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AI-generated text is notoriously verbose regardless of who came up with an idea.

Summary feature proposed in #4727 is for discussions not ideas.

I think this did not address what I think is the key part of the question which is 'how can something have an intrinsic value if value is subjective'.

I simply do not think all value is subjective. One can alter value through their own subjective experience. I personally still hold on to a paper napkin from a sentimental trip that I went on, and that creates a personal premium value for that napkin that goes above the utility and scarcity conditions of that napkin's value.

The contrary is obviously true. I doubt there are many monks that intend on buying Ferraris, even if they had the means to do so, so their subjective value impacts what would be considered the total of a Ferrari.

However, to speak of the 'intrinsic' side. I think value is best split into a multiplicative relationship between utility and scarcity. A toll road is a great example. Many times, there aren't many alternative roads, if any, and its utility at getting you to where you need to go should be non-zero assuming you intend on going where that road takes you. So, if a toll road were to crop up on the market selling for $1 dollar, assuming no 'strings attached', that would be a clear mispricing one could diagnose on an 'intrinsic value basis'.

I think it's incorrect to say that something cannot be intrinsically valued due to subjectivity being the primary motivator for humans, and so since subjectivity drives exchange, valuing that relationship is not possible. We can have long lasting theories of human behaviour or social systems that allow us to assign an objective/intrinsic value.

It doesn’t play the whole codebase at once. It walks through the code line by line, and when a file changes, it jumps to the changed lines and plays an accent made from them, rising or falling with that file’s health. So a small change in a big codebase is as audible as one in a small codebase. What’s quieter in a big codebase is the overall stage, and that’s on purpose: one long function shouldn’t make a whole healthy codebase sound sick. Bugs are the exception, since they count in full. One syntax error drops even a huge project from beautiful to meh.

I think this is actually more urgent for the new crit tree view on the right side.

For ex., this just shows:

1. Not if the...
2. A discussion can...
3. How is this a...

It could say something like:

1. Not if concise
2. Long discussions
3. No real criticism

How is this a criticism? My point was not about preventing long discussions but that we don't need to ai-summarize ideas that are already super concise.

Relatedly, I think in the future, software engineering will mostly be you talking to voice agents and looking at diagrams the agent is generating and constantly updating to help you understand the code/ideas. This is kind of how students already learn in the classroom, where there's a teacher who talks them through a drawing on the board, etc.

 It responds live as you make changes to your code

This seems useful only for small codebases. If the music is composed of all the code in a large codebase, each PR would change only a small subset, making the difference in the music almost inaudible.

I think what you actually care about is whether the ideas in the content were generated by AI. Whether the text was written or edited by AI should not be a concern. Therefore, I suggest the checkbox should read: "Were the core ideas of this submission generated by AI?"

Asking whether the text was written by AI is equivalent to asking a musician whether they used Ableton (music software) or only analog instruments.

I’m not using AI for this response and will not do so moving forward on Veritula to respect the rules and what seems to be the sentiment behind these rules (unless they change). My criticism is made in good faith and I will try to be especially careful not to make an unwanted mistake in this regard, because usually I would ask AI to check my wording for that.

I’ve been told by someone here that they preferred to talk to a person, not to an AI. This argument is understandable when there is no effort or no thinking involved by the human who uses the AI, or even worse, when the argument is not even looked at and just fed into an LLM to produce some counter, which is disrespectful, does not honor the time, effort and good faith of the other, and why the idea of a meat proxy and the criticism regarding that behavior makes sense. However, in my opinion, AI-assisted can mean many different things, some of which should be encouraged, not restricted or even punished.

Here are two examples that come to mind:

1. My English is not great but the English from a Spanish friend of mine is considerably worse, and I wonder if I should tell him about this platform, because he would usually use AI to polish his English. Instead, of course, he could use Spanish and then let it be translated. I understand this would probably be possible under the current rules but I’m not entirely sure. If it is, would it also be allowed for him to use a tool that makes it sound not like a literal translation, if he still understands afterwards what is being said? An AI assist here seems helpful for everyone involved.

2. All my contributions on this platform before this post have been AI-assisted in part exactly because I wanted to be as respectful of my counterpart’s time and effort (and those of any observers) as possible: I am aware that we sometimes can misunderstand the other’s position or use rhetorical moves without noticing it. So I would send the conversation we have had so far to the AI, share my thoughts on how I understand it and want to proceed, ask it to steelman the other side’s view, and see if its response would help me. It would then be a back and forth where I would try to figure out for myself if I should really change my mind on this or, if not, how exactly I want to respond to the steelmanned version to make my point clear. Now, as a result here I got the criticism that the language should be simpler and the arguments shorter, which is great feedback! I would incorporate that for the future, and any other criticism that I agree would make it better for the discussion. This would then be the current best version I have to offer, but yes, it’s with the use of an AI tool instead of me going out to talk with some philosopher friends about the latest criticism, taking notes, and then have some other friend check my final version for rhetorical moves, clarity, simplicity and shortness before posting it here.

In general, one question in my mind is how future proof this kind of rule is - if we merge more with the tools around us, if they are more integrated in us, would it still not be wanted to use them if done in good faith?

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organization of information processing

What does this mean if nothing physical? You mean the structure of their code?

Until about a week ago, when I debated this with my friend Tom Hyde, it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. Throwing a birthday party is solving a problem, and so is stopping an asteroid that is heading toward Earth. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?

The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the Popperian view above, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.

If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires’ Row apartment? Status plays a part, but I think I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.

I think the two reasons are:

1. Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Some of my desires I know already, like the mansion. Most I don’t know yet. Future desires are unknowable, thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
   1. This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story (a businessman advises a fisherman to scale up his business so he can retire and fish). The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. However, the fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
   2. Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
   3. There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire doesn’t mean I get a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
2. Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most awe-inspiring skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge. Deutsch argues beauty is objective and improves like science. But beauty doesn’t look like a problem we need to solve. Why do we seek it out?

So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” Bigger problems are riskier, but a bigger vision lets you raise more money and hire better people, which reduces the risk. So why not solve the problem people pay the most for? Or should you only be guided by curiosity, as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants or where the most interesting gaps are? I don’t know. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don’t think ambition is bounded.

The child who grows up knowing they will inherit several large companies might aim to build an even bigger one, while the child of, say, a cashier might aim to be a cashier. Each is working from a conjecture about what is within reach, formed from what they see the people around them do. It only gets criticized if the child asks whether they could do what someone like Elon Musk did, or something nobody has done before. That is why optimism matters for ambition. It says the only limit is what we don’t yet know.

Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don’t yet know what we’d want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.

Yes, I think you misunderstood. I've been referring to continuity in the organization of information processing, not the physical substrate. Evolutionary continuity is relevant because humans and other animals share many mechanisms and processing structures, some of which may be relevant to sentience. That doesn't imply that evolution couldn't also produce fundamentally new cognitive capacities.

In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing.

But we already know both current and future MacBooks will have von Neumann architecture. We already know it’s only different programming that could matter re: consciousness.

And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.

I disagree. I think there’s an important break/jump in human evolution: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/the-neo-darwinian-theory-of-the-mind

… I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.

As I understood it, you argued that it mattered insofar as it was part of evolutionary continuity. Did I misunderstand you there?

I think you're still missing the distinction I've made. Initially, you invoked substrate independence as though it contradicted my argument, but I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.

As Tegmark explains in the article you linked, it's the organization of information processing that matters, not the material implementing it. And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.

Your MacBook analogy doesn't address that. In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing. If, instead, sentience arose through a fundamentally different program, those predecessors would be much less plausible candidates for sentience.

So when you conclude that it would be about software rather than hardware, you're arguing against a claim I never made.

… I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.

She’s unconscious for all of that! It shows the opposite.

Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity…

More needlessly complicated language.

What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?

Because nothing is missing in our explanations of how calculators, roombas, self-driving cars etc work. Consciousness doesn’t figure in our explanations of them. The information processing animals do is the same as that of calculators etc. So the same conclusion applies.

Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?

Because then it can be explained fully in terms of mindless execution of a pre-written computer program.

Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity…

More unnecessarily complicated language.

I think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.

Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?

This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?

And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.

When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.

This idea (#5956) should be revised to be marked as a criticism.