(Sunday) 12 Apr - LessWrong Tokyo

Our next discussion will be Sunday, April 12th at 10:00 AM at Berry Bar in JustAnotherSpace (here).

This month’s two readings are “Zombies: The Movie & Zombies! Zombies?” as entry points to Yudkowsky’s Sequence R: Physicalism 201. See more details below.

We’ll have coffee. We will break for lunch at the Tokyo Rationality Salon around 13:00.

Looking forward to seeing you then,

Stewart

We’re continuing our journey into The Sequences, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s thematically organized essays on systemically getting what you want (i.e., rationality), later compiled as the free six-book Rationality: From AI to Zombies (audiobook also free). A “sequence” is a cluster of articles that develops a single thesis.

For this next discussion we turn to Sequence R: Physicalism 201, and focus on two essays to set the scene for a storied discussion of Philosophical Zombies:

• Zombies: The Movie

• Zombies! Zombies?

Key questions include:

1. What does it mean to reduce minds to physics?

2. Could something act conscious without being conscious?

3. What are the implications for LLMs?

As a bonus, if you’ve seen the Apple TV show Pluribus, we can open the last hour to discussion of the mysteries of this show and how, although it’s not expressly about AI or zombies, it deals with many of the questions that arise in this sequence and with how a (maybe conscious?) super intelligence would act.

If you have time, read the full Sequence R: Physicalism 201 for more background.