problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
Honestly I think you're closer to the population norm than I am. Everyone's always talking about how depressed they are and how meaningless everything seems. I feel like the odd one out in that I've never struggled with any of that.
Selection bias is probably a very big factor influencing that perception. People talk about their malaise partially because they need to get it off their chest; people who are doing fine don't speak about just How Very Ok they are. I don't really think the Redditors traumaposting about their deep depression are at all representative of what the general population actually is like.
Regarding "suffering", I think that's a very difficult thing to quantify and can't necessarily be assessed so easily. Generally I think the discourse surrounding suffering is flawed in many ways; firstly people tend to overweight sources of suffering that are essentially severe but temporary over sources of suffering that are lower-level but more persistent, and secondly people tend to underweight the influence and importance of someone having hope that things will get better for them in the future and belief in their own agency to change it. The lack of conception of what a feasible "better life" would look like is an extremely underrated factor in suicides. More than anything else, I think our brains regard the idea of being stuck as intolerable, and searches for any kind of actionable solution.
In your hypothetical of someone experiencing a potentially fatal health condition, often suicide doesn't even occur to them because there's some kind of conception of a better future to fight for and a clearly defined set of steps to possibly stop the suffering that is currently occurring; you have something to fight against and a sense that you will either reach a state where things will get better or you're going to die trying. Paradoxically, I think actively being under assault creates more of a sense of urgency and purpose. You can look to the future and declare that you will be happy once you make the negative stimulus stop (at least, until the hedonic treadmill inevitably kicks in and you return to your natural affective baseline, but your brain focuses on the here and now and doesn't think about that). But when, on paper, you already possess the things that any reasonable person could expect - you're healthy and have a job, friends, hobbies, and so on, and yet you're still coming back to your apartment feeling horribly empty and unmotivated as if the things you were doing only served to prevent you from having to deal with yourself, there's nothing to work towards. It's much easier to fall into a mindset where life itself, or your own ingrained mental patterns, are the problem, because that's less of a concrete issue that you can identify and take steps to address.
I'm not sure people do it on a whim per se, rather I'd frame the impulsive nature of suicide as being a response to the straw that broke the camel's back. I think we have affective baselines which are more insensitive to circumstances than we would like to believe they are, and there is a subsection of unlucky people whose affective baseline oscillates somewhere between misery and ennui (an idea partially supported by behaviour genetics). Modern life has reduced the number of blameworthy agents they can pin the problem on and try to fix, which only makes it worse. When you don't even know what the problem even is, what would make you happy, or what there is to even strive for, when you on paper should be doing okay but everything only seems like pointless sound and fury, I see why one would look around at the paucity of other feasible options and choose the only way out.
Can’t give a full response now, but mostly agree.
I don't think you need to be a spiritualist (although I am) to think that ML systems cannot experience pain.
I believe we’ve spoken about this before; I agree with this if you are defining pain as the sensation of physical pain, since you likely can’t capture most of its dimensions without a body or a sense of ownership over that body as belonging to you. Affective and emotional pain, on the other hand, is a broader category; it’s not prima facie implausible for an artificial system to have some kind of weird hall-of-mirrors distorted analogue of that which represents “negatively valenced response to stimulus”.
But qualia is very subtle - for instance, things as similar as men and women can experience distinctly different qualia.
It gets way weirder and more fucky than that: I’m aware of a study where researchers blinded rats and fitted them with a prosthesis which fed their visual cortexes info from a geomagnetic sensor. Their brains quickly adapted to the new sensory modality, to the extent that they were navigating mazes almost as well as sighted rats. Mole rats use magnetonavigation, and become incredibly stressed out and fearful when placed in experimental conditions that prevent them from sensing that. I have no clue how it would feel to be that rat, to be able to experience the Earth’s magnetic field firsthand. I literally have no conception of what that looks or feels like.
Thus I think that if we ever were able to make self-aware machines, their qualia could and would likely be vastly different from ours, possibly incomprehensibly so.
This is my take too. There’s no reason to expect their subjective perceptions would be similar at all; just because qualia may arise does not mean that qualia needs to be anthropomorphic. It’s the main problem I have with a lot of sentient-AI fiction; they’re just humans in metal skins meant to induce empathy and understanding. But in all likelihood the inner workings of a human mind and any kind of hypothetical future ML model won’t be the same.
I won’t speak on the topic of whether radically dissimilar alien qualia deserves moral consideration, except that I expect the topic to be divisive if it ever becomes a salient point of conversation. Though as per the blinded rat study it’s possible that humans themselves in the future will be able to use prostheses to experience many dimensions of unnatural qualia inaccessible to us, it’s likely they’ll assign moral value to them, and as such they may be far more sympathetic to the idea of the welfare of cognitive aliens.
This is true, but what I do find to be rather frustrating sometimes with these AI discussions is that people (not you necessarily) very often bake in their assumptions and take it for granted that AI cannot be sentient and choose to ridicule the idea that "electric patterns" can experience hurt (your brain substantially runs on electric patterns too but we'll just ignore that). Many people within this community act as if the hard problem of consciousness has been solved already, and we know what makes things sentient, and we know for a fact that ML systems cannot experience qualia. Well, we don't; when and how exactly has this been established? This argument has been made for so long, with many (flawed) thought experiments like Searle's Chinese Room to try and disprove the idea that any kind of sentience can ever actually be attributed to a chatbot.
Please note: I'm fairly certain they aren't currently sentient, and if they ever become such their "subjective experience" will be very different from any human one. But the strain of thought here that is essentially a contrarian reaction against the admittedly sometimes irritating crop of rationalists who care way too much about model welfare is frankly quite annoying and bakes in a number of assumptions that are framed as common sense. If you are a spiritualist, then explicitly state that assumption and acknowledge that it's one strand of possibility among others predicated on a metaphysical view of consciousness, not the only possible one that can exist.
I found that film goofy as shit, the practical effects were impressive for the time but the plot and dialogue felt incredibly hackneyed, B-movie-esque (which it is) and honestly quite unintentionally funny at times. Lines like "Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first... insect politician." absolutely laid me out in a way that I don't think was intended.
Maybe this is weird but I conceptualise it as a very breezy popcorn film. The grossness for me is probably also tempered by the fact that there was a period of my own life best summed up with the sentence "we have body horror at home" and barely any of this affects me anymore.
The scorn for and hatred of 'whites' is real, albeit often with an implicit 'but I'm one of the good ones' exception attached, but I don't think they actually expect to do themselves harm.
This has been discussed ad nauseam but it’s just intra-racial status signalling. The progressive leftist outgroup is not other races/immigrants; they don’t necessarily see themselves as being in competition or even in the same social worlds or status hierarchies as them, the outgroup they would most like to distinguish themselves from is the poorfag hick whites who worry about low-status things like manual or unskilled work being outsourced to waves of Oppressed Refugees who massively increase the supply of low-skill labour and are willing to perform these jobs for lower pay. By embracing these kinds of lax immigration policies, they distinguish themselves not only as one of the Good Whites but also as one of the Cultured Whites, who are magnanimous in their kindness, enlightened enough to accept and understand the value of other cultures, and most definitely not a part of the lowly social stratum at risk of competition from migrant workers. They are too genteel to care about that.
It bears mentioning that the converse exists too; those who hold the opposite view are countersignalling in a way that marks themselves as the populist voice of the masses, as steadfast advocates for the Real Salt-Of-The-Earth Americans/Australians/Canadians/[insert nationality here] who are so impervious to social control that they’re willing to go against the Establishment, but their base position is also just less inherently paradoxical than that of white racial progressives and it’s no great mystery why they would hold this position.
The relevant portions of the Great Wall such as Shanhaiguan and Gubeikou which were involved in the war were constructed during the Ming dynasty, built in the 15th and 16th centuries along a path that was somewhat reminiscent of the route past walls traced, but which were effectively entirely new fortifications. Really the entire brick portion of the Great Wall that people picture is the product of this very Ming wall-building project.
The earlier Qin and Han Great Walls tracing back to the 2nd century BCE were earthen fortifications that had pretty much eroded away over more than a millennium of disuse by the time the Ming took power; you can still see remnants of the original Han dynasty earthen wall in rural Gansu province which are more or less useless as fortifications due to how degraded they are. After the Sui, there was a really large gap in wall-building, which appears to be due to the fact that wall-building was seen as an admission of policy failure from the Tang onwards; a dynasty with successful foreign policy maintained engagement consistently with steppe-dwellers and was seen to have no need for such costly and manpower-heavy infrastructure projects.
Disclaimer: I really did not like this city when I travelled here to see my SO, it was one of my least favourite cities I have ever been to, but YMMV. My grievances with the city may all be normal and expected in the North American context, so maybe it's a good idea to not use me as a barometer for your experience.
Go see the Old City Hall and distillery district if you're already downtown, they're nothing to shout about but are decent pieces of old architecture, in addition to this it may also be worth making the trip out to Casa Loma to see the OG McMansion "Gothic Revival" architecture. CN Tower is interesting if you've never been in a tower before. Skip Centre Island in the middle of Lake Ontario (or Lake America depending on your nationality), it's extremely underwhelming, it's just a middlingly-sized meadowy island with hokey tourist infrastructure and virtually nothing going on; if you like nature I'm told the Scarborough bluffs are a decent choice though I did not have time to go there myself. Possibly the most interesting offbeat historical spot I can think of in the entire city of Toronto is actually the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, it was inspired by European and British garden cemeteries of the 19th century and features some stately mausoleums for important figures, including but not limited to Timothy Eaton, Hart Massey, William George Barker, etc. Oh and Glenn Gould is there.
Also the Group of Seven paintings, housed in the Art Gallery of Ontario, are worth seeing if you like that kind of thing. They're nicer in real life than they look in photos.
EDIT: Royal Ontario Museum is also okay for a short trip, though frankly there’s nothing all too distinctive about its collection.
I have to admit, crying foul over national sovereignty and international law is a bit rich coming from the US. After all, the general position of the US for the last quarter century or so has been that US law applies within the US and to US citizens, and the US president has unlimited jurisdiction over the life of freedom of anyone else.
No but you see when the US and its allies mess with the Middle East and Latin America for the umpteenth time, bomb their countries to smithereens and/or try to install their own puppet governments in the area, this is an act of magnanimity and liberation of the downtrodden as well as a justified act of retaliation against evil dictatorships. When US competitors exercise power on a much smaller and less consequential regional scale, for example China enforcing their sovereignty over Hong Kong or throwing their weight around in the South China Sea, this is uncalled-for aggression, authoritarianism and belligerence and a violation of international law. As always everything is just realpolitik and the ideological justifications are created ad hoc to legitimise it.
It's literally just rules for thee, not for me; their mode of engagement has never been particularly consistent. The actual basis for their objection to the ICC is primarily just that the US and its interests may be subject to some external power that constrains their ability to act, it has nothing to do with any serious belief in consistently-applied "international law" or "rules-based order". In this context, it's very hard for me to care about any arguments about how the ICC is trying to gain and keep power as an arbiter of international affairs, when we already live in a system where flagrant overexercise of power is the norm. America is just not used to being on the wrong side of that dynamic, and as such suddenly feels obliged to care.
Pain in the purely physical, immediate, tissue-damage sense is probably not accessible to an ML model and I don't think there's an argument for that which really holds up. The more defensible argument and the one I've seen thrown around more in model welfare circles is the idea that some analogue of affective pain would be available to a model, which I think most people would still consider worthy of moral consideration if present.
I think if you subscribe to the idea that qualia is meaningful and worth discussing in some way (an opinion which I do hold) you have more plausible outs from the idea; p-zombies for example are only legible through the lens of a distinction predicated on qualia-based language. In contrast if you're defining affective pain via only functional language your argument has to rely on splitting hairs about how the mechanism of action differs between conscious beings and ML agents, which isn't impossible by any means, but you have less options to argue a meaningful distinction.
Right but I also tend to think visceral distress is defined functionally without needing to rule either way on the presence of qualia, so I deny your premise.
I'm a bit confused since if you are defining everything functionally, this would appear to update in favour of ML agents being worthy of moral consideration, not against it, and in a way that isn't trivial. It appears to nullify your previous objection invoking panpsychism.
Pain and suffering is intrinsically linked to being able to register good and bad and respond accordingly; in other words, valence. Your brain is always predicting what’s going to happen next, and when that mismatch marks a state as worse, unsafe, costly, incoherent, or threatening to continuity, the same learning architecture marks it as discomfort so as to update future behaviour. It's negatively-valenced prediction error.
TD error in ML models are somewhat of a broadly similar concept; it compares expected outcomes with actual outcomes and updates future behaviour based on the mismatch. The whole architecture only works because better and worse outcomes mean something to the system going through it. This paper also reports a representation of "functional welfare" that tracks how well or badly the system is doing relative to its goals, which exists before RL in a latent way but gets recruited and modified through the training process as part of alignment in a way that results in longstanding valence evaluations of sorts post-training.
Not all of this is the same as what occurs in human brains, but if functional similarity implies moral value then this is a lot more similar to it than what goes on in a rock.
Similarly, even a 0.5% chance that we are creating unimaginable AI suffering by running an otherwise-useless program is worth just a tiny bit of effort to ask people "hey, please don't do that." Maybe thinking that just makes me a cringy bleeding-heart hippie? Oh well.
This is more or less my position as well, and I have to clarify; I don't really think LLMs have anything consciousness-adjacent as well and believe the original study wasn't illustrative of all that much. But I'm not ready to claim certainty yet that anything resembling subjective experience definitely does not exist nor can I establish that the chance of qualia existing is infinitesimal in a Pascal's wager sense (that can be easily argued by reference to infinitely many possible cosmologies, this cannot). At best something like this is aesthetically ugly whereas at worst it is infinite torture; there's just no real upside here.
I'm not exactly a utilitarian either (though frankly all moral systems lead to absurdities once applied consistently, I find).
If we care about AI pain, shouldn't we also care about AI pleasure? And then isn't it our moral obligation to create as many AIs as possible and simulate the pleasure nexus for each of them? Even if there's only a tiny chance AIs can experience pleasure?
These aren't really symmetrical considerations; that costs resources and time which could be devoted to other, far more worthwhile endeavours with a much higher chance of producing significant lasting utility for others, whereas not creating a Torment Nexus costs nothing (the marginal utility the creator gets from the satisfaction of having created a Torment Nexus is outweighed by the annoyance it would very plausibly cause others). If we had a way to create possible AI pleasure that cost us literally nothing then yes, I would say it should be done. Devoting resources and time to making things Possibly Worse just seems perverse to me.
I didn't say that it was certainly the case that you could establish moral value here (in fact I specifically stated it was likely not the case). But if you hold anything less than absolute certainty that such a system cannot harbour qualia you should probably not be creating the Torment Nexus for that system.
In any case I don't see how one is ever supposed to conclusively prove qualia in a way that would satisfy you and your ilk without the possibility of inviting objection, since shit like this almost entirely always boils down to pitting one intuition pump against another. I can posit that there is enough epistemic uncertainty surrounding the issue that some non-zero level of regard should be given to the idea.
The Sim clearly tries to avoid drowning in the pool, it's only the removal of the ladder that prevents them. They have a reward function and a trigger that they are trying to avoid that impacts that function, that's the definition of pain.
Okay, in order to have any productive discussion about this we would have to first establish what features would need to be present for a system to warrant possible moral consideration. If that's the expanded definition of "reward function" we're going off here, what do you feel about animal suffering, and how is torturing a baby chick different from torturing a Sim? What would make this different for you outside of intuition?
If you're not relying on something like substrate-dependence, I have the sense that your argument will end up proving too much, but I'll wait for you to articulate it before jumping to conclusions.
Sims aren't black boxes with reward functions and representations that causes them to be averse to drowning in a pool? There is literally no mechanism for these kinds of value judgements in a Sim.
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about it after one person who read Berg’s research used the findings to design an “AI torture chamber” that turns the pain vector to max again and again forever, and uploaded it to GitHub.
Thanks, I hate it. No, seriously that is probably one of the most existentially horrifying real-life events I have come across; I don't actually believe AI have qualia as of yet and don't take the proposition particularly seriously, but on the off chance that AI actually does have qualia that is still a microscopic chance of an infinity of pain. I find this viscerally displeasing.
Patriarchy is not rule by men collectively. It’s rule by, specifically, fathers
Hence "Of course, you can’t expect every single man on earth to take responsibility for a woman’s Honour and Dignity, so the practical implementation of this is to provide her father and brothers and other male relatives who would naturally care about her the most with the authority to make sure it is preserved."
And yes, patriarchy is not rule by men collectively, and definitely is not rule for the benefit of men either.
It’s true that under a patriarchy this never would have happened… because there wouldn’t be a house of young men.
"Patriarchies" often do have associations of young men (and women); such things are not usually prohibited. The difference is that there wouldn't be commingling between men and women like what occurred here, and women in public would often have to be supervised by male guardians acting as their bodyguard and honour guard, and daddy would have the right to vet any kind of partner the girl wants to have such that she wouldn't bring back a cad who'd defile her honour. They were provided the power to do this not because society hated women, but because they were the ones held responsible for enforcing restitution when something happened.
I think you would hear the screaming from orbit if we were to actually place restrictions on women to maintain moral and social order on their behalf though, in spite of women's apparent inability to regulate their sexuality themselves. That would cramp their style too much you see. Better to let them put out for whoever they want without restriction, then make false rape accusations once they don't like the outcomes.
That's why, in every society in history sexuality has been heavily regulated by custom and law.
Yes, and presumably in the system you’re imagining, men and women alike are to be heavily punished and held accountable for breaches of the sexual code, not this fucked-up one way system where agency and responsibility is placed on the man to Know Better as the ostensible buyers of sex under this framework (whereas expecting the seller not to give away free candy willy-nilly, then complain they were robbed because they just assumed people would donate after taking candy, is evidently too much to ask). That line of thinking naturally lends itself to a guardianship system, which is a system most people making this argument would feel very uncomfortable with. They are not taking their ideas to the logical conclusion; in my experience they would like women to be comparatively sexually unrestricted while at the same time believing that they should still possess the ability to displace responsibility onto the nearest man because they were just such poor little exploited damsels. It is untenable to let women freely put out and to let them still go crying for redress, sympathy and a shotgun wedding when they don’t get what they want out of their investment. Nobody can control a woman, yet everyone must avenge her nonetheless once she is unhappy with the consequences of her own actions.
I’m not a sexual libertine (as I said, everyone here is degenerate); I really just want things to be consistent. At this point I am completely inoculated to women's tears after having to listen to their incessant frivolous complaints blasted from every loudspeaker on maximum volume for over two decades.
Descriptively, they can't assess risk or bear consequences when their gambit fails, which calls for external regulation.
To clarify, in a world where you are afforded the right to assess risk for yourself and freely make decisions as a liberated individual, you should also be expected to accept the consequences of these actions. People who gamble or invest in a highly leveraged crypto ETF that ends up losing them money might not be the best judges of risk, but as an adult they are judged to be able to make these decisions and suffer the consequences, without having the ability to point to the nearest person and displace all accountability. Many women and those white knights who compulsively create apologia for them appear to be congenitally incapable of accepting this.
We live in a sexually liberated world, and perhaps that is not the world we should live in, but it is. “Your standards applied consistently” and all that. Frankly I am also very perturbed by how trads seem to try and agree with feminists on things like these, instead of forcing them to adhere to the sexual liberation many of them claim to want for themselves. By carrying water for them trads are not actually helping bring about the trad system they so valorise, they’re just pushing the Overton Window in the direction of Sexual Liberation+, which is just milquetoast sexual liberation except now there's shiny new features like the ability to endlessly play victim of your own choices and blame men every time something goes wrong or (gasp) they don't give you exactly what you thought yourself entitled to from sex.
I subscribe to the idea that literally everyone involved was degenerate for their participation in the act (the girl and the guys alike); her escalation into rape accusations is another matter entirely and does not reflect kindly on her or her ability to own her mistakes. But:
If you don't want to risk being thought a slut, don't have a drug-addled gangbang, it's really not that hard.
I really just think progs and trads alike would only be satisfied with the reintroduction of The Patriarchy™ (and probably not even then). They are literally stating that women do not have the capacity to regulate their own sexuality and cannot take full responsibility like adults when they get themselves into situations that make them feel shame or do not yield the outcomes they want, and that the responsibility should be displaced onto men collectively, who must decide on their behalf what would be good for them or read their mind to divine what they Really Want, then regulate their sexuality for them by preemptively stopping them from making stupid decisions and putting out in a way that won’t yield results. They are all just babes in the woods who cannot be expected to assess risk or bear the consequences when their gambits fail, the poor dears. If a woman doesn’t get what she wanted or expected, someone must be hung for it.
Of course, you can’t expect every single man on earth to take responsibility for a woman’s Honour and Dignity, so the practical implementation of this is to provide her father and brothers and other male relatives who would naturally care about her the most with the authority to make sure it is preserved. Frankly the discourse surrounding this is some Islam Is Right About Women-tier shit, and I struggle with not believing that women’s lib was a horrible mistake when women en masse seem intent on demonstrating that they are radically unsuited for the “empowerment” they so value. If I didn’t know better I would think this was a conspiracy to turn people into misogynists; it’s just so farcical that I could not have dreamt up better ammunition if I tried.
Low seven figures at 28 with no job? You are already winning and this is honestly some ridiculously high agency flexing. Take it from me, someone with a Real Job in Accounting and Tax and who's been permanently burned out because of it: It will not stop the identity crisis or the feelings of inadequacy (if anything, it can strengthen it; impostor syndrome and failure to meet the demands of your job is one of the major things that can crater your self esteem). Professional life is mostly miserable and soul-destroying.
You need to get out more, and honestly travel is a good idea for you (within reason). The issue here appears to be that you've spent a lot of time isolated in one place and as such have a lack of life experience to draw from, which is easily fixable when you have disposable income to spend and enough motivation. Also your mindset isn't productive whatsoever; maybe stop whaling on yourself so much for failing to stick to the straight-and-narrow. Whatever you're doing is evidently working well for you and a job is not an end in and of itself, it is a means.
This sort of precludes the possibility of depression among people who aren't experiencing immediate threat, though, since depression is in large part a problem of lack of meaning. Crucially, you can't simply will a telos into existence when you don't have one. I'm not saying rolling over and dying is the correct answer (it's not), but "finding purpose" is a very open-ended task with a very individualised solution and it can be easy or nearly impossible depending on the person in question.
It always strikes me just how radically different people are in terms of mental architecture, such that imagining a different cognitive landscape is sometimes like trying to conceptualise an alien mind.
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