(This is a light edit of a real-time conversation me and Victors had. The topic of consciousness and whether it was the right frame at all often came up when talking together, and we wanted to document all the frequent talking points we had about it, so we attempted in this conversation as best we could to cover all the different points we had before) On consciousness, suffering, and moral relevance Victors We've talked several times about consciousness—whether it matters, what the moral status of zombies or that of entities or systems that aren't conscious but potentially think in very complex ways might be, and how we should factor them into our decisions. I personally lean toward consciousness being important here, but I got the sense you don't necessarily agree, which makes this worth

LessWrong AI

36mabout 12 hours ago

ModelsLive

Sadly, The Whispering Earring

The Whispering Earring (which you should read first) explores one of the most dystopic-utopic scenarios. Imagine you could achieve all you've ever wanted by just giving up your agency. While theoretically this seems rather undesirable, in practice you get double benefits: that enviable high-status having-done-things reputation, without having to do all that scary failure-prone responsibility-taking. Just don't tell anyone you have the earring, otherwise the status points gained are void. Of course the fact that you're cheating takes away most of the satisfaction of winning too, but it's still better than not winning. Moloch says: sacrifice what you love, and I will grant you victory. Anyway, I've been using Claude chat as an enhanced diary for the past couple of months. I've been incredibl

LessWrong AI

4m15 minutes ago

ModelsRecent

Do You Need to Be Conscious to Matter? : LLMs and moral relevance

lesswrong.com

36mabout 12 hours ago