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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14379 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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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.

What people say pain is bad they really mean the experience of pain as a conscious phenomenon. If pain didn't feel bad we wouldn't have a problem with it, it would just be a useful diagnostic tool for our bodies.

That's why the comparison with the Sims is apt. You ridicule it because you understand intuitively there's no experiential pain, but the same is equally as true about an LLM.

I think you're probably right and LLMs don't have anything consciousness-adjacent. But that's the key word - probably. I am not as confident as you are that we've finally solved the hard problem of consciousness right on the eve of it actually mattering. Unlike a Sim, there is no simplicity argument you can use; LLMs are easily as complex as the brains of many animals.

AI Safety advocates (correctly) argue that even a 0.5% chance of the world ending is worth spending resources to study and solve. 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.

But that's the key word - probably.

If you won't state "it's significantly probable, and if you think that just any old probability counts whatever the size, you are essentially doing Pascal's mugging.

AI Safety advocates (correctly) argue that even a 0.5% chance of the world ending is worth spending resources to study and solve.

Pascal has entered the chat, and would like to encourage us to spend large-but-finite resources on the worship of God because the positive odds of evading eternal infinite hellfire make it a utilitarian positive.

Less tongue-in-cheek: I don't think you're wrong per-se, and some resources are reasonable. But how does AI risk compare to, say, the risk of near-Earth asteroids that could end civilization?

Less tongue-in-cheek: I don't think you're wrong per-se, and some resources are reasonable. But how does AI risk compare to, say, the risk of near-Earth asteroids that could end civilization?

AI risk is much more important. I'm an AI optimist and I still wouldn't put the odds of AI destroying humanity in the next decade or two below 0.5%; predicting AI capability is way too hard for that much certainty. Whereas the risk of a truly dangerous asteroid impact (Torino level 10, which is still merely at the "may threaten civilization" level) is well below 0.1% per century.

Furthermore, we already basically know how to mitigate asteroid risk: detect it early enough, with an accurate enough trajectory, and deflection is easy. Detection isn't particularly expensive; we just need to make sure we keep doing it. In contrast, how much spending on AI Safety is "enough"? ¯\(ツ)/¯

I agree FWIW, despite being broadly an accelerationist and thinking that the likelihood AI is conscious is very low.

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.

This is why I'm not a utilitarian. The idea that you can quantify suffering and then try to optimize over the sum necessarily leads to absurdities around ideas like the torment nexus.

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?

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), but:

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 that 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 cost nothing (the very 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 nothing for us then yes, I would say it should be taken.

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.

Yeah, that would be a good thing to establish before your visceral disgust, because until then you'll get people like the above, and me, saying you can't torture chips and you can't torture matrices.

I didn't say that it was certainly the case that you could do so (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.

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