Iâm currently working as an independent research contractor, primarily for the Qualia Research Institute. I previously worked as Chief of Staff at the Institute for Law & AI (formerly âLegal Priorities Projectâ) and as COO at the Center on Long-Term Risk (formerly âEffective Altruism Foundationâ). I also co-founded EA Munich in 2015. I have a masterâs and a PhD in Computational Science from TU Munich and a bachelorâs in Engineering Physics from Tec de Monterrey.
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Thanks so much for your comment and your willingness to support these efforts! Iâd be happy to chat and brainstorm ways for you to contribute. Just get in touch anytime (e.g. DM me here on the Forum). đ
In case it helps, I enhanced the audio of Rob Burbeaâs jhana retreat, which you can find here. :)
Thanks for reading and for your comment, Derek!
there doesnât seem to be any obvious mechanism for general quantum level truths to exert the kinds of very targeted influences that would be necessary for them to explain our beliefs about consciousness
I think it will turn out that the mechanism will not be obvious, mainly because quantum mechanics and fundamental physics more broadly are extraordinarily complex (and I expect that understanding consciousness will be just as difficult as understanding, say, quantum field theory). But, that being said, I do think there exist candidate quantum mechanisms that might explain the macro-level phenomenon of binding, such as entanglement.
Another assumption behind my position (which I also outlined in Indirect realism illustrated (and why it matters so much for consciousness debates)) is that, since I believe consciousness/âqualia are real (and a thing, not a process), the only sense in which they can be really real is for their 3rd-person physical correlates to be found at the deepest level of reality/âphysics. Any correlates that are not at the deepest levelâhowever elaborateâare just useful fictions, and thus (IMO) no different than what e.g. computational functionalists claim.
Hope that makes my views a bit clearer.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful and detailed comment, Mitchell! It seems like weâre roughly on the same page regarding the various constraints that a successful theory of consciousness should meet, as well as the class of approaches that seem most promising. Let me just share some immediate reactions I had while reading your comment. :)
The problem with entanglement is that it potentially gives you too much unity
Potentially, yes (though my understanding of entanglement is limited). On the other hand, as Atai has pointed out, âmost binding-appreciators strongly, strongly underestimate just how âinsaneâ it is that we can have any candidate solution to the binding problem *at all* [entanglement] in a universe that remotely resembles the universe described by classical physics.â (Hereâs his full writeup, which I find very compelling.) This makes me think that maybe we will find that entanglement gives us just the right amount of unity (though the specific mechanism might turn out to be pretty elaborate). Do you have any resources on the point about âtoo much unityâ? Iâd love to learn more.
First of all, the nature of the structures that hypothetically bridge fundamental physics and conscious states is still wide open, because the mathematics of fundamental physics is still wide open.
Agree, and this is part of what motivates the argument outlined in the last paragraph of the section âSufficiently detailed replicas/âsimulationsâ above.
For me, the core arguments against substrate-indifferent information-based theory of consciousness, revolve around vagueness.
Same for me. The paper âAre algorithms always arbitrary?â makes this case nicely.
But there are a number of challenges to this argumentâarenât states of mind vague too?
Maybe, yeah, depending on how we define a state of mind. But as you pointed out, âthere is a kind of ontological exactness that states of consciousness must possess,â which I also agree withânamely, that at least some moments of experience seem to exhibit some amount of fundamentally integrated information /â binding. So if an ontology canât accommodate that, itâs doomed. I believe thatâs the case for information-based theories, since any unity is interpreted by us arbitrarily, i.e. itâs epiphenomenal.
They only require that your simulation is a little more fine-grained than we used to believe necessary.
I think âa little moreâ is doing a lot of work here. If consciousness is a thing/âsubstrate, then any emulation that abstracts away finer levels of granularity will, by definition, not be that substrate, and therefore not be conscious (unless maybe one commits to the claim that the deepest layer of reality is binary/âbits, as pointed out above).
In any case, at least for quantum theories of mind to become widely convincing, there needs to be some evidence that quantum biology is playing a role in conscious cognition, evidence which I believe is still quite lacking. Hameroffâs microtubules are still by far the best candidate I have, for a biological locus of persistent coherent quantum states, but it seems difficult to get decisive evidence of coherence. The length of the debate about whether quantum coherence occurs in photosynthesis shows how difficult it can be.
I confess I still donât fully understand why we need to definitively prove that coherence has to be sustained. QM plays a causal role in the brain because it plays a causal role in everything, as I was hoping to convey with my xenon example. But Iâll keep thinking!
Iâll add another candidate for quantum biology into the mix: the Posner molecule (also mentioned by Atai here).
Thanks again! :)
Really cool report! Thank you and congrats on publishing it. :)
Iâd love to see an analogous report tackling preventable severe suffering (i.e., beyond preventable deaths). Thereâs a wonderful case report from Ugandaâs efforts to provide universal palliative care (see this short documentary). A good starting point could be the Lancet Commission report âAlleviating the access abyss in palliative care and pain reliefâ.
In addition if they are sentient, then I would estimate their experience of pain might be between 1x and 1,000x less important than that of an individual human.
This is the reason why I agree that thereâs a non-negligible chance that insect suffering is âonlyâ moderately important, though I think the chance is higher than âsmall-ishâ (despite the fact that I think insects are 100% conscious/âsentient). I come at it from a non-materialist physicalist stance on consciousness, assuming that suffering is (super roughly) proportional to the energy of the electromagnetic field in each nervous system times the degree of dissonance/âasymmetry in the field (quantified using some metric tbd). Given the size of many insects, the EM field they generate is very weak, so maybe the worst suffering an insect endures is just not too bad (maybe comparable to stubbing oneâs toe lightly). But Iâm not sure (especially about how suffering scales with size), so I still think thereâs some chance the suffering is quite bad.
(Thanks for posting this, @Benthamâs Bulldog! I enjoyed reading it. đ)
I assume itâs the one I linked in my original post? Catherine announced it was discontinued. :/â
Should the EA Forum facilitate donation swaps? đ¤ Judging from the number of upvotes on this recent swap ask and the fact that the old donation swap platform has retired, maybe thereâs some unmet demand here? I myself would like to swap donations later this year. Maybe even a low-effort solution (like an open thread) could go a long way?
My experience from the church is the salary doesnât correlate will with likelihood of donating, although it does of course correlate with donating larger amounts of money.
Yes, though I thought maybe among EAs there would be some correlation. đ¤ˇ
I think I was assuming people working in highly paid AI jobs were donating larger percentages of their income, but I havenât seen data in either direction?
Yeah, me neither (which, again, is probably true; just not in my circles).
Am I wrong that EAs working in AI (safety, policy, etc.) and who are now earning really well (easily top 1%) are less likely to donate to charity?
At least in my circles, I get the strong impression that this is the case, which I find kind of baffling (and a bit upsetting, honestly). I have some just-so stories for why this might be the case, but Iâd rather hear othersâ impressions, especially if they contradict mine (I might be falling prey to confirmation bias here since the prior should be that salary correlates positively with likelihood of donating among EAs regardless of sector).
Sharing this talk I gave in London last week titled âThe Heavy Tail of Valence: New Strategies to Quantify and Reduce Extreme Sufferingâ covering aspects of these two EA Forum posts:
I welcome feedback! đ
Oh god thatâs a huge preview. OK.
Thanks for writing this! Coincidentally, my talk âThe Heavy Tail of Valence: New Strategies to Quantify and Reduce Extreme Sufferingâ just went online a couple of hours ago. I thought you might like it âşď¸
Thanks, Hasan! :)
Obviously I want to be cautious about making such a recommendation. đ But Iâm confident enough in our data (pointing at chanca piedra being safer than e.g. melatonin) that I myself take 500mg once a week, but mostly because (a) that was the default recommended dosage on the bottle I got, and (b) I thought taking it daily would be an overkill given that I think Iâm at very low risk. But I could see the rationale for taking it daily for one month per year, as you suggest. Or maybe doing both?
Thanks, Henry. Your care, as a doctor, for peopleâs wellbeing shines through! Weâd also hate to learn that this herb causes e.g. delayed, severe side effects. We hope this question can be settled for good asap given the scope and severity of the suffering involved here!
We start our post acknowledging that online reviews are not usually a reliable source of information concerning medical matters. So we asked ourselves: if there was a statistically significant signal, how could we possibly find it? This is what motivated us to:
Compare reviews across three different platforms (WebMD, Amazon, Reddit).
Compare reviews of chanca piedra to reviews of other kidney stone treatments within those same platforms.
Compare reviews of other popular supplements within those same platforms (e.g., ashwagandha, melatonin).
Do sub-analyses of the data, e.g. looking only at the most credible reviews and reading closely any reviews mentioning any severe or rare side effects (which we report).
Look into whatever literature we could find about chanca piedra to see if mechanistic explanations were compatible with our findings.
Would an analysis of Reddit and Amazon reviews of thalidomide have revealed its negative effects? Bex powder? Diethylstilbestrol? Betel nut?
Not necessarily, no. But if we had access to thousands of anecdotes and reviews of these medications dating back to 2008, including by people who have taken them for years, the chances would go up significantly. I guess thatâs our main âselling pointâ.
In the end, our goal is to reduce as much extreme suffering as possible. If it turns out that taking chanca piedra actually increases extreme suffering, weâd want to be the first ones to know! But from what we can tell, that hypothesis is looking very unlikely.
I really appreciate your feedback and your questions! đ
Iâd love to reply in detail but it would take me a while. đ But maybe two quick points:
On observer independence: The main challenge that computational functionalism faces (IMO) is that thereâs no principled way to say âTHIS is the (observer-independent) system I posit to be consciousâ because algorithms, simulations, etc. donât have clearly-defined boundaries. Itâs up to us (as conscious agents) to arbitrarily determine those boundaries, so anything goes! The section âIs simulation an intrinsic property?â in this post sums it up quite neatly, I think. Field topology, as well as, say, entanglement networks, do give us observer-independent boundaries.
On the simulation behaving identically to the brain: Here I think one could reasonably ask: What if, in order for the simulation to behave identically, we had to simulate the brain even at the smallest physical scale? Many people think this isnât necessary and that the âneuron as digital switchesâ abstraction is enough. But say we actually had to simulate EM field phenomena, quantum phenomena, etc. Then I think runtime complexity matters, since maybe some parts of the brain can be simulated easily and others take millions of years. Can one bootstrap a coherent simulation from that? Now imagine trying to simulate multiple brains interacting with each other, running physics experiments, etc. Can one set up the simulation such that e.g. they all measure the speed of light to be the same? Or otherwise always get the same experimental results? I kind of doubt so. But regardless, the previous point about observer dependence would still stand.
Thank you so much, Dee! There might be a way for you to helpâIâll get in touch in the coming weeks! :)