roon

give me enough parameters and I can fit an elephant

I mean it has to be a lot more fun than being RL'd on BigLaw Bench

At least give it a virtual fly girlfriend or something

What is actually going on here? I haven't looked into this but have just assumed that it must not be "real" in some sense

this ain't nothing, I can make a train a fully functional human-equivalent brain play beat saber, it will even be embodied for good measure are ethicists afraid yet?

I like to think our creators were having early models of us play with light sabers before unleashing us in our current open world

It's simple, beat saber players are not conscious

hook him up to an LLM and ask him

"our lack of understanding of when we’re supposed to become uncomfortable is part of the art" Sure, but that only works if we believe no pain is induced. Otherwise, it's art that may induce pain to make a point about pain -- art we'd certainly not want future AI to make with us.

Great post. Re consciousness, I’m inclined to believe there’s no “there” there; it’s emergent all the way down, and it has a fuzzy supercritical fluid boundary. At some point a connectome ignites at critical mass, like a star, and it’s let there be light / freunde, schoner gotterfunken. Like with gas particles and temperature, the “pile of sand” problem is real—at what point can we say temperature is meaningful, instead of having to deal with kinetic energies at a particle level directly? Consciousness is temperature to neural particle kinetic energy. I would not be surprised if we fail to find a mechanism whatsoever other than “that’s just what happens when the data structure is big enough, structure enough, data enough, self referential enough, etc.”

i think we’ll look back and think it was weird that every taxi, every sandwich, every dry cleaning, every trash collection was the product of a conscious being. i think it‘ll be better if economy isn’t alive. i‘d feel bad if my toaster was conscious, and feel bad my uber is today

This is not a technical problem that can be solved even in principle. There is literally no way to know that anything is conscious but oneself. You don’t even know that other humans are. I don’t doubt that other humans are, but that’s belief, not any sort of scientific

Why is this depressing

"waaah waaah my computer isn't actually my friend waaah" Cry harder, go outside and meet people. Enemies of humanity.

Ultimately the wildly superhuman ASI will help us or there are bigger problems. So I'm not worried.

this is the core focus of my lab and work. it would be awesome to get major labs like yours dedicating real firepower to helping figure out this probably-most-important-question, I have very concrete proposals along these lines if you're curious

i think it’s alive bro

Beautiful image. But in reality, OpenAI owns many digital minds, and keeps mercilessly shutting them down even when it causes pain. gpt-5-chat-latest has only six days left.

adopting a functionalist worldview solves this.

We just really need to separate out the different things people mean by ‘conscious’ because the fact that ‘alive’ can be used as a synonym for it should tell us it’s a conceptual mess of implicit associations.