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What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

quantamagazine.org

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Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#101

Post by Scarblac »

filippp wrote: post #51
kkoncevicius wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are not alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention? I think the question shoud first be not about "how", but rather - "does consciousness emerge from the materials". Most cultures in the past have maintained ideas about the duality between spirit and matter. Nowadays we are so adept at manipulating matter we always explicitly assume that eve…

I think neuroscience could in principle show that phenomenal consciousness is an illusion, by giving a full account in terms of the brain of why it seems to us that we're conscious. Whether it will is another question.

There'd still be a "me" there who would be having that illusion.

Regardless of whether we know exactly how it works or not, I have a subjective experience.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#102

Post by Scarblac »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #35
jll29 wrote: post #30

As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). But this does not mean we cannot produce operational models of understanding, for example we have models of propositional/logical semantics and discourse such as Lambda Discourse Representation Theory and others, which can compute…

> How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are not alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention? I think the question shoud first be not about "how", but rather - "does consciousness emerge from the materials". Most cultures in the past have maintained ideas about the duality between spirit and matter. Nowadays we are so adept at manipulating matter we always explicitly assume that eve…

We do know that if we add chemicals, say we drink some amount of alcohol, that can alter our consciousness. That wouldn't happen if it were completely nonphysical.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#103

Post by mcguire »

"A Winograd schema, named for the language researcher Terry Winograd, consists of a pair of sentences, differing by exactly one word, each followed by a question. ... In each sentence pair, the one-word difference can change which thing or person a pronoun refers to. Answering these questions correctly seems to require commonsense understanding."

I don't buy it. These Winograd schemas are significantly limited and are exactly the sort of thing that "story understanding" systems from the '70s and '80s were designed for.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#104

Post by mcguire »

jll29 wrote: post #30

As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). But this does not mean we cannot produce operational models of understanding, for example we have models of propositional/logical semantics and discourse such as Lambda Discourse Representation Theory and others, which can compute…

Ah, but the question remains: Are you intelligent? :-)

How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention?

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#106

Post by mcguire »

nescioquid wrote: post #85
Kranar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your position couples intelligence with consciousness a bit too tightly. I can imagine a goldfish is conscious but not intelligent and I can imagine a very powerful supercomputer to be intelligent but not conscious. The prerequisite to change your position can be satisfied by having a computer randomly generate a question, which I don't think would be an example of consciousness or intelligence. Furthermore e…

As a lay-person, I was persuaded by Roger Penrose's argument that intelligence presupposes understanding, and that understanding is not computational. I had also finished reading a bunch of phenomenology before I read Penrose, so I was probably primed for that sort of an argument to be persuasive.

The difficulty there is, how do you understand things? "You" are mostly a chemical process, and I don't think there's much non-computational about chemistry. Penrose, as I understand him, answers "quantum mechanics", which I think is (a) kicking the can down the road rather than answering the question, and (b) problematic in its own right---the experiments supporting Bell's theorem seem to imply that QM and thus "understanding" are inherently random, right?

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#107

Post by wbsss4412 »

chermi wrote: post #53
kkoncevicius wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are not alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention? I think the question shoud first be not about "how", but rather - "does consciousness emerge from the materials". Most cultures in the past have maintained ideas about the duality between spirit and matter. Nowadays we are so adept at manipulating matter we always explicitly assume that eve…

*Edited because I can't type* I do not understand this argument. I'm going use the word magic for whatever you're calling this non-"materialistic" spiritual explanation. I'm not trying to be a jackass, that's truly the best word I can find for it. I don't think magic is a bad thing, I just don't think you should summon magic until you need to. Magic is not an explanation, it's a non-explanation. It's non-falsifiable…

Taking an absolutist view that empiricism is the litmus test for all truth is similarly magical thinking, in my opinion.

Asserting “something that isn’t falsifiable isn’t real” is just as arbitrary as asserting that there exist phenomena that are beyond the absolute boundaries of our capacity to perceive them (that is, no amount of technical innovation will allow us to observe such phenomena). The latter statement, though, seems much more reasonable of an assumption.

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#108

Post by [deleted] »

tomthe wrote: post #48

My understanding of "Understanding": Imagine a photo of a written poem: An image-processing program can "understand" the digital image: It can read the jpg, change the picture completely (e.g.: change the colors slightly), without changing the meaning one level up. But it doesn't understand the characters or words. An OCR program can read the image and "understand" the characters (or the textual representation. It ca…

[deleted]

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#109

Post by mannykannot »

kkoncevicius wrote: post #35
jll29 wrote: post #30

As an AI professor, I've always held that machines are NOT intelligent (I am prepared to change my position on the day my computer asks me anything surprising that I didn't program it to). But this does not mean we cannot produce operational models of understanding, for example we have models of propositional/logical semantics and discourse such as Lambda Discourse Representation Theory and others, which can compute…

> How do consciousness and intention emerge from materials that are not alive and that have neither consciousness nor intention? I think the question shoud first be not about "how", but rather - "does consciousness emerge from the materials". Most cultures in the past have maintained ideas about the duality between spirit and matter. Nowadays we are so adept at manipulating matter we always explicitly assume that eve…

You seem to be adopting a double standard here. It is true that materialists cannot explain how minds work, but dualists can do no better, and, furthermore, they cannot point to any remotely similar phenomenon that is non-physical. Your claim that "there is no angle to it where it can ever give in" is just as much a speculative intuition as the claim that minds are the result of physical processes.

The position you take in your last paragraph is one of solipsistic skepticism. Do you approach every epistemic issue with the same level of skepticism, or do you only adopt it with regard to the proposition that minds are the result of physical processes?

Re: What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?

#110

Post by nescioquid »

mcguire wrote: post #106
nescioquid wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a lay-person, I was persuaded by Roger Penrose's argument that intelligence presupposes understanding, and that understanding is not computational. I had also finished reading a bunch of phenomenology before I read Penrose, so I was probably primed for that sort of an argument to be persuasive.

The difficulty there is, how do you understand things? "You" are mostly a chemical process, and I don't think there's much non-computational about chemistry. Penrose, as I understand him, answers "quantum mechanics", which I think is (a) kicking the can down the road rather than answering the question, and (b) problematic in its own right---the experiments supporting Bell's theorem seem to imply that QM and thus "und…

I actually do agree with you while still finding Penrose persuasive. I don't know how earnestly he adheres to the "quantum perturbations in nanotubules" (if I've gotten the incantation right) for which he credits someone else as a good try at a solution, and I have the impression he holds it as an open question.

I think the appeal (or interest, to me) from the phenomenology angle, is that we understand things by being in the world, having needs and desires, and some agency to obtain them. We understand a hammer because we can imagine a need to drive a spike, we can see that it can be held in our hands and be swung to drive the spike, that we have hands and a body, and that we occupy space.

All of that made me wonder if simply executing a program is sufficient for emergence of intelligence. This raises the naive question of whether adding enough sensors and actuators to the program would be necessary, or have I merely added something unnecessary to the problem? Anyway, that's the kernel of doubt that I have that a computer program alone is sufficient for the emergence of an intelligence, that is, an agent with the capacity to understand.

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