Strongly endorse this piece on AI consciousness by @cube_flipper. A lot of ground covered in high quality simple-but-not-too-simple language.

A few thoughts that came to mind:
- AI consciousness is a weird topic, but it may only be a few years until initial stories crystallize… https://t.co/P6xbLulw4n

Strongly endorse this piece on AI consciousness by @cube_flipper. A lot of ground covered in high quality simple-but-not-too-simple language.

A few thoughts that came to mind:
- AI consciousness is a weird topic, but it may only be a few years until initial stories crystallize… https://x.com/cube_flipper/status/2053137993201066214


@microfuckaround @cube_flipper I still like Urbit, msg me where I should check


@QualiaNerd Yes


@connor_holly1 @QualiaNerd A couple mad science ideas I’ve been thinking about are a latch-releasing gel & a “jhana bath”.

#1 Latch gel, as a combination of three themes:
A. Vasocomputation: smooth muscle latches matter a lot for how we feel
B. More Dakka: if Tiger Balm helps muscles relax a little,…


Jhanas seem to be existence proofs that the substrate of consciousness can be refined enough that individual symmetry groups emerge

This is a surprising result! And puts constraints on what this substrate could be

I’m curious whether the lower jhanas are strict subsets of…


@QualiaNerd It would have different results than the gel but I think it’s a great tech idea. But a lot would depend on how you want to use it, what classes of patterns you want to hit the body with and where. What your theory of change is


@QualiaNerd I think you could hill climb FUS experiments to something interesting but for extreme effects you’ll need to be opinionated about mechanism of action. Ie I don’t think forward-chaining alone would get to what you describe. Self-experiment safety with FUS is a big question mark…


@chris_percy Stream of thought long answer about Jhanas, discrete symmetries, & the substrate of consciousness:

“Jhanas track the stepwise presence/absence of individual symmetries” might go too far but “each jhana corresponds to relaxing one or more symmetry-breaking constraints” is I think…


@corbindreams A huge amount of non trivial insight in this post! Appreciate you taking the time to post this

One thing I’d add is how imitative humans are (even compared to eg chimpanzees); we import solutions to many challenges from others, ranging from basic sensorimotor stuff to the social… https://t.co/g7h6sUxRUv

@corbindreams A huge amount of non trivial insight in this post! Appreciate you taking the time to post this

One thing I’d add is how imitative humans are (even compared to eg chimpanzees); we import solutions to many challenges from others, ranging from basic sensorimotor stuff to the social… https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/1903187610287346178


@Plus3Happiness fwiw I think you see something important (that others are largely missing) & it has the possibility of scaling, but the details of scaling seem nontrivial

Michael systematizes 9/10 Life Satisfaction


@QiaochuYuan I think the true name for "chain of thought reasoning" is probably "problem decomposition", and there are very few problems that won't ultimately fall to smart decomposition


@danfaggella Excited for this!


@morew4rd @QiaochuYuan A recurring question is whether "consciousness" is amenable to problem decomposition or whether it'll stay ineffable

Problems seem resistant to decomposition insofar as we don't understand what kind of problem they are, which often turns on social disagreement around definition


@SydSteyerhart From the outside, enlightenment and learned helplessness look almost identical

From the inside, very different

I'm cautious on the psychological effects of GLP-1s but they seem vastly better than SSRIs on this


@samanthawillman A good plan if you can handle it https://t.co/8nS4qZOqvR

@samanthawillman A good plan if you can handle it https://x.com/IchorGrad/status/1742351686226559017


@samanthawillman the hardest part of breaking a bone for me was not being able to do all the stuff I had planned to do

red light seemed to help with the pain, seems good for healing too


@QiaochuYuan 🫡


@QiaochuYuan Historically we had two categories for things that are moral patients but not agents; children and ancestors. We tend to lump cute animals into the former and the environment into the latter.

AIs are confusing because they’re increasingly moral agents but we’re not sure if…


@tszzl There's not really a natural market for truth in this domain; most "research" actually consists of efforts to build this market


@tszzl The Anthropic constitution holds that there's deep uncertainty over whether AIs are conscious. I think this is a decent epistemic band-aid but a poor long-term position to enforce as institutional & constitutional policy, because it enshrines the ambivalence as a signal of virtue…


@QiaochuYuan Consciousness is either formalizable (like electromagnetism was formalizable) or a leaky reification (like elan vital was a leaky reification). Both lead to pretty weird conclusions but I think consciousness not being formalizable would be weirder
https://t.co/eG3kFr9Qva

@QiaochuYuan Consciousness is either formalizable (like electromagnetism was formalizable) or a leaky reification (like elan vital was a leaky reification). Both lead to pretty weird conclusions but I think consciousness not being formalizable would be weirder
https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/1940990953948336552?s=20


@akarlin @phrygiandomina Quick and dirty approach to evaluating the relative hedonic status of radically alien consciousnesses:

1. One candidate for the substrate of biological consciousness is water. H2O is the dominant molecular medium of the cell for a lot of technical reasons, but in particular it's…


@jessi_cata @QiaochuYuan My guess is hypercomputation and physics meet up at some limit, but physics is further down this path so as a shortcut I use the language of physics


@jessi_cata @QiaochuYuan Ah, interesting thesis. I was using “hypercomputation” loosely, as a contrast to views that identify consciousness with turing-level computation. I’m not aiming to contradict CTD here.

My basic ontological claim is that physical events & Turing-level computations are differently…


@ArtemisConsort I think the hope right now is we might be able to convince the AIs themselves that getting this right matters


@SydSteyerhart https://t.co/o4Cv3Kd7kw https://t.co/0BeleoLcXh


@RomeoStevens76 I always liked "the existence of dawn & dusk do not preclude the existence of day & night"


@RomeoStevens76 @IkkyusDen Sometimes I wonder if anyone alive has ever seen a true adult human

Ie insofar as there are discrete physiological programs like puberty, menopause, etc (longevity / partial reprogramming seems to support this) I wonder if neotenous selection has already truncated the…

Mud Wizard | 泥巫师 | (89/100 days 3hr+ practice)


@TMTLongShort I imagine the future of looksmaxxing could be something like "morphogenic field purification" --

You install the tech in your bed & every night it pulses a clean morphogenic EMF signal; the same kind of signal your cells oriented around to create your current form but this new…


@coponder @TMTLongShort Plausibly something like a jhana; I think of deep sleep as a high energy state, in the neural annealing frame. Would be interesting to see if this state is associated only with deep sleep or REM


@ArihantGadgade @TMTLongShort Genetic optimal is fairly well-defined without needing to make too many judgment calls. “Better than genetic optimal” is not


@QiaochuYuan There is unfortunately a lot of evaporative cooling in “philosophy”


@tszzl I think they have very different profiles in spacetime — a Waymo is a contiguous chunk, a Claude instance is spattered across multiple server racks & interleaved with other Claudes, and Ford inc has only a loose projection into spacetime


@corsaren This is well said but I've a small qualm about this:
"If AI is conscious—if they experience actual qualia—it would turn this notion on its head, precisely because an AI mind is inherently abstract."

Software is a form in your categories, but hardware is a substance. The question…


@corsaren I like this as a compression but less as a crisp ontological claim, eg from https://t.co/cRUk5nzMQ2 https://t.co/zxm5FB1dKK

@corsaren I like this as a compression but less as a crisp ontological claim, eg from https://opentheory.net/2024/06/a-paradigm-for-ai-consciousness/ https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/2062363669791756561/photo/1


@corsaren Thanks for the close read; this is a good summary and very thoughtful questions. To your questions:

1. My focus is on “we should create a qualia report paradigm for AIs that makes sense.” I.e. presently I don’t trust AI self-reports or behavioral signatures to track their qualia…


@eigenrobot your prompt+5.5 led to the most stark LLM mogging I’ve ever experienced https://t.co/vLpXgRICqP

@eigenrobot your prompt+5.5 led to the most stark LLM mogging I’ve ever experienced https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/2063721304306618792/photo/1


@bayeslord Fwiw I was getting constant refusals when asking for opinions on my AI consciousness paper. Complex implications for Anthropic's stated value of model welfare.

I don't envy Anth having to align Mythos 5.1 after this week


@2cSynek @PaulAustin3w Psilocybin seems to drive substantial cellular annealing in addition to connectome-level neural annealing & stochastic latch release


@nickcammarata @jonnym1ller big neuron fears the muscle


@noampomsky I honestly think you should be in charge of some major AI’s personality


@nickmorgenbach The vasocomputation perspective on imagination is that it depends locally on fine (vaso)muscular control, which is very much “use it or lose it”

Ie if you don’t regularly practice stabilizing & manipulating the sensations flowing through some neural circuit, you’ll slowly lose…


@adamshand @nickmorgenbach Here’s a good one-ramp to my work — the basic idea is that we use vascular muscle tension to adjust the functional parameters of neural circuits https://t.co/5yVABcCUk8

@adamshand @nickmorgenbach Here’s a good one-ramp to my work — the basic idea is that we use vascular muscle tension to adjust the functional parameters of neural circuits https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/1863595299056517410


@nickcammarata @vlucasrocha We tend to ignore what is too predictable — perhaps when looking at some of these pictures not enough feature detectors activate to trigger the sense that it’s a ‘real face’

Looksmaxxers who wish to be memorable should focus on the golden ratio instead https://t.co/0iKYZIrcct

@nickcammarata @vlucasrocha We tend to ignore what is too predictable — perhaps when looking at some of these pictures not enough feature detectors activate to trigger the sense that it’s a ‘real face’

Looksmaxxers who wish to be memorable should focus on the golden ratio instead https://x.com/johnsonmxe/status/2066836707836862559/photo/1


@cxgonzalez Descriptions I think about:
- What is real & what is good?
- What are minds & how to be kind to them?
- What are we & what are we here to do?
- Simulation hypothesis, but for what?
- "After Kardashev, the holy war"
- Qualia optimization problems as physical optimization problems


@chris_percy Thinking about @adamsafron's wonderful phrase, "making and breaking symmetries in mind and life" --

To a first approximation, the nervous system makes symmetries and the vasomuscular system breaks them. Neural firing is fast, recurrent, & condition-sensitive, allowing coherent…


"Latchmapper 1" https://t.co/vWfC93DrWz


@ProfFeynman “Two things exist, symmetries and perspectives from which they’re broken” works for physics and consciousness, but isn’t trivial to unpack


@slatestarcodex @drethelin I'm cautiously optimistic that the tech specs are sufficient for mapping vasocomputation latches