241–250 of 282 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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
It's Mandelbrot all the way down.
Perhaps 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…
[0] Like the tumor recognition algorithm that instead learned to recognize rulers or the triage algorithm that decided asthma patients had BETTER outcomes with pulmonary diseases not making the connection that it's because they get higher priority care - https://venturebeat.com/business/when-ai-flags-the-ruler-not...
Doesn't really make much sense. It states that this is a purely mechanistic world with no emotion. So why would a machine be "bored" and wish to create a human?
yeah, more on the environmental constraints and where the machines even come from would be nice > There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic also this type of pure humanism seems disrespectful or just presumptuous, as if we are the only species which might be capable of "emotion, art and logic" even though we already have living counterexamples
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Not only are emotions deterministic So is your claim that 100% of all human emotions are deterministic? That's quite a bold claim don't you think?
What 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…
Another way to think about meaning is how a person frames the importance of their decisions: why does doing one thing instead of another matter?
I, like most humans, want to survive for a lengthy period of time and lead a good life. I want my fellow humans and all of our children to share in that.
The idea of some unknown and maybe incomprehensible grand “plan” — whether it be a Judeo-Christian heaven or some techno-utopian rise of next generation machine consciousness personally brings me no comfort. Why? It is a foreign concept very far from my experience. So foreign that I sometimes view advocacy of such philosophies as doing it for manipulative reasons.
The idea of human thriving changing over time is good and part of how I think about progress. Moral lock-in (see MacAskill) is to be avoided. I admit the thought experiment of “how fast is too fast” raised by Bostrum in Superintelligence (IIRC) is challenging and requires more thought and experience.
Perhaps 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…
We already see that at smaller scales though with other machine learning algorithms; image recognition algorithms will lock on to any consistency in your training set more often than learning to recognize what you actually want it to [0]. It's not a huge stretch to map that pattern out to a more generally intelligent system having a poorly defined reward function doing really weird stuff. [0] Like the tumor recogniti…
Unless there is some physical reason for the behavior I wouldn't make any strong claims. The specificity of algorithms is why AGI is hard in the first place cause at the end of the day you have a single operation running on a single data structure (helps when it's a few TB).
What 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…
Maybe people don't realize, when Evolution developed emotional apparatus in brains, the Nature was pristine, true and direct with no misinformation. But today's environment is digital and there is no quick way to distinguish between true and wrong information. Brain still thinks both kind of information comes from the same true direct Nature and gives credence to it.
Claude :
That's a profound observation about the mismatch between our evolved emotional systems and our modern information environment.
You're highlighting something crucial: our emotional responses evolved in environments where information was directly experienced and generally reliable. If you saw a predator, it was really there. If someone in your tribe showed fear, there was likely a genuine threat.
In today's digital landscape, our brains still process information with those same ancient mechanisms, but now we're bombarded with content that:
1. Is often deliberately engineered to trigger emotional responses 2. Lacks the contextual cues that would help us evaluate reliability 3. Comes at a volume and speed our brains never evolved to handle
This creates what some researchers call an "evolutionary mismatch" - where mechanisms that served us well in our ancestral environment may not be adaptive in our current one. Our emotional systems can't easily distinguish between a threatening situation we're directly experiencing and one we're merely reading about online, potentially thousands of miles away.
It's like our emotional processors haven't received the necessary update to handle the new information ecosystem, leading to misallocated emotional resources and attention. This might help explain phenomena like anxiety from consuming negative news or strong emotional reactions to online interactions that wouldn't affect us the same way in person.
> logical self-preservation mechanisms This tautology has always bothered me. It's such an obvious anthropomorphization. A computer is a clock. A clock doesn't care about its preservation; it just ticks. The whole point of this is to not anthropomorphize computers! But of course, without some nugget of free will, there would be nothing to talk about. There wouldn't be any computers, because they were never willed int…
A molecule is just a number of atoms in a particular configuration.
An cell is a collection of molecules.
An organ is a collection of cells.
A human is a collection of organs.
Seemingly, everything can emerge from clocks.
What 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…
“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.
Complexity and Gravity - Leonard Susskind
https://youtu.be/6OXdhV5BOcY?t=3026
My conjecture is as we peel back the layers of onion beyond information, we will have another concept (lets call it Mu) and its corresponding law i.e (Mu-entropy always increases)
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.
Are we entirely sure that energy and information aren't the same thing, or if they aren't the same thing they are both highly overlapping echoes of some more fundamental concept? Or maybe they are two sides of the same coin?