Steve Byrnes

@[email protected]
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65 Posts
https://sjbyrnes.com/agi.html
Steve ByrnesNov 22, 2024
Blog post: “Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kYvbHCDeMTCTE9TAj/neuroscience-of-human-social-instincts-a-sketch
Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch — LessWrong

My primary neuroscience research goal for the past couple years has been to solve a certain problem, a problem which has had me stumped since the very beginning of when I became interested in neuroscience at all (as a lens into Artificial General Intelligence safety) back in 2019 …

Steve ByrnesNov 4, 2024
The 8th and final post of my “Intuitive Self-Models” series is out! “Rooting Out Free Will Intuitions” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JLZnSnJptzmPtSRTc/intuitive-self-models-8-rooting-out-free-will-intuitions
[Intuitive self-models] 8. Rooting Out Free Will Intuitions — LessWrong

Back in Post 3, I argued that the way we conceptualize free will, agency, desires, and decisions in the “Conventional Intuitive Self-Model” (§3.2) bears little relation to what’s actually happening in the brain. For example, for reasons explained in detail in §3.3 (brief recap in §8.4.1 below), “true” desires are conceptualized in a way that makes them incompatible with having any upstream cause. And thus …

Steve ByrnesOct 29, 2024
Post 7 of my 8-part “Intuitive Self-Models” series: “Hearing Voices, and Other Hallucinations” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k8uMmw45k3qp8LPNc/intuitive-self-models-7-hearing-voices-and-other
[Intuitive self-models] 7. Hearing Voices, and Other Hallucinations — LessWrong

The main thrust of this post is an opinionated discussion of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in §7.4, and then some discussion of how hallucinations and delusions arise from schizophrenia and mania (§7.5), and from psychotic depression and BPD (§7.6). But first—what exactly does this have to do with intuitive self-models? A whole lot, it turns out! …

Steve ByrnesOct 22, 2024
Post 6 of my 8-part “Intuitive Self-Models” series: “Awakening / Enlightenment / PNSE” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GvJe6WQ3jbynyhjxm/intuitive-self-models-6-awakening-enlightenment-pnse
[Intuitive self-models] 6. Awakening / Enlightenment / PNSE — LessWrong

I do have meditation experience—in my lifetime, I have probably logged as much as *several hours* of total time spent meditating! And I was keeping up my meditation practice until as recently as 2007! OK fine, obviously I won’t be speaking from personal experience here. But I will offer some opinions anyway, with pretty low confidence all around.

Steve ByrnesOct 16, 2024
Blog post: “Against empathy-by-default” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TprdAhgTvr3tuDJsD/against-empathy-by-default
Against empathy-by-default — LessWrong

TL;DR Section 1 presents an argument that I’ve heard from a couple people, that says that empathy happens “for free” as a side-effect of the general architecture of mammalian brains, basically because we tend to have similar feelings about similar situations, and “me being happy” is a kinda similar situation to “someone else being happy”, and thus if I find the former motivating then I’ll tend to find the latter motivating too, other things equal. …

Steve ByrnesOct 15, 2024
Post 5 of my 8-part “Intuitive Self-Models” series: “Dissociative Identity Disorder, a.k.a. Multiple Personality Disorder” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6bW5uJ325JxHYqMFr/intuitive-self-models-5-dissociative-identity-multiple
[Intuitive self-models] 5. Dissociative Identity (Multiple Personality) Disorder — LessWrong

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (previously known as “Multiple Personality Disorder”) involves a person having multiple “alters” (alternate identities), with different preferences and (in some cases) different names. A DID diagnosis also requires some nonzero amount of “inter-identity amnesia”, where an alter cannot recall events that occurred when a different alter was active. For example, DSM-V talks about patients “coming to” on a beach with no recollection of how they got there. …

Steve ByrnesOct 8, 2024
Post 4 of my 8-part “Intuitive Self-Models” series: “Trance” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QAjmr323LZGQBEvd5/intuitive-self-models-4-trance
[Intuitive self-models] 4. Trance — LessWrong

“Trance” is an umbrella term for various states of consciousness in which “you lose yourself”, somehow. The first kind that I learned about was hypnotic trance, as depicted in the media.…

Steve ByrnesOct 2, 2024
Post 3 of my 8-part “Intuitive Self-Models” series: “The Homunculus” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7tNq4hiSWW9GdKjY8/intuitive-self-models-3-the-homunculus
[Intuitive self-models] 3. The Homunculus — LessWrong

So far in the series, Post 1 established some foundations about intuitive self-models in general, and then Post 2 talked about the specific intuitive self-model concept “conscious awareness”. Now we’re ready to meet the protagonist starring in (most people’s) intuitive self-models—the mental concept that is conceptualized as being the root cause of many important mental events, especially those associated with “free will”. It’s the intender of intentions! It’s the decider of decisions! It’s the will-er of willing! Following Dennett, I call this concept: “the homunculus”. …

Steve ByrnesSep 25, 2024
Post 2 of my 8-part “Intuitive Self-Models” series: “Conscious Awareness” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/73xBjgoHuiKvJ5WRk/intuitive-self-models-2-conscious-awareness
[Intuitive self-models] 2. Conscious Awareness — LessWrong

The previous post laid some groundwork for talking about intuitive self-models. Now we’re jumping right into the deep end: the intuitive concept of “conscious awareness” (or “awareness” for short). Some argue (§1.6.2) that if we can fully understand why we have an “awareness” concept, then we will thereby understand phenomenal consciousness itself! Alas, “phenomenal consciousness itself” is outside the scope of this series (§1.6.2). Regardless, the “awareness” concept is centrally important to how we conceptualize our own mental worlds, and well worth understanding for its own sake.…

Steve ByrnesSep 19, 2024

New 8-post series on “intuitive self-models”! I’ll be attempting to explain what’s the deal with consciousness, free will, hypnotism, enlightenment, hallucinations, flow states, dissociation, akrasia, delusions, and more!

Post 1 of the series, “Preliminaries”, covers the basic idea:
• The brain has a predictive (a.k.a. self-supervised) learning algorithm.
• It builds generative (“intuitive”) models.
• Some of those models are of the brain algorithm itself! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FtwMA5fenk