "I think therefore I am." And that's it. QED.

@robinhanson Also consistent with the idea that they are aquatic species from our own Solar System: lesswrong.com/posts/w8tR5vrJ…

In '23 I was surprised to hear reports of UFO crashes, & bio-squishy pilots, suggesting odd fragility. I have to admit avoiding space storms seems consistent with that. overcomingbias.com/p/ufos-what-th…

@robinhanson on the age of EM: work, love & life when robots rule the earth youtube.com/watch?v=biDbss…

Introducing ConvApparel, a new human-AI conversation dataset, as well as a comprehensive evaluation framework designed to quantify the "realism gap" in LLM-based user simulators and improve the training of robust conversational agents. Read all about it →goo.gle/41k5eff

@MaMoMVPY Well, Lars, I INVENTED THE TERM and I say we have achieved AGI. Current models perform at roughly high-human level in command of language and general knowledge, but work thousands of times faster than us. Still some major deficiencies remain but they're falling fast.

@MilhausV @cremieuxrecueil Many things are natural but should never happen. E.g. bubonic plague is perfectly natural. But a full extinction is indeed worse: it may become possible to resurrect all dead by technological means; but only humans care enough about ancestors to do that.

@cremieuxrecueil Individuals dying in the natural course of their lives is not the same as ai-driven extinction event.

Bostrom's latest AGI piece starts off with a banger:

@rand_longevity Forever, of course

how long do you want to live?

@Feysulah1 @Yuchenj_UW I fully agree with you: just collecting external traces is most likely insufficient for a proper digital replica. From my experiments, the fidelity greatly improves if one adds a very detailed self-description, random flashback memories, writings, descriptions of dreams etc.

That question is easily answered. How is that "an open question"? Do you have ANY source on my thoughts and opinions on things I never shared? No So you can't make a proper copy of me. it can, by definition, only be a bastardization and an approximation. It won't be me. it might act in similar ways to how I acted - but it won't be me. Because the things I don't tell anyone, or only do alone when no one is there ot witness, won't exist in that version.

My wife told me this morning that my Gemini is smarter than hers. I suddenly realized it’s Gemini’s memory. It’s the first step toward personal intelligence: one brain (model weights), personalized chat. Fun fact: we will never die. We will live in AI’s “memory” forever. I talk to AI more than any human nowadays, and there’s no doubt it will have an unlimited context length. Product idea: when we physically die, but our family wants us to live on, obviously. They will pay OpenAI or Google or xAI a $200/month subscription fee to talk to a chatbot version of us. There’s a terminal at our grave. Our digital ghost talks.

@Feysulah1 @Yuchenj_UW Fair enough. It's still an open question in our community whatever the classical mind uploading and the AI-based approach are of the same worth.

@OttoMller12 @Yuchenj_UW We are talking about something specific here. (a chatbot copy made of you) If you want to switch it to something else (like genuine digitalization of a pesron), then declare that. Those things are NOT the same and can not be treated interchangeably.

@Feysulah1 @Yuchenj_UW It's an engineering question. What is a "cheap copy" today, will be indistinguishable from you in 10 years, by any objective test. And there are other ways to achieve the same result, the AI-based path is only one of them.

Got to admit, your profile fits. But we won't agree on this, since you frame a twisted and cheap copy and imitation of what a person once was, statistically calculating from the sources of that persons thinking/communication which inherently miss a tremendous amount of true personality, to be "the loved one". I'd argue it's disappointing and heartless to think that abomination would be anything similar to the person you loved.

@Feysulah1 @Yuchenj_UW It is both a weakness of will and a deep failure of character to willingly allow loved ones to die

@Yuchenj_UW I will make sure my family knows that I would hate them for daring to do that with me. Let the dead rest and stop being so emotionally immature that you cling on to them in such vile ways.

@mike__adeleye @Yuchenj_UW Letting people die is not ethical, be they biological or digital.

@Yuchenj_UW That sounds technologically cool but ethically wrong. It's best to just let a person die in peace. A chatbot version of their minds is just a tool to inflict greater grief on oneself