Joe Carlsmith

people might make if you get a little bit less interested in the notion of consciousness is some sort of slightly more like animistic, like, so what's going on with the tree?

And you're like, maybe not like talking about it as a conscious entity necessarily, but it's also not like,

totally unaware or something.

And like, so there's all this, like the consciousness discourse is rife with these funny cases where it's sort of like, Oh, like those criteria imply that this, um, this totally weird entity would be conscious or something like that.

Like, especially if you're interested in, in some notion of like agency or preferences, like a lot of things can be agents, corporation, you know, all sorts of things like corporations conscious.

And it's like, Oh man.

Um, but I actually think it's a one place it could go in theory is in some sense, you start to view the world as like animated by moral significance and

in kind of richer and subtler structures than we're used to, you know?

And so like plants or, you know, like weird optimization processes are kind of like outflows of like complex, I don't know, like who knows exactly what you end up seeing as infused with the sort of thing that you ultimately care about.

But I think it is possible that that doesn't map

that that like includes a bunch of stuff that we don't normally ascribe consciousness to.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few different aspects.

There's kind of... My memory of this conversation, you know, I don't claim to really understand Michael's picture here, but I think my memory was sort of like, sure, you get the fundamental laws.

Like, I think he... My impression was that he expects sort of

physics, the kind of physics to get solved or something, maybe modular, like the expensiveness of certain experiments or something.

But the difficulty is like, even granted that you have the kind of basic laws down, that still actually doesn't let you predict like where at the macro scale, like various useful technologies will be located.

Like there's just still this like big search problem.

And so my memory though, you know, I'll let him speak for himself on what his take is here.

But my memory was, it was sort of like, sure, you get the fundamental stuff, but that doesn't mean you get the same,

tech.