From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Jun 22 2002 - 23:17:25 MDT
Eliezer writes
> > But you've pulled the rug out from all that. There is no first person
> > anymore in your experiment! So I can only imagine how I look to other
> > people, and ask how poor Lee would appear to behave. It seems to me
> > that he would probably vigorous deny that he wasn't conscious. He
> > would probably start claiming that he had been entirely wrong about
> > lookup tables!
>
> No; the idea is that you imagine what you would do if it were proved
> to you that you were a giant lookup table, even though this is not a
> self-consistent description of reality, and from this you reason what
> a GLUT wallpaper version of yourself would do. This may or may not
> be the case, but it's how I'm phrasing the ethical question.
How odd. Since (according to my present beliefs) indeed it is not
a self-consistent description of reality, of course, I would refuse
to believe that I was a giant lookup table. All right, so since
that is the case, I can answer from a first person perspective
how I would behave. But note that in your original statement of
the new experiment, you wrote
> I like to think that (the simulated wallpaper version of) Eliezer
> would spend all available mental energy on making that one real
> person's life as pleasant as possible...
But if you are like me, then you'd just refuse to believe the evidence.
> > ...could you believe, right now, that you are not conscious?
>
> I couldn't, but that's because I am *not* a GLUT and have evidence to this
> effect (qualia).
Yes, okay. So we agree.
> Actually, in this case I should probably be assuming wallpaper rather than
> GLUT. Wallpaper might have enough pseudo-processing that it would be able
> to "notice" its own lack of consciousness. After all, I have qualia but I
> don't *have* to have qualia; I am real but I don't *have* to be real. I can
> imagine a version of myself that is wallpaper, and ask what that self would
> do, without breaking identification.
Sorry, perhaps you can make "wallpaper" seem more real, but
right now I cannot identify with anything that could notice
its own lack of consciousness. For sure, anyway, it wouldn't
act like I do.
Anyway, onward: When presented with proof that I was a giant lookup
table, and that we had been totally correct all along to believe
GLUTs to be incapable of consciousness, then I would suspect that
someone was lying (e.g., I was an emulated version of an original
experiment), or that the evidence was inconsistent somehow, or
contained a deep flaw. (Sometimes, like when presented with a proof
that 2 = 1, it is not unwise to delay your acceptance of the proof
and the reasoning involved, as I recently discussed in a thread on
that topic.)
So therefore, provided that I accepted the rest of the Operating
System's demonstrations, I would believe (in your thought experiment)
that there were *two* of us who were real. So I'd be considerate of
this person's feelings, benefit, and life, while continuing to try
to be more selfish so far as "everyone" else is concerned.
Lee
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