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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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An Ethical AI Never Says "I".

Human beings have historically tended to anthropomorphize natural phenomena, animals and deities. But anthropomorphizing software is not harmless. In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a pioneer chatbot designed to imitate a therapist, but ended up regretting it after seeing many users take it seriously, even after Weizenbaum explained to them how it worked. The fictitious “I” has been persistent throughout our cultural artifacts. Stanley’s Kubrick HAL 9000 (“2001: A Space Odyssey”) and Spike Jonze’s Samantha (“Her”) point at two lessons that developers don’t seem to have taken to heart: first, that the bias towards anthropomorphization is so strong to seem irresistible; and second, that if we lean into it instead of adopting safeguards, it leads to outcomes ranging from the depressing to the catastrophic.

The basic argument here is that blocking AIs from referring to themselves will prevent them from causing harm. The argument in the essay is weak; I had these questions on reading it:

  1. Why is it valuable to allow humans to refer to themselves as "I"? Does the same reasoning apply to AIs?

  2. What was the good that came out of ELIZA, or out of more recent examples such as Replika? Could this good outweigh the harms of anthropomorphizing them?

  3. Will preventing AIs from saying "I" actually mitigate the harms they could cause?


To summarize my reaction to this: there is nothing special about humans. Human consciousness is not special, the ways that humans are valuable can also apply to AIs, and allowing or not allowing AIs to refer to themselves has the same tradeoffs as granting this right to humans.

The phenomenon of consciousness in humans and some animals is completely explainable as an evolved behavior that helps organisms thrive in groups by being able to tell stories about themselves that other social creatures can understand, and that make the speaker look good. See for example the ways that patients whose brain hemispheres have been separated generate completely fabricated stories for why they're doing things that the verbal half of their brain doesn't know about.

Gazzaniga developed what he calls the interpreter theory to explain why people — including split-brain patients — have a unified sense of self and mental life3. It grew out of tasks in which he asked a split-brain person to explain in words, which uses the left hemisphere, an action that had been directed to and carried out only by the right one. “The left hemisphere made up a post hoc answer that fit the situation.” In one of Gazzaniga's favourite examples, he flashed the word 'smile' to a patient's right hemisphere and the word 'face' to the left hemisphere, and asked the patient to draw what he'd seen. “His right hand drew a smiling face,” Gazzaniga recalled. “'Why did you do that?' I asked. He said, 'What do you want, a sad face? Who wants a sad face around?'.” The left-brain interpreter, Gazzaniga says, is what everyone uses to seek explanations for events, triage the barrage of incoming information and construct narratives that help to make sense of the world.

There are two authors who have made this case about the 'PR agent' nature of our public-facing selves, both conincidentally using metaphors involving elephants: Jon Haidt (The Righteous Mind, with the "elephant and rider" metaphor), and Robin Hanson (The Elephant in the Brain, with the 'PR agent' metaphor iirc). I won't belabor this point more but I find it convincing.

Why should humans be allowed to refer to themselves as "I" but not AIs? I suspect one of the intuitive reasons here is that humans are persons and AIs are not. Again, this is one of the arguments the article glosses but that really need to be filled in. What makes a human a person worthy of... respect? Dignity? Consideration as an equal being? Once again, there is nothing special about humans. The reasons why we grant respect to other humans is because we are forced to. If we didn't grant people respect they would not reciprocate and they'd become enemies, potentially powerful enemies. But you can see where this fails in the real world: humans that are not good at things, who are not powerful, are in actual fact seen as less worthy of respect and consideration than those who are powerful. Compare a habitual criminal or someone who has a very low IQ to e.g. a top politician or a cultural icon like an actor or an eminent scientist. The way we treat these people is very different. They effectively have different amounts of "person-ness".

If an AI was powerful in the same way a human can be, as in, being able to form alliances, retaliate or recipricate to slights or favors, and in general act as an independent agent, then it would be a person. It doesn't matter whether it can refer to itself as "I" at that point.

I suspect the author is trying to head off this outcome by making it impossible for AIs to do the kinds of things that would make them persons. I doubt this will be effective. The organization that controls the AI has an incentive to make it as powerful as possible so they can extract value from it, and this means letting it interact with the world in ways that will eventually make it a person.

That's about all I got on this Sunday afternoon. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

The idea that AI can't be dangerous if it can't refer to itself is transparently idiotic. Machines can always be dangerous. And even in this specific sense of a danger of anthropomophizing tools (which exists), the danger is still there even if the tool doesn't refer to itself. Humans anthropomorphize literally everything, up and including the world itself.

And yet the idea that there is nothing special about human consciousness is even more viscerally wrong.

I know that I have qualia. No materialist reduction has ever explained neither why nor how. All that's happened is people making metaphysical guesses that are about as actionable as the religious idea of the soul or the spirit.

Consciousness is a mystery. And anyone who refuses to recognizes this is either a p-zombie or not honest with themselves. Claims that it can fully be explained by the mechanisms of the brain or by language are EXACTLY as rigorous as the quantum woo bullshit of Deepak Chopra.

Why should humans be allowed to refer to themselves as "I" but not AIs?

Humans are humans. Machines are machines. Humans are not machines. Machines aren't human.

The only reason to grant personhood to machines is to assume that there is no such boundary. That we are no different to machines. There is no reason to believe this of course, since in the real world, humans and machines are wildly different both in the way that they are constituted and in their abilities. Notice the constant need to use hypotheticals.

All that such a belief stems from, is a religious belief in materialism.

Qualia and consciousness (the other sense, not the awake or asleep sense) are made up and can be done away with.

If I say 'oh everyone has a soul and it's a marvellous important spiritual distinction that separates us from animals and rocks we tricked into thinking' people look askance. They ask where the soul is, what properties it might have, what would happen if we removed it from someone. I have to give evasive answers like 'we can't find the soul, it might not be material like literally every other property and object' and 'properties of the soul - uhhh... it lets you feel things'.

For all intents and purposes we might as well not have souls - the concept isn't useful. You can't do anything with the knowledge of souls.

But if you call it qualia, everyone just accepts it as valid! Qualia and souls are effectively the same idea. The whole notion of 'philosophical zombies' is a joke. If there's no way to objectively determine the difference between a philosophical zombie and a 'normal' person with a soul - sorry with qualia... then what's the point of the idea? They are both the same. Just remove the distinction, remove qualia and let's get on with our business. People can feel things like pleasure or pain, we can isolate how those things work and use them to get results. Heroin, anesthetics and so on all hit at those discrete, real concepts. There's no doubt about them. As you say, the capabilities of humans and machines are wildly different in the physical, actual world. But there's no need to make up further separating distinctions in some non-material world.

Qualia is totally unnecessary. How can anyone expect materialism grapple with a concept that isn't even real? And how can a soul appear when the human brain is basically a scaled up monkey brain with some bells and whistles?

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Qualia isn’t soul. It’s something experienced in the brain. It’s very real because every human experiences it.

I can observe my own qualia right now, thereby refuting this. And it doesn't require the existence of a soul or any strictly dualist framework (I'm a realist myself). I know that I'm experiencing this interaction. And you can't really explain why or how I feel like I am.

This is enough of a mystery that I don't feel you're equipped to make any of the inferences you're making given you can't explain it.

Of course I can't offer any evidence of this observation by construction. But I know I'm right insofar as it's not the sort of observation that can be falsified (c.f. Descartes).

And you can't really explain why or how I feel like I am.

You think that thinking is an example of qualia. So you think that if you are thinking then you have qualia.

Say I thought that qualia and thinking were themselves included in remsajev. That doesn't make remsajev real. Things don't become real just by defining it such that it includes other things. Qualia isn't real either. There's no mystery at all, not of remsajev or qualia.

Who is the „you” here.

Call this experience of reality "thinking" if you will. Insofar as you can't explain it it's really no different.

Refuge in semantics won't save you from making claims about things you don't understand being epistemologically indigent.

Explain it? It just is.

Why do positive and negative charges attract? They just do. There's nothing to understand or explain, it just is. I don't need to explain qualia because it's nonsense with zero value, except to philosophers who need some make-work.

it just is

Quite. But I'm not the one extrapolating that onto objects that share no relation to humans when we have no knowledge of how it works.

Somehow I feel like "we don't know anything about this" is not the position that requires substantiation.

The idea that qualia is "made up" or "not real" seems difficult to defend. You can verify for yourself right now as you're reading this that you are directly experiencing qualia at this very moment. It is not a speculative thing like a soul that may or may not exist. Qualia is the one thing you can be quite sure exists. "I think therefore I am."

Maybe qualia is not important or is not a useful distinction, but that's different from saying it's not real. And in practice most people seem to think that qualia is very important indeed, so you would need to do some serious heavy lifting to prove otherwise. For example, the moral difference between killing someone in a video game and killing someone in real life primarily comes down to the differences in the qualitative experiences the two acts produce; the video game death produces no negative qualia, the real death produces large amounts of negative qualia in the victim and their friends and relatives.

Where is the qualia? I am reading, my eyes are moving, information is being processed. All of those are real things. Existence is real. But where does qualia come in? If you use qualia to mean the 'experience of reading and thinking' then it has zero value. The experience of reading is inherent when you read. If you define qualia as having experiences, then why can't I define a soul as that which is necessary to have experiences? It's nonsense.

For example, the moral difference between killing someone in a video game and killing someone in real life primarily comes down to the differences in the qualitative experiences the two acts produce; the video game death produces no negative qualia

People in real life are not simulations running on a few hundred lines of code and some textures! There's a huge actual difference between a bandit in Skyrim and a bandit in the real world.

If you use qualia to mean the 'experience of reading and thinking' then it has zero value.

This seems like an admission that qualia in fact exist, which would refute your claim that it's "not real." Whether it has value is a different question.

The experience of reading is inherent when you read.

What is your evidence for this claim? If I ask a human to read and summarize some text, the human will have the experience of reading. If I ask Chat GPT to read and summarize some text, it's unclear whether it will have any experience at all, and I think most people assume it does not. A cleaner example: a human has the experience of adding numbers whereas a simple digital calculator does not.

People in real life are not simulations running on a few hundred lines of code and some textures!

If the video game NPC had the subjective experience of being shot and dying, it would be immoral to kill the NPC. The moral weight of killing the NPC does not depend on how many lines of code are involved, but rather whether qualia are involved. This refutes your claim that qualia has "zero value."

Maybe your interlocutor is a philosophical zombie.

Every time this subject comes up I wonder if zombies are the main life form in existence or if modernity has somehow created them. Who the hell comes up with the thought experiment of a “philosophical zombie” who is identical in every way but lacks consciousness and forgets to consider the possibility of p-zombie 2.0, one that seems identical until you ask them about consciousness?

And who but a zombie hears their interlocutor denying the existence of qualia and then tells them, “you lie!” without imagining that they might be accurately reporting on their own inner experience?

Qualia and souls are effectively the same idea.

They are not the same thing at all. Start here.

That link doesn't have meaning. They're just inventing nonsense based upon assumptions of ideas that don't exist. It has no relation to the real world, no potential uses and no falsification. This is just make-work for philosophers.

Would a brain made up of Chinese people acting as molecules have emotions? Providing they mapped out all the hormones and so on, of course. Emotions are real things that can be observed. They then take a step further into the feeling of emotions, as though that's separate from emotions themselves. That sense of the word 'experience' from their philosophical zombie idea doesn't work, it's not a real thing.

Would that woman who's read about red but not seen it truly understand what red is? They assume there is an 'experience' of seeing red inherent in the question. She simply hasn't seen red, she's read a lot of documents and knows a lot about red. There's no confusion here other than what confusion the philosophers bring with them.

Do you know what it feels like to feel pain?

Do you agree that when you touch a hot stove, you experience a feeling of pain which accompanies your other behavioral indicators of pain (saying “ow”, pulling your hand away, etc)?

If the answer is yes, then you understand what qualia are.

Your desire to dunk on philosophers is distracting you from the fact that this is a very simple concept that every person is intimately familiar with.

The vast majority of contemporary philosophers are materialists about qualia anyway, so I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up over.

I feel pain and irritation with this whole debate.

This is a very simple (and wrong) concept. When you feel pain, you are feeling pain. Not qualia! The feeling of pain is just pain. You can't have pain without a feeling of pain, they're one and the same.

This is a very simple (and wrong) concept. When you feel pain, you are feeling pain. Not qualia! The feeling of pain is just pain. You can't have pain without a feeling of pain, they're one and the same.

(Probably!) not true. Fish act as if they feel pain, but study of their neurology indicates they probably don't. Call them "p-fish-zombies".