Earlier quoted context omitted.
“If the universe is information at play” I’ve thought of it more as energy at play but I like this perspective as well. What can I dream up next is also fascinating as this current science / tech worldview feels like it will persist forever but surely it will be overshadowed at some point just as other paradigms before it have been.
Information is more fundamental than energy. Maxwells demon and all.
Human
181–190 of 282 posts
Re: Human
#182Perhaps I am unimaginative about whatever AGI might be, but it so often feels to me like predictions are more based on sci-fi than observation. The theorized AI is some anthropomorphization of a 1960s mainframe: you tell it what to do and it executes that exactly with precise logic and no understanding of nuance or ambiguity. Maybe it is evil. The SOTA in AI at the moment is very good at nuance and ambiguity but some…
Re: Human
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you elaborate? The universe tends to produce self-replicating intelligence. And that intelligence rids itself of chemical and biological limitations and weaknesses to become immortal and omnipotent. If evolution can make it this far, it's only a few more "hard steps" to reach take off. >> It happens to literally every existence of life across the universe because the final emergent property of energy gradients…
could you elaborate slightly on what is meant by ancestor simulation? My best stab is that you're saying we're the unknowing entities that they created for fun to get to meet or observe their own ancestors? This still seems far fetched.
Perhaps the fidelity and technology is even beyond our reasoning. Perhaps the future is able to bend physics and capture the past light cone. It may be able to perfectly simulate the past as it happened, down to every neurotransmitter fired by every brain at every second. Every event, every thought, every emotion. Perhaps it is pulling beings out of the past and placing them into its simulation with 100% fidelity such that you couldn't tell the two apart if you wanted.
Perhaps that's where we are right now.
Re: Human
#184Re: Human
#185What this thread keeps surfacing, and so much discussion around this stuff generally right now, from speculation about the next phase of intelligence, the role of pattern, emotion, logic, debates over consciousness, the anthropocentrism of our meaning-making...is that we are the source of reality (and ourselves). Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, ph…
> what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern Most matter in the universe is various forms of plasma that have no pattern. You generally find patterns in condensed matter. And yes patterns, including life, repeat themselves. That’s just a tautology.
I don't know anything about plasma or science, so do take this as an accusation, but does science have a way to identify something of having no pattern vs having no pattern found?
Re: Human
#186Perhaps I am unimaginative about whatever AGI might be, but it so often feels to me like predictions are more based on sci-fi than observation. The theorized AI is some anthropomorphization of a 1960s mainframe: you tell it what to do and it executes that exactly with precise logic and no understanding of nuance or ambiguity. Maybe it is evil. The SOTA in AI at the moment is very good at nuance and ambiguity but some…
Re: Human
#187Why are emotions so special? they're just algorithms like any other. Emotions aren't what make humans different than machines. feeling something is similar to an LLM model reacting to a prompt a certain way. Just because chatgpt is trained to not "feel" anything (to avoid controversial output) doesn't mean LLMs can't feel things like we do. self-awareness, self-training, adaptability, original thinking, critical thin…
Nobody understands what emotions are. Nor can they predict which emotion someone will feel in a given situation, or how they'll act under the influence of that emotion. Emotions aren't the mechanism by which humans solve problems, and rather they are often an obstacle to overcome. Emotions also aren't "finite" or "rigorous" as those terms aren't applicable to ephemeral phenomenon.
This is the kind of confidently incorrect statements people who work on software say that irks me. Not everything in life has a nice and simple parallel to computer science. Just because a person can abstract about one subject well, doesn't mean their tools of abstraction can be applied to all other subjects.
Re: Human
#188What this thread keeps surfacing, and so much discussion around this stuff generally right now, from speculation about the next phase of intelligence, the role of pattern, emotion, logic, debates over consciousness, the anthropocentrism of our meaning-making...is that we are the source of reality (and ourselves). Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, ph…
“Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern expressed in ever more novel forms?” This part nicely synthesises my biggest takeaway from experiencing AI: how close to human intelligence we have got with recursive pattern matching
Re: Human
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why are emotions so special? they're just algorithms like any other. That's a pretty bold claim. There's uncountable inputs. It's like trying to accurately predict the weather - chaos theory or something. Emotions are "essentially" gas exchange, but the areas and rate or whatever are not standardized across humans.
Emotions are not inputs, they are outputs first. we process information using internal algorithms that we developed as a result of our life experience and genetic coding and the result is an emotional verdict over some input. That emotional verdict is presented to our decision making algorithms as input, we can ignore it or act on it. I have neither experienced or observed anything about human emotions that indicates…
Famously, human experience is quite subjective (gestures broadly at 3 millenniums worth of philosophy), so I don't believe your individual experience means much here.
Re: Human
#190What this thread keeps surfacing, and so much discussion around this stuff generally right now, from speculation about the next phase of intelligence, the role of pattern, emotion, logic, debates over consciousness, the anthropocentrism of our meaning-making...is that we are the source of reality (and ourselves). Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, ph…
“Instead of a “final authority” or a simple march from animal to machine, what if everything from mind, physics, value, selfhood, is simply a recursive pattern expressed in ever more novel forms?” This part nicely synthesises my biggest takeaway from experiencing AI: how close to human intelligence we have got with recursive pattern matching