Michael Graziano

Uh, psychopaths, in fact, also, uh, they, they defect in repeated games earlier than they should, even when it's not in their best interest, uh, unless they're reminded that something is in their best interest.

Uh, and, uh, there's, there's also, uh, there, there's, there's a lot of relevant, interesting research that we're doing with regards to AI alignment here, actually, uh, One of our neglected approach visionaries is a guy named Michael Graziano, who has a theory of consciousness called attention schema theory.

And I can explain it as well, but the reason I bring it up is because one of his larger theses here is that if AI is not conscious, it will be a psychopath.

As you were talking about, if it's just trying to fulfill this specific goal that it's been RL to try to go achieve, then it'll psychopathically go try to achieve exactly that goal.

And so interestingly, in attention schema theory, it is fairly similar.

So you have your attention and then you have your imperfect model of your attention.

And Michael Graziano posits that your imperfect model of your attention is which is the only thing you can ever engage with really ever anyway, is your consciousness.

And interestingly, he identifies that this is in the same place in your brain as your model of other people's consciousness as well.

I've spent years trying to figure out what is the seed of human consciousness, starting with solipsism, which would be the easiest one, but is a dead end.

But I've interviewed David Chalmers, the hard problem, Michael Graziano, Philip Goff, John Parrington, Andy Clark, Raphael Eustace, a whole bunch of people.

And the thing that's interesting is each of them has their own understanding of human consciousness and they all think they're right.

And they're all slightly different, which puts me in a very perplexing situation.

It's going after a theory of the observer.

and also an understanding of consciousness but we can separate the two notions we can just talk about the notion of an observer as we need it in in science but i'm also interested in consciousness and and we can tie the two notions or separate them for whichever audience that we were talking to for those who don't believe in consciousness fine we need an observer in science and everybody has to agree on that we need the notion of an observer in science And for those who don't think that there's something called consciousness, so Michael Graziano and Dan Dennett, for example, said there's just the illusion of consciousness.

There's no real consciousness.

And that's fine.

That is the core friction in the whole debate.

Michael Graziano tries to answer that with attention schema theory, or AST.

AST.

Okay, break that one down.

He's sort of a Nostra Aetate proponent prior to Nostra Aetate.

And we saw that from the Michael Graziano book, Aaron into the Wilderness, which surprised me, although it shouldn't surprise me because it makes perfect sense why these Catholics involved in Cold War operations would be ecumenists.

But Donovan served as an official, an operative, and an agent of the Rockefeller Foundation.

He was a worker who was sent on missions to various places to supply food.

I throw this recommendation back at them.

It's a book that came out the same year, and it's by a char- a, a writer called Michael Graziano, and it's called-

Uh-huh

...

So the story behind this idea is that hunger is in our head.

I first came across this, my friend Daria Rose, she had an article from... a guy called Michael Graziano, who is a professor of psychology at Princeton University.

And he has a link to the article at the end, but he had this really compelling argument that he got himself into this situation where he was overweight and he had this theory that there's more to losing weight than just calories in, calories out, and that there's actually a psychological component.

to hunger and given he's a psychologist of course he wants to look at the brain and what he discovered was eight months later as he said and 50 pounds lighter he found that by not restricting and actually making sure he felt satisfied at every meal he was able to lose weight really easily so Let's talk about the hunger that lives in your brain and not in your stomach.

So this idea is that there's a psychological component to hunger.

And he goes into detail, Michael Graziano goes into detail about the exact part of the brain that we don't need to know that.

But the thing that we need to take away from this is that hunger isn't just about the physical hunger, that there's a mental component to it as well.

And so that's why just telling yourself, I'm going to just going to eat less is actually a trap because, and actually it backfires and why all diets don't work for the longterm because they're relying on this idea of restriction.

and I will be defending the negative position drawing on computational functionalism and illusionism.

We are grounding today's discourse in recent literature, contrasting Anil K. Seth's recent Target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences with the functionalist frameworks of Michael Graziano, Daniel Dennett, and Keith Frankish.

So

to start, assuming that computation provides a sufficient basis for consciousness is a categorical error.

like

what, exactly?

Well, under Michael Graziano's attention schema theory, we find a rigorous mechanistic explanation for what experience actually is.

The brain constructs a body schema to track its limbs in space, allowing coordinated movement without having to consciously calculate the angle of every joint.

N- now, there are some who will say, "Ah, well, that's because you're talking about conscious experiences, and there are no such thing as conscious experiences.

We have the illusion of conscious experiences." So Michael Graziano and, and others have, have said this kind of thing.

So there are no conscious experiences.

There's just the illusion of the taste of mint.