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The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

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Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#11

Post by stupidcar »

> For AI researchers to move past the behaviorist conflation of thought and action, the field needs to drink again from the philosophical waters that fed much AI research in the late 20th century, when the field was theoretically rich, albeit technically floundering.

Well, gosh. Fancy a professor of philosophy deciding that AI needs more philosophy. Clearly, if the price of making progress in the field is to engage in all this ugly mathematics and -eww- engineering, then it's no price worth paying.

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#12

Post by selfhoster11 »

jerf wrote: post #8
ctoth wrote: post #2

> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.

No, if you study how GPT-3 works, it becomes pretty clear that that model can't really produce "understanding", even if we can't clearly define what that is very well. And I don't just mean this from the old point of view of "if we understand it, it's not AI anymore", I mean, the model has serious fundamental limitations. One of them is that it's static, so, once trained, it doesn't learn from its future input. Anoth…

> However, I'd submit that what that something is is a something that we don't have an English word for, because up to this point humanity has never encountered anything with a cognitive model like GPT-3. So, it doesn't have "understanding", it has a quality-that-has-no-name (not to be confused with the "quality without a name" which GPT-3 most certainly does not have yet).

I think that terms like "philosophical zombie" may be close to the truth, but I'm guessing some sci-fi work has a term that we could adopt.

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#13

Post by phkahler »

>> Yet the connections GPT-3 makes are not illusory or concocted from thin air. It and many other machine learning models for natural language processing and generating do, in fact, track and reproduce real features of the symbolic order in which humans express thought. And yet, they do so without needing to have any thoughts to express.

Unfortunately there are plenty of people who seem to do that as well.

>> But the purpose of thought — what thought is good for — is a question widely neglected today, or else taken to have trivial, self-evident answers. Yet the answers are neither unimportant, nor obvious.

I thought the entire purpose of having a brain is to A) predict the future and B) plan for it ahead of time by C) making predictions about outcomes based on our various possible actions. The entire purpose of the brain is to predict and control. That's why projection is so important.

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#14

Post by majormajor »

jimmaswell wrote: post #9
jmoss20 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with the article, but hold on -- you don't need to buy "intelligence -> soul" for this. There are plenty of things that can't (or can't efficiently) be represented in a single agent. This is (for example) Hayek's main critique of central planning: "[price] understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior"; there are simply too many necessary details to fit into any one head/computer, an…

I don't see any fundamental reason a human brain couldn't be simulated at the atomic level by a turing machine, so it follows intelligence should be able to come from a machine, as far as it can come from a human.

Simulating that brain will require you to provide some sort of inputs and do something with the outputs. Which gets you into questions of "what does this simulated brain want" once again. How much of human desire and behavior comes from the body? I want to avoid pain (signals that my body sends to my brain). I want to experience pleasure (also signals that my body sends to my brain).

If you simulate a body with the same inputs as the existing brain, do you just have a "faster horse" problem, where you have a brain that could possibly perceive/process information faster (or slower) than a real human depending on the speed of the simulation? That could be useful, but sounds potentially rather bleak, especially if we limit what it can do to change its environment. It also seems limited for e.g. central planning - it can do planning faster than any individual, but likely will still have working memory size limitations, if it's just a simulation of a human brain. So it may not be so much better than parallelizing tasks across a bunch of humans.

More interesting, probably, then, than the "super human" style, is giving a new sort of intelligence different and additional senses, so that it doesn't want or need the same sort of physical embodiment we have, a la the "set sets" in the Terra Ignota series. But then we have to figure out what separates abstract intelligence from our own senses, and how to usefully augment it with new senses for a data-based world...

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#15

Post by sbierwagen »

Applejinx wrote: post #10
ctoth wrote: post #2

> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.

It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucinatory mockeries of meaning: trippy, but if it was consciousness you'd be looking for severe organic damage. Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing. AI o…

You're proposing that the... facebook feed is "more conscious" than GPT-3?

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#16

Post by p_j_w »

stupidcar wrote: post #11

> For AI researchers to move past the behaviorist conflation of thought and action, the field needs to drink again from the philosophical waters that fed much AI research in the late 20th century, when the field was theoretically rich, albeit technically floundering. Well, gosh. Fancy a professor of philosophy deciding that AI needs more philosophy. Clearly, if the price of making progress in the field is to engage i…

>Clearly, if the price of making progress in the field is to engage in all this ugly mathematics and -eww- engineering, then it's no price worth paying.

What makes you think the author is saying anything like this?

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#17

Post by joshmarlow »

bob1029 wrote: post #6

> Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. I can't help but read this as "automation". I think there is an interesting philosophical overlap between automation and intelligence. Perhaps some virtuous cycle exists between these things. Like, consciousness is probably only feasible because so much of what happens in our biology occurs withou…

> I think there is an interesting philosophical overlap between automation and intelligence.

On the flip side - there's an interesting hypothesis that the purpose of consciousness is to mediate conflicting non-conscious impulses. An example would be falling in the water - you have to mediate the impulse to breath with other conflicting impulses (such as the knowledge that you will drown).

So I think consciousness/intelligence helps build skills and push them into the subconscious (thus 'automating' them) and then consciousness has to step in again for edge cases the automation can't (yet) handle.

There's some fun discussion on the mediation hypothesis (with some Dune tie-ins) here: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#18

Post by lolwut987 »

Applejinx wrote: post #10
ctoth wrote: post #2

> Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Ah, right, it won't work because it doesn't have a soul. Got it.

It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucinatory mockeries of meaning: trippy, but if it was consciousness you'd be looking for severe organic damage. Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing. AI o…

It’s wrong to say it doesn’t want anything, it’s solely motivated to minimize training error.

If you align what minimizing train error means with a larger purpose, it will seemingly make magic happen.

Just like you, online, trying to figure out how to turn this into copulatory success. It doesn’t matter if you succeed but don’t understand why, only that you succeed.

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#19

Post by lolwut987 »

majormajor wrote: post #14
jimmaswell wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any fundamental reason a human brain couldn't be simulated at the atomic level by a turing machine, so it follows intelligence should be able to come from a machine, as far as it can come from a human.

Simulating that brain will require you to provide some sort of inputs and do something with the outputs. Which gets you into questions of "what does this simulated brain want" once again. How much of human desire and behavior comes from the body? I want to avoid pain (signals that my body sends to my brain). I want to experience pleasure (also signals that my body sends to my brain). If you simulate a body with the s…

Yes, I often have to consider the context of the excel spreadsheets on my VMs, because you can’t know how to run a machine without knowing what it wants at a high level.

Re: The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

#20

Post by Jtsummers »

lolwut987 wrote: post #18
Applejinx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't come with PURPOSE unless you force it to have some. Which is a perfectly fine avenue to take, I think. But without purpose, what you get is hallucinatory mockeries of meaning: trippy, but if it was consciousness you'd be looking for severe organic damage. Purpose doesn't automatically mean civilized, but you can't get to civilized without purpose. It's an okay word to use for outlining what's missing. AI o…

It’s wrong to say it doesn’t want anything, it’s solely motivated to minimize training error. If you align what minimizing train error means with a larger purpose, it will seemingly make magic happen. Just like you, online, trying to figure out how to turn this into copulatory success. It doesn’t matter if you succeed but don’t understand why, only that you succeed.

Is it motivated or is it just what it does? Is your thermostat motivated to minimize the temperature difference in a particular direction as well or is it just a machine that does that? Is your bicycle motivated to stay upright when you ride it or is just a consequence of physics (and halfway decent balance)?
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