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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27983 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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I was recently discussing why are foods including yeast ok with vegans but honey is not? Yeast are living things and we either stick them in bottles of their own waste until they shut down or cook them alive and there are many many more of them than anything else we use to prepare food.

I don’t care if they’re living. I care if they experience something that I would recognize as pain. The closer they get to having our sort of neurotransmitters or whatever, the more empathy I feel.

There is no reason to think single celled organisms can suffer.

But what if they all make up a group mind and so they have intelligence and sentience? You just don't know! What if yeast have souls? What if yeast are souls, the soul of Gaia? All the individual organisms on the Earth make up one giant mega-organism, just like all the different cells in our bodies make up one mega-organism that we call the self! And besides, humans aren't conscious either, there is no one single unitary "I" or "self". So it's all the same!

(No, I don't believe any of this, but if one gets into the weeds of philosophical explorations of what is life, what is consciousness, why do you think it's not okay to shove the fat man into the path of the trolley, etc., one can easily discard common sense by the way).

Suffering is essentially just the unlearning gradient in an ML model. Any system that responds to external stimuli by altering itself to avoid repeating past behavior can suffer. Even a single neuron can suffer. Even a single atom can suffer.

That being said, I don't care about the suffering of neurons and atoms-- or plants, or animals, or basically anything except a few near-human species (apes, elephants, cetaceans, etc), pets I irrationally love, and of course humans themselves. AI could be smarter than me but I'm still not going to give a shit if it suffers except insofar as it experiences specifically human suffering.

While I agree with the second paragraph, the first one has me scratching my head. Why would suffering have anything to do with the "unlearning gradient of an ML model" and, if so, how does an atom have anything to do with ML?

I think of it more as a (negative) reward signal in RL. When a human touches a hot stove, there's a sharp drop in dopamine (our reward signal). Neural circuits adjust their synapses to betterpredict future (negative) reward, and subsequently they take actions that don't do it. There's a bit of a sleight of hand here--do we actually know our experience of pain is equivalent to a negative reward signal--but it's not too wild a hypothetical extrapolation.

How do atoms fit in? Well, it's a stretch, but one way to approach it is to treat atoms as trying to maximize a reward of negative energy, on a hard coded (unlearned) policy corresponding to the laws of physics. E.g. burning some methane helps them get to a lower energy state, maximizing their own reward. Or, to cause "physical" pain, you could put all the gas in a box on one side of the box: nature abhors a vacuum.

Neither psychologist nor RL people I talked with seem to believe that this is literally how the human mind works, because this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring. Yes there is a vaguely RL-like layer of our brain, but RL itself does not conscious experience make. Unless of course you have some very heavy philosophical machinery to convince us otherwise...

That's the sleight of hand I mentioned: because qualia are so mysterious, it's a leap to assume that RL algorithms that maximize reward correspond to any particular qualia.

On the other hand, suffering is conditioned on some physical substrate, and something like "what human brains do" seems a more plausible candidate for how qualia arise than anything else I've seen. People with dopamine issues (e.g. severe Parkinson's, drug withdrawal) often report anhedonia.

That heavy philosophical machinery is the trillion dollar question that is beyond me (or anyone else that I'm aware of).

this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring

Maybe they are? I don't believe this, but I don't see how we can simply dismiss it out of hand from an argument of sheer disbelief (which seems just as premature to me as saying it's a fact). Agnosticism seems to be the only approach here.

Not a vegan but it seems internally consistent. Yeast are indeed living things, just like plants! Since vegans haven't quite figured out how to photosynthesize yet, they still need to eat living things to not starve. Yeast is just acceptable casualties.

You joke, yet one of my oldest dreams is our geneediting capabilities to reach the state where we can produce a human/plant hybrid where basking in the sun actually feeds you.

The minor character of the Green Man was included in the Book of the New Sun just for you.

Photosynthesis provides far too little calories of sugar. Outsourcing your photosynthesis to a large quantity of plants gives you enough energy for a high metabolism and big brain.

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