LessWrong meetup, Tuesday after next
Joshua Fox
Another great LW meeting is on the way!
Daniel Armak will be speaking on problem of consciousness on Tuesday, February 24.
Consciousness is the most direct and personal thing that we experience, modulo typical mind fallacy on the speaker's part. This experience creates expectations of "personal subjective experience", and can cause certain behaviors that deviate from the rational behaviors we would choose for our artificial agents. Is there any objective foundation, or any privileged human value, to guide us in resolving this inconsistency? Can this human value avoid being outcompeted to extinction by even slightly posthuman variants? Note that this is not what Chalmers calls "the hard problem of consciousness", although it is related.
The talk will be followed by a roundtable. We are going to figure this out!
- Where: Google, Electra Tower, 98 Yigal Alon Street, Tel Aviv. Meet at the 29th floor (not the Google Campus floor). We'll then move to a room.
- When: Tuesday, February 24 at 19:00
- Contact: If you can't find us, call Anatoly, who is graciously hosting us, at 054-245-1060; or Joshua at 054-569-1165.
- Facebook: Join the group. If you have FB, please RSVP at the FB event which will appear there, to help us get a sense of what to expect.
- You can also email me with questions.
Joshua Fox
Change of speaker for next Tuesday!
On Tuesday, February 24, Liran Valadarsky will be speaking on rationality in the immune system.
Our immune system needs to balance many simultaneous and often contradictory tasks. For example, a weak inflammatory response might be insufficient to fight an infection while too strong of a response causes unnecessary damage and, in extreme cases, system failure. How does the immune system extract the relevant information from its environment and 'update its beliefs' so as to carry out the most relevant response?
Liran has a BSc in biology and is currently in transition between MSc and PhD in Immunology at the Weizmann Institute of Science.