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Cyc

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Re: Cyc

#131

Post by [deleted] »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #120
randomidiot666 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote "computation", not "arithmetic". Human intelligence goes beyond computation / mathematical logic, and you seem to ignore all of that. We haven't got a clue how consciousness works. It's a total mystery.

The aim of AI is intelligence, not human intelligence. It's not to emulate a process; it's to solve problems. If we do build AI, maybe we'll never know if it's conscious. You can't know whether any other human is conscious, either. But you can know whether they make you laugh, or cry, or learn, or love. The knowable things are good enough.

[deleted]

Re: Cyc

#132

Post by randomidiot666 »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #120
randomidiot666 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote "computation", not "arithmetic". Human intelligence goes beyond computation / mathematical logic, and you seem to ignore all of that. We haven't got a clue how consciousness works. It's a total mystery.

The aim of AI is intelligence, not human intelligence. It's not to emulate a process; it's to solve problems. If we do build AI, maybe we'll never know if it's conscious. You can't know whether any other human is conscious, either. But you can know whether they make you laugh, or cry, or learn, or love. The knowable things are good enough.

But I wasn't talking about Artificial Intelligence or problem solving. I am talking about Actual Intelligence, specifically human level intelligence.

If we build AI we could only know if its conscious if we know what conscious is, and that is something we do not know, and perhaps will never know. It could be fundamentally beyond our comprehension.

Re: Cyc

#133

Post by perl4ever »

yters wrote: post #84
13415 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one position, but there are three problems with it: 1. You have to solve the interaction problem (how does the mind interact with the physical world?) 2. You need to explain why the world is not physically closed without blatantly violating physical theory / natural laws. 3. From the fact that the mind is nonphysical, it does not follow that computationalism is false. On the contrary, I'd say that computationa…

1. No I don't. I don't have to explain how gravity works to know that it does and make scientific claims about its operation. Likewise, I can scientifically demonstrate the mind is non physical and interacts with our physical world without explaining how. 2. If the world is not physically closed then physical theory and natural laws are not violated, since they would not apply to anything beyond the physical world. 3…

Explaining how gravity works doesn't tell you whether gravity itself is a real thing, whether it is metaphysical, whether it's an epiphenomena of something else. People talk about it being curvature in spacetime vs. a force, but we're just reifying the math, right?

And I don't think we have a completely firm grasp on what is possible computationally with a given amount of physical resources, given the development of quantum computing.

Re: Cyc

#134

Post by perl4ever »

yters wrote: post #127
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The aim of AI is intelligence, not human intelligence. It's not to emulate a process; it's to solve problems. If we do build AI, maybe we'll never know if it's conscious. You can't know whether any other human is conscious, either. But you can know whether they make you laugh, or cry, or learn, or love. The knowable things are good enough.

What if the secret sauce that makes intelligence, the kind that invents AI, is consciousness? I, at least, certainly do a lot of conscious thinking when I solve problems, as opposed to unconscious thinking :)

"I, at least, certainly do a lot of conscious thinking when I solve problems"

That jumps out at me, because I do a lot of "unconscious thinking" to solve problems and I feel like I've read where other people describe similar experiences.

Besides the cliche of solving problems in your sleep, I sometimes have an experience where consciously focusing on solving a problem leads to a blind alley, and distracting my conscious mind with something else somehow lets a background task run to "defrag" or something. But on the other hand there is "bad" distraction too - I'm not sure offhand what the difference is.

It's possible that I'm far from typical, but I also suspect people of different types and intellects might process things in very different ways too.

But to me, I definitely have a strong sense much of the time that my conscious mind engages in the receipt of information about something complex and then the actual analysis is happening somewhere invisible to me in my brain. I'm frequently conscious that I'm figuring something out and yet unaware of the process.

It particularly seems weird to me that other people often seem to be convinced they are conscious of their thought processes, because surely the type of person who is not a knowledge worker isn't? I'm not sure if my way of thinking is the "smart way", the "dumb way", or just weird, but I'm sure that there is significant diversity among people in general.

Sometimes I wonder if the model of AI is the typical mind of a very small subset of humanity that's unlike the rest, kind of like the way psychological experiments have been biased towards college students since that's who they could easily get.

Re: Cyc

#135

Post by inimino »

yters wrote: post #126
13415 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't trying to argue with you, I merely laid out what is commonly thought about the subject matter. Sorry if that sounds patronizing (it's really not meant to). Anyway, if you want to publish a paper defending a dualist position nowadays in any reputable journal, you'll have to address points 1&2 in one way or another, whether you believe you have to or not. It's not as if that problem hadn't been discussed durin…

Yes, I understand computationalism does not imply physicalism, but physicalism does imply computationalism. Thus, if computationalism is empirically refuted, then physicalism is false. I know the Lucas Godel incompleteness theorem type arguments. Whether successful or not, the counter arguments are certainly fallacious. E.g. just because I form a halting problem for myself does not mean I am not a halting oracle for…

> physicalism does imply computationalism

That's not true either.

There are plenty of materialists who think the universe is not computable, thus it's totally possible to believe that the mind is not computable despite being entirely physical.

Re: Cyc

#136

Post by inimino »

yters wrote: post #64
Ididntdothis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s pretty certain that we can improve a lot. If that leads to human intelligence or something else we don’t know. But it’s worth working on improving things and trying different approaches even if the final result isn’t known.

But there might be even better approaches if human intelligence is not computable. E.g. if the mind is a halting oracles that can get us all kinds of cool things.

If the mind were a halting oracle I don't think most of our open problems in mathematics would be.

Re: Cyc

#137

Post by tgbugs »

joveian wrote: post #80

I can't find it but I distinctly remember that there was part of an episode of 3-2-1 contact in the 80s about what must have been an early version of this system. It was the exact same thing as brundolf mentions* about the common sense system and how they set up the system to ask questions when contradictions arose. An example they used was it had asked if a human is still human when shaving. It is interesting that t…

Amusingly, or sadly, depending on your perspective, in practical settings the default behavior of that question depends on exactly what you want human to mean in the vocabulary of the local use case, because continuants are a very leaky abstraction if they are used to type biological systems, and while to our 'common sense' the type of human and human shaving should obviously be the same, when you get to questions about whether seemingly insignificant numerical differences in rates of catalysis constitute differences in type, then suddenly the distinction between "protein" and "protein wiggling slightly faster than usual" or "protein binding molecule a" (think "human holding shaver") becomes very much not obvious depending on exactly what question you want to answer. In the protein example if you black box the system, they can be fundamentally different. If human means predator, and your question is how dangerous is this human, then "human" and "human holding razor" becomes "agentous thing" and "agentous thing with sharp edged object" practically different things in very important ways if you are trying not to be filleted.

Re: Cyc

#138

Post by Rerarom »

catpolice wrote: post #99
Rerarom wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Do you think it's possible that Cyc would lead to AGI? 2) Do you think it's possible that Cyc would lead to AI advances that are impressive to the layman like AlphaGo or GPT-2?

These answers are very personal to me. I joined Cycorp because Doug Lenat sold me on it being a more viable path toward something like AGI than I had suspected when I read about it. I left for a number of reasons (e.g. just to pursue other projects) but a big one was slowly coming to doubt that. I could be sold on the idea that Cyc or something Cyc-like could be a piece of the puzzle for AGI. I say "Cyc-like" because…

Thanks for the answer!

> Interestingly, some of Doug Lenat's early work was maybe more relevant to that problem than Cyc is.

Yeah, Eurisko was really impressive, I often wondered why people don't work on that kind of stuff anymore.

Re: Cyc

#139

Post by lorepieri »

Rerarom wrote: post #88
yters wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if general learning is uncomputable?

General learning is uncomputable, it's called Solomonoff induction. You don't need general learning, you need something at least as powerful as the mess in a human brain.

Can you provide some references on "General learning is uncomputable"? Thanks.

Re: Cyc

#140

Post by Rerarom »

lorepieri wrote: post #139
Rerarom wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General learning is uncomputable, it's called Solomonoff induction. You don't need general learning, you need something at least as powerful as the mess in a human brain.

Can you provide some references on "General learning is uncomputable"? Thanks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI
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