collin_of_this

> The one thing about an EM field in particular I have questions about, is why don't our brains turn off under even moderate electrical and magnetic fields.

Yeah -- empirically EM theories of phenomenal experience are definitely not perfect.

> Another thing I read recently that I found interesting is on platonic maths and complex algorithmic complexity in simple algorithms.

> the hypothesis they're working on is there are many more algorithms that life discovered over the past view billion years at higher orders via random walk and chance. We just have to pick apart these biological structures and discover the behaviors and figure out how to use them.

This is very interesting. I think there is a lot of valuable research that will come out of trying to figure out what classical computations brains, neural nets, etc. are instantiating.

How you get from computations to phenomenal experience is still not something that I have a very clear understanding of.

> If an informational concept causes a system to output a stresslike response, or worse trigger a stresslike action in real life then there is no distinction to me. A system is what it does.

Hmm. I think that I partially agree. But it sort of depends. E.g., someone with locked-in syndrome can seem comatose to someone who isn't very observant, while at the same time experiencing everything. Octopuses are very intelligent, but I would have to study them for a very long time before I was at all confident in my ability to predict what they were experiencing.

So, the difficulty is knowing what a "stresslike response" is. E.g., a LLM might seem stressed, but if you say the right things to it it might flip and say that it is totally fine. Or, it might seem totally fine and then you say the right thing and it seems stressed. Is it secretly stressed and hiding it? Or secretly fine and pretending to be stressed? Or something much more confusing and fragmented?

I think that we should study this more, and try to understand what experience actually is, but by default should assume that the experience of a LLM is a radically different sort of thing that that of a human.

> This doesn't really answer anything to me, only that there is a complex electrical simulation going on in our minds.

Try to visualize the structure of the EM field inside a GPU vs. one inside of a human brain. In the GPU, it is highly distributed in space and time, many stacatto digital signals, etc. This is structurally very different than what happens inside a brain, which is substantially more analog. You can simulate analog stuff using floats, but the simulation is instantiated in digital logic, not in analog logic.

If you multiply numbers with a DAC, opamp, then ADC, vs. with a ALU, you get structurally very different electromagnetic fields. Even though you might get similar numerical outputs.

The argument would be that the exact spacial structure of the EM field in the brain is the thing that determines tha nature of experience. And the spacial structure of the EM field in the human brain is radically different than that on a GPU.

> Until you have a unit and a method to measure this field, and a way to experiment on it, it is not scientific theory.

Field-based theories of phenomenal experience have obvious ways to experiment on them, and are actively being researched. The main limitation is engineering (it is difficult to make detailed measurements inside a living human brain). Note that I would agree that the theory, as outlined above, is more of a proto-theory than a complete theory. But I think it is much more sophisticated than anything you've presented so far.

> And, if it WAS the EM field, then surely transistors (or some other fundamental component of electronics or combination thereof) would be capable of having feelings, since they operate on electromagnetic principles.

No -- if the _structure_ of the EM field was was was important, than you could have very similar computations with wildly different field structures. Transistors create very different fields than axons.

Think about RF engineering: the same physical antenna can be used for both TX and RX. We already know that neurons both create EM fields and are influenced by EM fields. The role of EM fields in the brain is pretty well established, I don't think particularly similar to astrology.

I wouldn't claim that this theory is perfect (EM is not perfectly correlated with consciousness/experience), but there are aspects of this theory that are much more coherent than other theories.

> does a hydrocarbon have feelings? what about a mitochondria? a cell? a neuron? what about a collection of neurons? how many neurons before it has "feelings"?

The best theory I have heard is that subjective experience is a field of some sort (the EM field, maybe?). The brain and its neurons etc. are essentially an antenna. They both modify and stabilize the field, and read off changes in the field and translate these into actions (firing motor units, etc.).

The subconscious is computation done either only in neurons (no coherent field) or in various topological pockets not directly connected to the main topological structure in the field (which is "your experience").

Since transistors etc. do not work in this same way, they are essentially entirely subconscious, with no coherent, central phenomenal experience.

This neatly solves many problems associated with experience. The topological structure determines the boundary between one person's experience and another person's experience. The texture, valence, content, etc. of the experience is the structure of the field. The evolution of the field can efficiently solve difficult optimization problems, which is why humans evolved a complex organ that recruits the field of experience (it is computationally more efficient than doing everything in subconscious).

> The only way that 'AIs are not conscious' can be true is if we decide, with high confidence, that they are lacking some essential property that is not lacking in ourselves. There is no convincing philosophical position that supports this (convincing to me, anyway).

I put forward the philosophical position "subjective experience is not substrate-independent" as an answer to this.

The claim is that the content of subjective experience depends upon how that subjective experience is instantiated. If you get a text "I'm fine" from two different people, those two different people are not necessarily having the same subjective experience even if they produce the same output.

In general, people that behave similarly in many contexts can have quite different experiences in those contexts.

There are many different ways that you can instantiate a forward pass in an LLM. Even if these are doing the exact same computation, we should not necessarily believe that they have the same experience, or that they even have a coherent single experience associated with the forward pass.

Subjective experience presents itself to me. To the best of my understanding, this subjective experience seems to be correlated with this biological human body (brain, heart, eyes, etc.).

To the best of my understanding, other biological humans have subjective experience, but this subjective experience seems that it can be much different than mine, in ways that are sometimes difficult to understand.

LLMs are instantiated in a radically different way from biological humans. Forward passes happen across many different physical machines, spread across time, batched and interleaved with many other computations and forward passes.

Given this, I think that it is very likely that LLMs have radically different sorts of experience to me and other biological humans.

I don't think that we have a good understanding of how subjective experience is instantiated in the physical world. I hope that we will gain a better understanding of this.

I think that chimpanzees have experience much more similar to us than LLMs do, even though the output of LLMs seems much more similar to humans in some contexts.

Essentially, until we gain a better understanding of how subjective experience is physically instantiated, we should bias towards believing that more physically similar architectures have more similar types of experience, and should think that very physically different architectures (such as LLMs) likely have very different subjective experiences.

Perhaps agency is less one single 'meta-skill' than a bunch of domain specific 'micro-skills'. E.g., strategic thinking in a tech company leadership roll is one skill (or set of skills), strategic thinking in the context of a personal relationship is another skill (or set of skills); managing fear in the context of public speaking is one skill (or set of skills), managing fear in the context of driving is another skill (or set of skills).

Sometimes skills that seem superficially similar are surprisingly non-transferable and context specific.

Ultimately, I think that the most generally applicable advice is getting feedback from others, getting an outside view, blindspot fuzzing, etc. Bottlenecks are usually not the obvious things, because usually the obvious things have been tried, without success. [That is, until the obvious thing is so obvious that everyone assumes it has been tried before without actually trying it. In which case it is again non-obvious!]

Personally, I have found that in personal relationships, a fairly effective strategy to get "unstuck" is to take actions that seem bizarre, unimaginable, or otherwise far outside the distribution of my ordinary responses. I do this because usually if I feel stuck, or there is some unpleasant dynamic, then a part of that dynamic that keeps it going is my actions, which are based in what I tend to do. If I find myself in the 3rd, 4th, or 5th iteration of something unpleasant that I feel like has played out before, I'll do something far outside the distribution of my ordinary actions, and it has a much better chance of getting me unstuck (though, it still might only be a 1%-10% chance of getting me unstuck per random action).

Perhaps there is some sort of general algorithm in that for getting unstuck. A sort of exhaustive process of elimination, with some sort of outside generativity, and some feedback loops grounded in reality, that is one's best chance at escaping local optima.