251–260 of 320 posts
Given that I don't agree with many of Yann LeCun's stances on AI, I enjoyed making this: https://6ammc3n5zzf5ljnz.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/inf2... Hello I'm an AI-generated version of Yann LeCoon. As an unbiased expert, I'm not worried about AI. ... If somehow an AI gets out of control ... it will be my good AI against your bad AI. ... After all, what does history show us about technology-fueled conflicts among…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree 100% with you, everyone thinks that way about their own belief.
So let's put it differently. True or not, materialism is the simplest, most constrained, and most predictive of the hypotheses that match available evidence. Why should we prefer a "physics + $magic" theory, for any particular flavor of $magic? Why this particular flavor? Why any flavor, if so far everything is explainable by the baseline "physics" alone? Even in purely practical terms, it makes most sense to stick t…
I'm not arguing that they're correct. I'm saying that they believe that they are correct, and if you argue that they're not, well, you're back to arguing!
It's the old saw - you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into.
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> consciousness and will can be completely encoded in cause-and-effect atomic relationships. The real problem is that that belief is BS until proven true. Wait. Isn't literally the exactly other way around ? Materialism is the null hypothesis here, backed by all empirical evidence to date; it's all the other hypotheses presenting some kind of magic that are BS until proven.
A wise philosopher once said this. You know your experience is real. But you do not know if the material world you see is the result of a great delusion by a master programmer. Thus the only thing you truly know has no mass at all. Thus a wise person takes the immaterial as immediate apparent, but the physical as questionable. You can always prove the immaterial “I think therefore I am”. But due to the uncertainty of…
Sure, you can prove that "I think therefore I am" for yourself. So how about we just accept it's true and put it behind us and continue to the more interesting stuff?
What you or I call external world, or our perception of it, has some kind of structure. There are patterns to it, and each of us seem to have some control over details of our respective perceptions. Long story short, so far it seems that materialism is the simplest framework you can use to accurately predict and control those perceptions. You and I both seem to be getting most mileage out of assuming that we're similar entities inhabiting and perceiving a shared universe that's external to us, and that that universe follows some universal patterns.
That's not materialism[0] yet, especially not in the sense relevant to AI/AGI. To get there, one has to learn about the existence of fields of study like medicine, or neuroscience, and some of the practical results they yielded. Things like, you poke someone's brain with a stick, watch what happens, and talk to the person afterwards. We've done that enough times to be fairly confident that a) brain is the substrate in which mind exists, and b) mind is a computational phenomenon.
I mean, you could maybe question materialism 100 years ago, back when people had the basics of science down but not much data to go on. It's weird to do in time and age when you can literally circuit-bend a brain like you'd do with an electronic toy, and get the same kind of result from the process.
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[0] - Or physicalism or whatever you call the "materialism, but updated to current state of physics textbooks" philosophy.
This is my favorite: https://6ammc3n5zzf5ljnz.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/inf2...
FYI dang they kinda ripped off our product down to copying the UI (Hedra.com). Our model is about 12x faster and supports 4 minute long videos…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So let's put it differently. True or not, materialism is the simplest, most constrained, and most predictive of the hypotheses that match available evidence. Why should we prefer a "physics + $magic" theory, for any particular flavor of $magic? Why this particular flavor? Why any flavor, if so far everything is explainable by the baseline "physics" alone? Even in purely practical terms, it makes most sense to stick t…
But the religious nuts will say "no, 'god did it' is the simplest, most constrained explanation". I'm not arguing that they're correct. I'm saying that they believe that they are correct, and if you argue that they're not, well, you're back to arguing! It's the old saw - you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into.
Maybe, but then we can still get to common ground by discussing a hypothetical universe that looks just like ours, but happen to not have a god inside (or lost it along the way). In that hypothetical, similar to yet totally-not-ours universe ruled purely by math, things would happen in a particular way; in that universe, materialism is the simplest explanation.
(It's up to religious folks then to explain where that hypothetical universe diverges from the real one specifically, and why, and how confident are they of that.)
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But the religious nuts will say "no, 'god did it' is the simplest, most constrained explanation". I'm not arguing that they're correct. I'm saying that they believe that they are correct, and if you argue that they're not, well, you're back to arguing! It's the old saw - you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themself into.
> But the religious nuts will say "no, 'god did it' is the simplest, most constrained explanation". Maybe, but then we can still get to common ground by discussing a hypothetical universe that looks just like ours, but happen to not have a god inside (or lost it along the way). In that hypothetical, similar to yet totally-not-ours universe ruled purely by math, things would happen in a particular way; in that univers…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the religious nuts will say "no, 'god did it' is the simplest, most constrained explanation". Maybe, but then we can still get to common ground by discussing a hypothetical universe that looks just like ours, but happen to not have a god inside (or lost it along the way). In that hypothetical, similar to yet totally-not-ours universe ruled purely by math, things would happen in a particular way; in that univers…
You've never actually met a religious person, have you. :)
I do of course exclude people, religious or otherwise, who have no interest or capacity to process a discussion like this. We don't need 100% participation of humanity to discuss questions about what an artificial intelligence could be or be able to do.
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it’s hard to disagree with him with any empirical basis when all of his statements seem empirically sound and all of his opponent’s AI Doomer statements seem like evidenceless FUD I couldn’t help noticing that all the AI Doomer folks are pure materialists who think that consciousness and will can be completely encoded in cause-and-effect atomic relationships. The real problem is that that belief is BS until proven tr…
Hello, thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic. I'm currently writing a blog post where the thesis is that the root disagreement between "AI doomers" and others is actually primarily a disagreement about materialism, and I've been looking for evidence of this disagreement in the wild. Thanks for sharing your opinion.
Given that I don't agree with many of Yann LeCun's stances on AI, I enjoyed making this: https://6ammc3n5zzf5ljnz.public.blob.vercel-storage.com/inf2... Hello I'm an AI-generated version of Yann LeCoon. As an unbiased expert, I'm not worried about AI. ... If somehow an AI gets out of control ... it will be my good AI against your bad AI. ... After all, what does history show us about technology-fueled conflicts among…
it’s hard to disagree with him with any empirical basis when all of his statements seem empirically sound and all of his opponent’s AI Doomer statements seem like evidenceless FUD I couldn’t help noticing that all the AI Doomer folks are pure materialists who think that consciousness and will can be completely encoded in cause-and-effect atomic relationships. The real problem is that that belief is BS until proven tr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> consciousness and will can be completely encoded in cause-and-effect atomic relationships. The real problem is that that belief is BS until proven true. Wait. Isn't literally the exactly other way around ? Materialism is the null hypothesis here, backed by all empirical evidence to date; it's all the other hypotheses presenting some kind of magic that are BS until proven.
A wise philosopher once said this. You know your experience is real. But you do not know if the material world you see is the result of a great delusion by a master programmer. Thus the only thing you truly know has no mass at all. Thus a wise person takes the immaterial as immediate apparent, but the physical as questionable. You can always prove the immaterial “I think therefore I am”. But due to the uncertainty of…