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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

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Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#281

Post by pmarreck »

lgas wrote: post #221
pmarreck wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see no reason why AI would have any difficulty defining its own reward functions The first problem is epistemological... If you think that creative decisions are made by complying with a "reward function," you are entirely missing something. Most values are fundamentally based on irrationality. I've literally spent an entire life doing things that everyone else told me was wrong and being interested in things tha…

I think perhaps you're just misunderstanding some of the terms you're attempting to use. Those things that everyone else told you were wrong and that no one else saw the value in... your reward function rewards pursuing those. And in that context your decisions were rational and functional.

I am not misunderstanding anything. I'm 51 and have been programming since I was 10 in 1982- Rest assured that I know what a "function" is, and I know what "optimizing for a local minima/maxima" is from my machine learning coursework. You can't just say there's a "reward function" without defining it. It's otherwise a completely hypothetical assumption, and assumptions are beliefs, and beliefs are useless from the perspective of rationality. There is otherwise nothing rational about some of the things I felt I needed to do, and yet a very disproportionate percentage of them seemed correct in hindsight.

What YOU have to realize is that you (like many others in the past) can only seem to understand the explanation for something in terms of only what is already understood. And that there is nothing "magical" or "special" about our current understanding (unless you believe there's nothing new to discover, which is preposterous hubris).

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#282

Post by kbrkbr »

quus wrote: post #280
kbrkbr wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hold a master in philosophy and it was my first big love. Over the years I came however to a conclusion opposite to yours. > Also, philosophy underpins science. Whenever a hypothesis is tested, there is are philosophically-grounded assumptions being made. The epistemological implications for any given scientific finding depend on the underlying philosophical framework being assumed. I think that is not true. Scienc…

> The reason might be that philosophy is actually practically mostly irrelevant. I have not seen one undisputed statement of philosophy. And so it can neither test its statements, nor let others see their validity. This is the core confusion I think. I find philosophy very relevant for the way I reason and solve problems and evaluate arguments, and in this sense philosophy is powerfully practical. But it’s true that…

I can't say "been there, done that", because I know little about how you came to the position you hold. And I've had my share of burying hypotheses I've held for long times, so chances are I'm wrong.

But I held similar views. What moved me away from these views was the experience that in science you have methods that will let you see with high probability when your thesis is wrong.

Philosophy does not have such methods. You cannot only take the opposite claim for almost anything, but in my experience that claim has actually been taken by another philosopher for almost any topic.

The current consensus is in my experience lead by the people with the loudest megaphone. It's not the best theory given the things that really happen.

No philosophy (in the sense of actual writings of a philosopher) was causally involved in bringing the first astronaut to the moon; in building the first pacemaker - I would argue in none of anything where you could say: if you can do this with it, its probably on to something. Its methods seem to work.

As said, I cannot judge your thinking in any way, but this led me to question that philosophy is not practically relevant to me. How can I even judge if it works? And if I can't, is this not blind trust? Like an imaginary screwdriver for imaginary screws.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#283

Post by jdietrich »

kuhewa wrote: post #248
jdietrich wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also, philosophy underpins science. Whenever a hypothesis is tested, there is are philosophically-grounded assumptions being made. The epistemological implications for any given scientific finding depend on the underlying philosophical framework being assumed. P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B). To the extent that philosophy underpins science, it does so because scientists are bad at math.

Your comment appears to imply Bayes theorem is all you need for a scientific framework and outside of that is just inadequate mathematical know-how to deploy it. I find it amazing really, a quintessential straight-from-the-summit [1] HN comment for a couple reasons: First, it appears to imply that such a probabilistic inductive approach to science would be free of any philosophical baggage or assumptions, when deploy…

>First, it appears to imply that such a probabilistic inductive approach to science would be free of any philosophical baggage or assumptions

I'm arguing that philosophical baggage is irrelevant to the current practice of science, because the overwhelming majority of published papers have serious and obvious methodological deficiencies that we have collectively agreed to ignore. Science as practised today is a desperate struggle to demonstrate something (p ≤ 0.05) by any means necessary. Established statistical methods have become a means to conceal rather than illuminate. This isn't the fault of individual working scientists, but the fault of the basic information architecture of science and a ritualistic, cargo-cult approach to understanding data. Bayes theorem probably isn't all we need, but it is all we need to spark a scientific renaissance if only we would use the damned thing.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#284

Post by kbrkbr »

kuhewa wrote: post #274
kbrkbr wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hold a master in philosophy and it was my first big love. Over the years I came however to a conclusion opposite to yours. > Also, philosophy underpins science. Whenever a hypothesis is tested, there is are philosophically-grounded assumptions being made. The epistemological implications for any given scientific finding depend on the underlying philosophical framework being assumed. I think that is not true. Scienc…

> I think that is not true. Science does not get its merit from philosophical underpinnings, but from working in practice. In the day-to-day practice of science i.e. when empirical inquiry 'works', there certainly are underpinning philosophical assumptions, whether or not they are reconsidered or appreciated with every experiment. The implicit in the act of hypothesis testing, some variant of which most scientists in…

Thank you for your thoughtful comment.

You have many good points.

Let me just say that Popper has been philosophically criticized to the point that some say it is a dead horse. Why are we still using this mixture of Fisherian and Neymar-Pearson hypothesis testing (that is if we don't use bayesian methods)? Because it practically works well, not because Popper was right or found a deep philosophical truth.

These methods just generate more often than not knowledge, as we can judge from the consequences.

I argue that nobody cares if the assumptions we put into the frameworks are philosophical true - they are possibilities, and we try some out. So far we seem to be doing pretty well, no matter what philosophers say about the truth of these assumptions.

I also think bending philosophy to apply to practical advice like "use the tool that works" will not leave much to the notion of philosophy.

But it's not that I have a fixed metaphysical position here. I really only use the tool that was most promising in the past for the task at hand. Never needed philosophy.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#285

Post by [deleted] »

spadros wrote: post #270
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also told me my pet couldn't think and couldn't feel pain when it died. It was only a convoluted and complex system of instincts. I now know they told this story to me (as a child) to make me feel better. It was one of those things like Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy to me. Later when I studied animal behavior, I found out science-wise that animals behave in ways that strongly suggest that in fact they do…

I agree with your sentiment that animals and maybe even plants can experience sentience. But that’s a far, far, faaaar cry from what ChatGPT is and is capable of. We don’t have “general” AI yet. ChatGPT’s intelligence is very narrow; it generates written content. That’s about it. I believe a lot of people are overhyping it this way.

[deleted]

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#286

Post by skybrian »

kaba0 wrote: post #242
skybrian wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure "underpins" is the right word here. A theory of ants wouldn't "underpin" the behavior of ants. If the ants behave differently than the theory, then the theory is wrong and should be changed. The ant theory is something in the minds of outside observers, not the ants, and ant behavior doesn't rely on it. The dependency goes the other way: the observers modify their theory to better describe the ants. The…

Science is not an observable thing in itself like ant behavior is. Science (especially the scientific method) is a framework/pattern of thought that can be used to state/observe things about the universe. Why that pattern of thought is correct in stating anything is absolutely part of philosophy.

I'm under the impression that science is what scientists do, which does seem to be observable?

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#287

Post by Kim_Bruning »

spadros wrote: post #270
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also told me my pet couldn't think and couldn't feel pain when it died. It was only a convoluted and complex system of instincts. I now know they told this story to me (as a child) to make me feel better. It was one of those things like Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy to me. Later when I studied animal behavior, I found out science-wise that animals behave in ways that strongly suggest that in fact they do…

I agree with your sentiment that animals and maybe even plants can experience sentience. But that’s a far, far, faaaar cry from what ChatGPT is and is capable of. We don’t have “general” AI yet. ChatGPT’s intelligence is very narrow; it generates written content. That’s about it. I believe a lot of people are overhyping it this way.

I won't disagree that some people are over-hyping, but beware of counter-leaning too much in the other direction!

Generating written content is a pretty powerful tool, all things told.

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#288

Post by skybrian »

kuhewa wrote: post #241
skybrian wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure "underpins" is the right word here. A theory of ants wouldn't "underpin" the behavior of ants. If the ants behave differently than the theory, then the theory is wrong and should be changed. The ant theory is something in the minds of outside observers, not the ants, and ant behavior doesn't rely on it. The dependency goes the other way: the observers modify their theory to better describe the ants. The…

Underpins is the correct word. There is no comparison of observations of any behaviour to a theory or hypothesis about any behaviour outside of an epistemological framework that makes certain assumptions, even if it is unwittingly. Neither those assumptions nor the framework itself can be derived from science itself. > Is a philosophy of science similar? Or does it have a practical effect on scientific work? Absolute…

> There is no comparison of observations [...] to a theory or hypothesis [....] outside of an epistemological framework that makes certain assumptions, even if it is unwittingly.

Okay, let's assume animals (such as scientists) observe things, record them, and react to them without an explicit theory in mind, but there's an implicit epistemological framework that describes how they behave.

It seems like you still need to build your epistemology to match the animals' behaviors, or it's not the one they use? When scientists do math, you need to observe how they actually use math. How do they actually set up and run an experiment or write a paper? It might be different than you imagine?

This is what David Chapman calls the "ethnomethodological flip" [1].

Scientists also might use math differently from how they claim they use it in a formal paper, which doesn't include all the blind alleys and mistakes. A scientific paper is a cleaned-up just-so story.

A fun example of ethnomethodology is studying exactly how a scientist follows the formal procedure for doing a PCR test, including small mistakes that they don't explain and you might not even notice in the demonstration video unless you watch it very carefully, multiple times. [2]

It seems like a very cool thing to do that's rarely done. It might help for coming up with better philosophy?

[1] https://metarationality.com/ethnomethodological-flip [2] https://metarationality.com/rational-pcr

Re: Decades-long bet on consciousness ends

#290

Post by Balgair »

quus wrote: post #278
Balgair wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I gotta ask now, right? What is their job then?

sounds like you don’t know what philosophy is and why it’s dope, so rather than me try to explain in a comment on hackernews, I would say try reading Plato

Believe it or not, I'm going through my third read-through of his entire works right now (yes, even Cratylus).

But the question still stands: What is the job?

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