Any sufficiently advanced consequentialism is indistinguishable from its own parody. The present article is sincere, though it might come across as absurd depending on one’s perspective. In order to reduce suffering, we have to decide which things can suffer and how much. Suffering by humans and animals tugs our heartstrings and is morally urgent, but we also have an obligation to make sure that we’re not overlooking negative subjective experiences in other places. I’ve written elsewhere about suffering in insects and digital minds. This piece explores what is arguably the most extreme possibility: seeing at least traces of suffering in fundamental physics.
Author: tstadmin
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Do Artificial Reinforcement-Learning Agents Matter Morally?
Artificial reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely used technique in artificial intelligence that provides a general method for training agents to perform a wide variety of behaviours. RL as used in computer science has striking parallels to reward and punishment learning in animal and human brains. I argue that present-day artificial RL agents have a very small but nonzero degree of ethical importance. This is particularly plausible for views according to which sentience comes in degrees based on the abilities and complexities of minds, but even binary views on consciousness should assign nonzero probability to RL programs having morally relevant experiences. While RL programs are not a top ethical priority today, they may become more significant in the coming decades as RL is increasingly applied to industry, robotics, video games, and other areas. I encourage scientists, philosophers, and citizens to begin a conversation about our ethical duties to reduce the harm that we inflict on powerless, voiceless RL agents.
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Ethical Issues in Artificial Reinforcement Learning
There is a remarkable connection between artificial reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms and the process of reward learning in animal brains. Do RL algorithms on computers pose moral problems? I think current RL computations do matter, though they’re probably less morally significant than animals, including insects, because the degree of consciousness and emotional experience seems limited in present-day RL agents. As RL becomes more sophisticated and is hooked up to other more “conscious” brain-like operations, this topic will become increasingly urgent. Given the vast numbers of RL computations that will be run in the future in industry, video games, robotics, and research, the moral stakes may be high. I encourage scientists and altruists to work toward more humane approaches to reinforcement learning.
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Why digital sentience is relevant to animal activists
Robots are hard to build, but they can go places like Mars where it would be more expensive and more risky to send humans. Computers need power, but this is easier to generate in electrical form than by creating a supply of human-digestible foods that contain a variety of nutrients. Machines are easier to shield from radiation, don’t need exercise to prevent muscle atrophy, and can generally be made more hardy than biological astronauts.
But in the long run, it won’t be just in space where machines will have the advantage. Biological neurons transmit signals at 1 to 120 meters per second, whereas electronic signals travel at 300 million meters per second (the speed of light). Neurons can fire at most 200 times per second, compared with about 2 billion times per second for modern microprocessors. While human brains currently have more total processing power than even the fastest supercomputers, machines are predicted to catch up in processing power within a few decades.
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Conceptualizing suffering and pain
Pain can be described in neurological terms but cognitive awareness, interpretation, behavioral dispositions, as well as cultural and educational factors have a decisive influence on pain perception. Suffering is proposed to be defined as an unpleasant or even anguishing experience, severely affecting a person at a psychophysical and existential level. Pain and suffering are considered unpleasant. However, the provided definitions neither include the idea that pain and suffering can attack and even destroy the self nor the idea that they can constructively expand the self; both perspectives can be equally useful for managing pain and suffering, but they are not defining features of the same. Including the existential dimension in the definition of suffering highlights the relevance of suffering in life and its effect on one’s own attachment to the world (including personal management, or the cultural and social influences which shape it). An understanding of pain and suffering life experiences is proposed, meaning that they are considered aspects of a person’s life, and the self is the ever-changing sum of these (and other) experiences.
Source: https://peh-med.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13010-017-0049-5
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Sentience in machines and anti-substratism: Can machines feel?
First version: Dec. 2016. Updated: Jan. 2017 I have created this text from the materials I prepared for the talk I gave at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Santiago de Compostela on December 15, 2016 along with Brian Tomasik, which was entitled “Outlook and future Risks of artificial consciousness”.
“Digital computers have eclipsed analog, but perhaps the extraordinary advantages of analog computers, as his “infinite” precision or its ability to efficiently solve problems such as ordination could be a requirement for sentience, because machines for which we have overwhelming proof of sentience (animals in general) are analog machines.”
Source: http://manuherran.com/wp-content/uploads/Sentience-in-machines.pdf
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Living robots created as scientists turn frog cells into entirely new life-forms
Xenobots. Could self-replicating blissbots create a happiness explosion?
Seen in The hedonistic Imperative
“The world’s first living robots have been built using stem cells from frog embryos, in a strange machine-animal hybrid that scientists say is an ‘entirely new life-form.’”
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The emotional need of a “scenario completion” and the difference between a cook and a chef
The need of a “scenario completion”
“Fascinating concept that I came across in military/police psychology dealing with the unique challenges people face in situations of extreme stress/danger: scenario completion. Take the normal pattern completion that people do and put fear blinders on them so they only perceive one possible outcome and they mechanically go through the motions *even when the outcome is terrible* and there were obvious alternatives. This leads to things like officers shooting *after* a suspect has already surrendered, having overly focused on the possibility of needing to shoot them. It seems similar to target fixation where people under duress will steer a vehicle directly into an obstacle that they are clearly perceiving (looking directly at) and can’t seem to tear their gaze away from. Or like a self fulfilling prophecy where the details of the imagined bad scenario are so overwhelming, with so little mental space for anything else that the person behaves in accordance with that mental picture even though it is clearly the mental picture of the *un*desired outcome.
I often try to share the related concept of stress induced myopia. I think that even people not in life or death situations can get shades of this sort of blindness to alternatives. It is unsurprising when people make sleep a priority and take internet/screen fasts that they suddenly see that the things they were regarding as obviously necessary are optional. In discussion of trauma with people this often seems to be an element of relationships sadly enough. They perceive no alternative and so they resign themselves to slogging it out for a lifetime with a person they are very unexcited about. This is horrific for both people involved.”
…and the opposite: how is Elon’s Software?
The difference between the way Elon thinks and the way most people think is kind of like the difference between a cook and a chef. […]
Musk calls this “reasoning from first principles.” I’ll let him explain:
I think generally people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good.” But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.5
My favorite all-time quote might be Steve Jobs saying this:
When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
[…]
Most people would have stuck with the Stanford program—because they had already told everyone about it and it would be weird to quit, because it was Stanford, because it was a more normal path, because it was safer, because the internet might be a fad, because what if he were 35 one day and was a failure with no money because he couldn’t get a good job without the right degree.
Musk quit the program after two days. The big macro arrow of his software came down on the right, saw that what he was embarking on wasn’t in the Goal Pool anymore, and he trusted his software—so he made a macro change.
He started Zip2 with his brother, an early cross between the concepts of the Yellow Pages and Google Maps. Four years later, they sold the company and Elon walked away with $22 million.
As a dotcom millionaire, the conventional wisdom was to settle down as a lifelong rich guy and either invest in other companies or start something new with other people’s money. But Musk’s goal formation center had other ideas. His Want box was bursting with ambitious startup ideas that he thought could have major impact on the world, and his Reality box, which now included $22 million, told him that he had a high chance of succeeding. Being leisurely on the sidelines was nowhere in his Want box and totally unnecessary according to his Reality box.
So he used his newfound wealth to start X.com in 1999, with the vision to build a full-service online financial institution. The internet was still young and the concept of storing your money in an online bank was totally inconceivable to most people, and Musk was advised by many that it was a crazy plan. But again, Musk trusted his software. What he knew about the internet told him that this was inside the Reality box—because his reasoning told him that when it came to the internet, the Reality box had grown much bigger than people appreciated—and that was all he needed to know to move forward. In the top part of his software, as his strategy-action-results-adjustments loop spun, X.com’s service changed, the team changed, the mission changed, even the name changed. By the time eBay bought it in 2002, the company was called PayPal and it was a money transfer service. Musk made $180 million.
source: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html
Bonus tip: about Tim Urban’s and Elon Musk’s idea of consciousness:
“One topic I disagreed with him on is the nature of consciousness. I think of consciousness as a smooth spectrum. To me, what we experience as consciousness is just what it feels like to be human-level intelligent. We’re smarter, and “more conscious” than an ape, who is more conscious than a chicken, etc. And an alien much smarter than us would be to us as we are to an ape (or an ant) in every way. We talked about this, and Musk seemed convinced that human-level consciousness is a black-and-white thing—that it’s like a switch that flips on at some point in the evolutionary process and that no other animals share. He doesn’t buy the “ants : humans :: humans : [a much smarter extra-terrestrial]” thing, believing that humans are weak computers and that something smarter than humans would just be a stronger computer, not something so beyond us we couldn’t even fathom its existence.”
Source: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
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David Cooper’s argument showing sentience to be impossible.
David Cooper’s argument showing sentience to be impossible.
http://magicschoolbook.com/consciousness
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Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness. However, in what Sestan termed a “mind-boggling” and “unexpected” result, billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity.
“These brains may be damaged, but if the cells are alive, it’s a living organ,” says Steve Hyman, director of psychiatric research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was among those briefed on the work. “It’s at the extreme of technical know-how, but not that different from preserving a kidney.”