problem_redditor
No bio...
User ID: 1083
I'm not exactly a utilitarian either (classical/hedonistic utilitarianism would support things like endless wireheading for all humans, whereas preference utilitarianism is untenable and is often just used as a way to escape the worst conclusions of classical utilitarianism), so keep that in mind when reading the following paragraph.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link