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Scott Aaronson Blog Post
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A personal blog post by quantum computing theorist Scott Aaronson relevant to AI safety discussions around mind uploading, digital consciousness, and the philosophical underpinnings of personal identity in an AI-enabled future.
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Summary
Scott Aaronson recounts attending LessOnline 2024, a rationalist blogging conference, where he humorously 'came out' as a rationalist and engaged in debates about his 'Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine' essay. The essay argues that quantum mechanical irreversibility and the universe's initial conditions make biological consciousness fundamentally non-copyable, with implications for digital mind uploading and personal identity.
Key Points
- •Aaronson formally identifies as a rationalist after years of engagement with the community, including figures like Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
- •His 'Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine' thesis argues that the No-Cloning Theorem and chaotic amplification of quantum states make biological consciousness irreplicable digitally.
- •The essay challenges assumptions underlying mind uploading and digital immortality by grounding personal identity in physical irreversibility.
- •LessOnline is described as a venue where unstructured small-group conversation, not formal sessions, is the primary intellectual value.
- •The debate at LessOnline with Joe Carlsmith and others highlights ongoing rationalist-community tension over consciousness, identity, and AI-relevant questions about mind.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Lighthaven (Event Venue) | Organization | 40.0 |
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Guess I’m A Rationalist Now
A week ago I attended LessOnline , a rationalist blogging conference featuring many people I’ve known for years—Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Zvi Mowshowitz, Sarah Constantin, Carl Feynman—as well as people I’ve known only online and was delighted to meet in person, like Joe Carlsmith and Jacob Falkovich and Daniel Reeves. The conference was at Lighthaven , a bewildering maze of passageways, meeting-rooms, sleeping quarters, gardens, and vines off Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, which has recently emerged as the nerd Shangri-La, or Galt’s Gulch, or Shire, or whatever. I did two events at this year’s LessOnline: a conversation with Nate Soares about the Orthogonality Thesis , and an ask-me-anything session about quantum computing and theoretical computer science (no new ground there for regular consumers of my content).
What I’ll remember most from LessOnline is not the sessions, mine or others’, but the unending conversation among hundreds of people all over the grounds, which took place in parallel with the sessions and before and after them, from morning till night (and through the night, apparently, though I’ve gotten too old for that). It felt like a single conversational archipelago, the largest in which I’ve ever taken part, and the conference’s real point. (Attendees were exhorted, in the opening session, to skip as many sessions as possible in favor of intense small-group conversations—not only because it was better but also because the session rooms were too small.)
Within the conversational blob, just making my way from one building to another could take hours. My mean free path was approximately five feet, before someone would notice my nametag and stop me with a question. Here was my favorite opener:
“You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?”
“Yes,” I replied, not bothering to correct the “physicist” part.
One night, I walked up to Scott Alexander, who sitting on the ground, with his large bald head and a blanket he was using as a robe, resembled a monk. “Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.
I replied, “you k
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