didericis

Of course not! Regardless of whether the core phenomenon is fundamentally impossible to explain (which I think it has to be for philosophical reasons), it’s an incredibly productive question to ask/am also curious about cutting edge theories and related findings.

Our conscious experience is in fact a unique phenomenon because it is all perceivable phenomenon.

You can create as many self reflective machines as you like and experiment on them and compare them to output from humans, and maybe you’ll learn things, but you can’t ever get to looking at consciousness at all. There is no indirect or direct data you can use to compare all of your experience to something that sits inside a fraction of it.

What you’re talking about are behavioral experiments comparing the reported thoughts and actions of separate acknowledged conscious actors, ie other people, to the internal states and outputs of machines.

You’re not looking at consciousness when you do that. Looking at consciousness requires looking at all experience. Which is fundamentally impossible. When you try to look at all of experience as a single object to study nothing is differentiated. There is zero information.

There is no way to distinguish between an unconscious machine mimicking the functional aspects of consciousness we are able to indirectly observe and compare to our own experience and something having the same experience.

We could easily (and I think almost definitely are given the current pure symbolic manipulation track) be doing the same thing as a jungle cargo cult constructing an air strip out of sticks. Studying that won’t tell us how planes work.

Obviously advanced AI is more sophisticated than that and may have more legitimate parallels to consciousness, but I think it’s fundamentally impossible to know what’s a core part of the conscious experience and what just looks superficially similar to the output of conscious beings.

The current generation of AI are clearly not at all conscious and are “just” (don’t want to diminish the work) very good parrots generating image and text output from a given input in a way a whole bunch of conscious humans already have. But we’re already getting cargo cults and people who are anthropomorphizing and considering them comparable to humans.

There’s a danger in studying artificial models of an underlying phenomenon to learn about the phenomenon. That method of study is inherently very limited and extremely difficult to keep calibrated to the underlying phenomenon.

We can almost definitely learn a lot more about consciousness related phenomenon than we already know through science, and I don’t know the answer to OP’s question about the current cutting edge of that, but I think it’s always going to be about related phenomenon rather than consciousness itself. Unlike other phenomenon, which are only revealed to us because aspects of their existence appear in our observable universe, we don’t really “observe” the core experience of consciousness. The goalposts can be moved indefinitely whenever consciousness related phenomenon are made sense of. The fundamental experience is not observable, which means we can’t really see that black box at all. To me the mystery of that is much more satisfying than thinking we can ever get a definitive answer.

The fact that we think we can observe and comprehend a mechanism doing the observation does not preclude things we cannot see. You might be able to pan a cctv camera and get some insight about the camera itself if you find a reflection, but you can’t pan it over to the linux driver. It is not a given that all of the observer exists within the observable universe.

Whether or not more local emphasis is better when talking about civic education is a much longer conversation. Determining what proper civic education should be is an extremely difficult balancing act. That difficulty and the long term ramifications of education is why I think it's likely to be THE most important problem in upcoming decades. In order to avoid dystopian outcomes that difficulty needs to be confronted honestly and pragmatically. Systems become most dysfunctional and dystopian when they pursue a vision without regard for pragmatic considerations and are willing to become increasingly "in debt" to a vision by doing things that are very bad in the short term to medium term for an imagined, non existent benefit in the long term. I think it's perfectly possible to aim a system in pragmatic directions towards actually viable paths to betterment which balance short, medium, and long term considerations without the type of indebtedness to vision that leads to bad outcomes. Those paths won't be perfectly defined, and the benefits might end up being modest. In short I don't think I'm advocating for anything utopian, just intentional, pragmatic, and in service of whatever best paths make themselves visible. I think we are not looking at paths which are much better than the one public education is currently on. Exactly how much better civic education could be is a big unknown, but my hope is that it could be drastically improved.

“Blessed self appointed teachers” should not and cannot exist in any functional actually meritocratic system. In order for mass civic education to be effective there needs to be a core set of criteria for what constitutes a good teacher and a good citizen that all parties negotiate on and largely agree on (to the extent possible) that’s actually (not just superficially) bottom up and not imposed by social engineering types.

The exact criteria for what constitutes a good citizen can and should be varied based on location and can and should be driven by the values of any given local community. But there also needs to be a convergence on higher order values that can help negotiate between communities that have different values. A good education system needs to incorporate local community values while also fitting into a larger system.

That is incredibly difficult to achieve, and impossible to fully realize. But that should be the aim. What we have now is based off an old Prussian industrial model that is serving fewer and fewer people while also increasing disunity by preaching grievance. The education system could be much much better and both serve and be run by everyone in a much more unifying and cooperative way if there was better leadership, less inertia in the old system, and a much clearer and beneficial social contract at the foundation of the system.

Aiming at anything else will simply be a less effective, more corrupt, more unjust, more arrogantly constructed system.

True meritocracy requires aiming away from corruption, towards justice, and towards humility. That will never be perfectly achieved, but the lack of willingness to even aim at the target in large sectors of society at the moment is something I find both incredibly depressing and incredibly counterproductive strategically. There are tools and procedures that can be systematically employed to measure merit that, while imperfect, are better than nothing, and seem to be increasingly rejected because people don’t like the results. Those results are not something that should be considered static nor perfectly calibrated to merit nor reflective of worth as a high status member of society. But the incredible amount of sensitivity around any attempt at identifying and nurturing people with signs of high potential regardless of background is a giant achilles heel affecting all of society. Failing to properly address and assuage those sensitivities so we can pursue meritocracy to the extent possible harms everyone in the long run.

Because China is experiencing all kinds of internal demographic and political turmoil, and they’re still much further behind than people realize, what I worry about more in the long run is decay of western education than anything externally driven. We are our own worst enemy, and we risk hollowing out what has historically been the engine of innovation for the majority of the world (I am talking primarily about the pipeline feeding people into US University systems since World War II and high level technical/tinkering environments, as I think European education seems to have lost a decent amount of innovative capability a while ago, though I know much less about it). That problem is deeper than the problem of products of that system being sold off as you describe, but related. That poses a far bigger long term risk to domestic and global prosperity than China, imo, although China is still a massive risk for at least the next decade if Xi continues his current trajectory, and the education problem is of course related to our ability to confront that.

I see two extremely important problems that need to be solved:

1. The most intelligent and competent members of the public need to be pulled from all backgrounds, colors and creeds and be rigorously evaluated purely for ability and merit regardless of all other criteria. Historically there has been bias in favor of the host nation population. Now there is bias in favor of restorative education and nepotism. While truly restorative education has merit, it cannot interfere with attempts to identify and nurture the best of the best, which is of upmost national security importance, and is important for the maintenance and improvement of the machinery which has given us so much material prosperity.

2. We need to accept that not everyone is able to handle the complexity of the world we have created and educate those who are not in that first highly selective pool of people how to be good citizens, participate in complex systems in a way that’s beneficial for all parties despite the complexity, achieve high status, and create a compact that actually rewards them for being good citizens regardless of intellectual ability. There is a very toxic aspect in the upper echelons of modern society where those not able to handle the insane complexity and competitiveness of technocracy are essentially lied to by most of our educational system to continue schooling and training indefinitely, or they are ousted from the training environment and treated like livestock. Many people then end up clinging on to large bureaucratic systems for meaning and survival, which becomes further and further out of sync with real societal needs. This is a much harder problem to solve than the first given modern organizational complexity, but people will not accept the solution to the first problem (which is inevitably unbalanced and discriminatory against those less able) unless the system as a whole is explicitly rewarding and accepting everyone for participation and giving them achievable pathways to high status.

I see that second problem as THE problem of the 21st century. If that problem is not solved, or if it is forcibly “solved” arrogantly and stupidly, I worry the world will be plunged into a level of dysfunction that makes the past 3 years look like nirvana. If that problem is solved we could find ourselves enjoying the highest levels of prosperity, meaning, belonging, and global uplift in the history of mankind in the decades to come.

You run into an abstracted version of that in software all the time, but it’s way more ubiquitous that just a software or business problem. There’s always a limit to interchangeability/some kind of assumed context. That rabbit hole is incredibly deep. I don’t think I’ve ever run into anything comparable. If you pull on that thread long enough you end up in deep esoteric discussions about perception and philosophy and the history of categories/evolution. And whether or not all of that rabbit hole I ended up in is an unrelated tangent or not requires dealing with the same exact problem (which is whether or not the boundaries you’ve placed around something are legitimate/fit your definition, or if they belong somewhere else/you’re missing very important hidden context).

Is a hardware device, password never leaves device except when filling in form, requires hardware confirmation, and works as usb/bluetooth keyboard and is compatible with most everything.

I distinctly remember a period when the iPhone came out and the high score leaderboards for certain apps went from like a couple thousand to tens of thousands to like a million. I realized this kind of connectivity is going to select for a tiny percentage of hyper competitive winners. Those people are mixed in with billions of people not used to operating in that kind of a space. More and more people are being forced into a competition they don't really want to be a part of. The rooms are way too big and way too flat to allow for proper self selection and sorting into like minded peer groups at similar levels. They make 99% of people miserable, including many of those at the top who need to work ungodly hard to maintain positions that used to be more secure due to less global exposure.

What you can do is create a village of about 200 people and their networks with a much more interesting and larger set of like minded people than what your geography limits you to, and self select and bypass gatekeepers to create new and emergent communities beyond anything people might have dreamed or expected. But that requires a kind of community maintenance and segmentation that we haven't figured out how to do yet.

It still seems like the only solution that currently exists and actually works on the scale required. I’m not sure what realistic solutions are for regions where hydro pumped storage is not a viable option.

The most ideal locations are natural that require minimal land reshaping. Some places in the world have a lot of suitable locations like that. Others don’t.

But despite that it still seems much more feasible to build lots of hydro pump stations like that than it does to build other forms of battery farms.

I’m not a chemist/someone else can offer a more detailed explanation (just love the excuse to post that song), but with most of these kinds of things the energy and advanced equipment required to go in a theoretically plausible direction for a minuscule amount of yield is usually absurd. Including turning iron into gold. (I think it might theoretically be possible to do that at this point as well, but if it is possible I’m sure it’d be astronomically energy intensive and wasteful to manipulate matter to that degree)

I’m not involved in this kind of research or low level auditing, but I have some mathematical training and fascination with the idea of formal verification.

I ran across this thing called “K-Framework” that seems to have invested a lot in making formal semantics approachable (to the extent that’s possible). It’s striving to bridge that gap between academia and practicality, and the creator seems to really “get” both the academic and practical challenges of something like that.

Here’s a brief overview of one of the features that seems most impressive/useful: https://youtu.be/x_xm69gd3fE

The clarity of Grigore’s explanations and the quality of what I’ve found here: https://kframework.org/ makes me think K has a lot of potential, but again, this is not my direct area of expertise, and I haven’t been able to justify a deep dive to judge beyond impressions.

You’re correct in pointing out that complex systems are inevitably difficult to verify, but I think stuff like K could help provably minimize surface area a lot.

As impressive as a lot of these models are, I can't help but feel like they're going to end up making an incredible amount of sterile soulless content that makes everyone's lives worse. We're already drowning in ad dominated cynical soulless computer generated search results. Are all online forums going to end up being drowned out by cynical pumped out super cheap to produce simulacrums of creative content now too?

If I want people to buy more Triscuts next year what's stopping me from writing a bunch of prompts to insert subtle marketing cues to buy Triscuts with entire fake ecosystems of users, fan art, radio call ins, user stories, etc in like every niche community in existence and flooding them with soulless fake interaction?

That exists to a certain extent already, but I don't see how this stuff won't make it way easier, way more effective, and way more widespread.

The most effective way to handle this type of person is usually to make it clear you respect their intelligence/are impressed by them, and then to ask them if they can try to apply that same intelligence to a different problem: as near universal legibility as possible.

Trying to minimize context required for understanding code and think about how to put that map in their head in the code explicitly and to get as close as they can to universal language is a really really fascinating and difficult problem to try to solve, and even more impressive to see done.

If they listen to that and get it that type of engineer can transform and start to write fantastic, very legible code.

It think it depends on the type of intelligence they have, as well. In my experience there’s also a large percentage of people like you’re describing that are much better mathematically and visually/spatially than verbally. Sometimes this type of programmer is just better suited to writing the parts of a system that need to be very complicated. Some code is not really possible to write legibly without a bunch of prerequisite internal knowledge, like the deep guts of a game engine, some very complicated computer vision algorithm, etc. Having them stick to that stuff and make overview documents/general comments about whats going on can also be a good way to utilize their skill without as many downsides and illegibility problems.

Removing that extra bit of documentation related friction and maintenance that keeps an ill suited architecture around longer than it should or drifting from reality would be nice. I have a hard time seeing how the complexity or quirks of a diagramming tool that could also stay tailored to certain views wouldn’t become more of maintenance headache than being disciplined about manual diagrams.

People forget the atmosphere that spawned the war on drugs, the war on poverty, affordable housing legislation/fannie and freddy, the native american reservation system, the democratization of the middle east, no child left behind, etc.

This whole thing smells similar to me.

Big federally organized ambitious projects that don’t make the problem they’re trying to solve worse don’t seem to have happened since the late 60s. Apollo, the Interstate Highway System, the creation of the US electric grid, the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the creation of NORAD, the creation of the US global trade network, etc… all the big US federally organized success projects seem to have happened before that.

I’m hesitant trusting anything the federal bureaucracy does in it’s current state. That’s not particularly helpful, and I applaud genuine effort aimed at solving big problems, but I think there’s a severe age/bloat issue endemic to most of the kinds of organizations shoveling money to solve problems like this.

Generally speaking there seems to have been a big increase in both complexity and disconnect from reality in post 60s big federal plans like this. I’m not sure what would help calibrate big plans like this to reality better, but I suspect there’s been an increase in procedure and meticulous planning rather than doing/experimenting and being willing to just throw money at talented capable people and say “figure it out”.

There’s an incredibly sad but inspiring documentary called “The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off” about a man named John Kennedy that died of a genetic skin condition called EB at 36. He did everything within his power to make the most of his life, and was brilliantly dedicated to squeezing as much meaning and good as possible out of his horrible situation.

Failure to attempt moving away from and transcending sickness is itself possibly the worst form of sickness, and something that can be easily cured by just having someone genuinely loyal and rooting for you, even if only your inner self. What sick people need most, more than simple compassion and accommodations for their problems, are people genuinely rooting for health/trying to find solutions or grieving the difficulty in finding any.