Joe Carlsmith: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Suppose we figure out that consciousness is just a word we use for a hodgepodge of different things, only some of which encompass what we care about. Maybe there are other things we care about that are not included in that word, similar to the life force analogy. Where do you then anticipate that would leave us as far as ethics goes? Would there then be a next thing that's like consciousness? What do you anticipate that would look like? There's a class of people called illusionists in philosophy of mind, who will say consciousness does not exist. There are different ways to understand this view, but one version is to say that the concept of consciousness has built into it too many preconditions that aren't met by the real world. So we should chuck it out like élan vital. The proposal is at least phenomenal consciousness, or qualia, what it's like to be a thing. They'll just say this is sufficiently broken, sufficiently chock full of falsehoods that we should just not use it. On reflection, I do actually expect to continue to care about something like consciousness quite a lot, and to not end up deciding that my ethics is better if it doesn't make any reference to that. At least, there are some things quite nearby to consciousness. Something happens when I stub my toe. It's unclear exactly how to name it, but there’s something about that I'm pretty focused on. If you're asking where things go, I have a bunch of credence that in the end we end up caring a bunch about consciousness just directly. If we don't... Yeah, where will ethics go? Where will a completed philosophy of mind go? It’s very hard to say. A move that people might make, if you get a little bit less interested in the notion of consciousness, is some slightly more animistic view. What's going on with the tree? You're maybe not talking about it as a conscious entity necessarily, but it's also not totally unaware or something. The consciousness discourse is rife with these funny cases where it's like, "Oh, those criteria imply that this totally weird entity would be conscious" or something like that. That’s especially the case if you're interested in some notion of agency or preferences. A lot of things can be agents, corporations, all sorts of things. Is a corporation conscious? Oh man. But one place it could go in theory is that you start to view the world as animated by moral significance in richer and subtler structures than we're used to. Plants or weird optimization processes are outflows of complex… I don't know. Who knows exactly what you end up seeing as infused with the sort of thing that you ultimately care about. But it is possible that it includes a bunch of stuff that we don't normally ascribe consciousness to. You say "a complete theory of mind," and presumably after that, a more complete ethic. Even the notion of a reflective equilibrium implies, "Oh, you'll be done with it at some point." You just sum up all the numbers and then you've got the thing you care about. This might be unrelated to the same sense we have in science. The vibe you get when you're talking about these kinds of questions is that, “Oh, we're rushing through all the science right now. We've been churning through it. It's getting harder to find because there's some cap. You find all the things at some point.” Right now it's super easy because a semi-intelligent species has barely emerged and the ASI will just rush through everything incredibly fast. You will either have aligned its heart or not. In either case, it'll use what it's figured out about what is really going on and then expand through the universe and exploit. It’ll do the tiling or maybe some more benevolent version of the “tiling”. That feels like the basic picture of what's going on. We had dinner with Michael Nielsen a few months ago. His view is that this just keeps going forever, or close to forever. How much would it change your understanding of what's going to happen in the future if you were convinced that Nielsen is right about his picture of science?…

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