221–230 of 437 posts
He does touch upon this in section 3, and his argument is - as expected - weak.
Human brains apparently have this set of magic properties that machines can't emulate.
Magical thinking, paper is quackery, don't waste time on it.
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Sure I can (and thanks for writing) Well, given the specific way you asked that question I confirm your self assertion - and am quite certain that your level of Artificiality converges to zero, which would make you a GI without A... - You stated to "feel" generally intelligent (A's don't feel and don't have an "I" that can feel) - Your nuanced, subtly ironic and self referential way of formulating clearly suggests th…
>but obviously, there seems to be more than that. I don't see how that's obvious. I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but it seems like these arguments always come down to a qualia, or the insistence that humans have some sort of 'spark' that machines don't have, therefore: AGI is not possible since machines don't have it. I also don't understand the argument that "Your nuanced, subtly ironic and self referentia…
It doesn't follow.
Trivially demonstrated by the early LLM that got Blake Lemonie to break his NDA also emitting words which suggested to Lemonie that the LLM had an inner life.
Or, indeed, the output device y'all are using to read/listening to my words, which is also successfully emitting these words despite the output device very much only following an algorithm that simply recreates what it was told to recreate. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
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Unless you can prove that humans exceed the Turing computable, the headline is nonsense unless you can also show that the Church-Turing thesis isn't true. Since you don't even appear to have dealt with this, there is no reason to consider the rest of the paper.
I think OP answered the question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349516
It's not even close to addressing the argument.
Sure, the author clearly needs to catch up on the last 80+ years of computer science (which sounds daunting but I think it's doable), but I'm not convinced this is just promotional content. He seems has real credentials in his field (epistemology and hospitality management I think?), plus he apparently runs a boutique hotel chain in Germany that I've actually heard of before!
So yeah, I'm intrigued. Looking forward to part IV - maybe after he gets through GEB ;)
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> are humans not generally intelligent? Have you not met the average person on the street? (/s)
Noted /s, but truly this is why I think even current models are already more disruptive than naysayers are willing to accept that any future model ever could be.
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>but obviously, there seems to be more than that. I don't see how that's obvious. I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but it seems like these arguments always come down to a qualia, or the insistence that humans have some sort of 'spark' that machines don't have, therefore: AGI is not possible since machines don't have it. I also don't understand the argument that "Your nuanced, subtly ironic and self referentia…
Consciousness is an issue. If you write a program to add 2+2, you probably do not believe some entity poofs into existence, perceives itself as independently adding 2+2, and then poofs out of existence. Yet somehow, the idea of an emergent consciousness is that if you instead get it to do 100 basic operations, or perhaps 2^100 then suddenly this becomes true? The reason one might believe this is not because it's logi…
Ages ago, it occurred to me that the only thing that seemed to exist without needing a creator, was maths. That 2+2 was always 4, and it still would be even if there were not 4 things to count.
Basically, I independently arrived at similar conclusion as Max Tegmark, only simpler and without his level of rigour: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/08/26-08.28.24.html
(From the quotation's date stamp, 2007, I had only finished university 6 months earlier, so don't expect anything good).
But as you'll see from my final paragraph, I no longer take this idea seriously, because anything that leads to most minds being free to believe untruths, is cognitively unstable by the same argument that applies to Boltzmann brains.
MUH leads to Aleph-1 infinite number of brains*. I'd need a reason for the probability distribution over minds to be zero almost everywhere in order for it to avoid the cognitively instability argument.
* if there is a bigger infinity, then more; but I have only basic knowledge of transfinites and am unclear if the "bigger" ones I've heard about are considered "real" or more along the lines of "if there was an infinite sequence of infinities, then…"
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Why? 1. Basically because physical laws obviously allow more than algorithmic cognition and problem solving. (And also: I am bound by thermodynamics as my mother in Law is, still i get disarranged by her mere presence while I always have to put laxatives in her wine to counter that) 2. human rationality is equally limited as algorithms. Neither an algorithm nor human logic can find itself a path from Newton to Einste…
“Imagine little Albert asking his physics teacher in 1880: "Sir - for how long do I have to stay at high speed in order to look as grown up as my elder brother?"” Is that not the other way around? “…how long do I have to stay at high speed in order for my younger brother to look as grown up as myself?”
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Unless you can prove that humans exceed the Turing computable, the headline is nonsense unless you can also show that the Church-Turing thesis isn't true. Since you don't even appear to have dealt with this, there is no reason to consider the rest of the paper.
could you explain for a layman
The set of Turing computable functions is computationally equivalent to the lambda calculus, is computationally equivalent to the generally recursive functions. You don't need to understand those terms, only to know that these functions define the set of functions we believe to include all computable functions. (There are functions that we know to not be computable, such as e.g. a general solution to the halting problem)
That is, we don't know of any possible way of defining a function that can be computed that isn't in those sets.
This is basically the Church-Turing thesis: That a function on the natural numbers can be effectively computable (note: this has a very specific meaning, it's not about performance) only if it is computable by a Turing machine.
Now, any Turing machine can simulate any other Turing machine. Possibly in a crazy amount of time, but still.
The brain is at least a Turing machine in terms of computabilitity if we treat "IO" (speaking, hearing, for example) as the "tape" (the medium of storage in the original description of the Turing machine). We can prove this, since the smallest Turing machine is a trivial machine with 2 states and 3 symbols that any moderate functional human is capable of "executing" with pen and paper.
(As an aside: It's almost hard to construct a useful computational system that isn't Turing complete; "accidental Turing completeness" regularly happens, because it is very trivial to end up with a Turing complete system)
An LLM with a loop around it and temperature set to 0 can trivially be shown to be able to execute the same steps, using context as input and the next token as output to simulate the tape, and so such a system is Turing complete as well.
(Note: In both cases, this could require a program, but since for any Turing machine of a given size we can "embed" parts of the program by constructing a more complex Turing machine with more symbols or states that encode some of the actions of the program, such a program can inherently be embedded in the machine itself by constructing a complex enough Turing machine)
Assuming we use a definition of intelligence that a human will meet, then because all Turing machines can simulate each other, then the only way of showing that an artificial intelligence can not theoretically be constructed to at least meet the same bar is by showing that humans can compute more than the Turing computable.
If we can't then "worst case" AGI can be constructed by simulating every computational step of the human brain.
Any other argument about the impossibility of AGI inherently needs to contain a something that disproves the Church-Turing thesis.
As such, it's a massive red flag when someone claims to have a proof that AGI isn't possible, but haven't even mentioned the Church-Turing thesis.
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Unless you can prove that humans exceed the Turing computable, the headline is nonsense unless you can also show that the Church-Turing thesis isn't true. Since you don't even appear to have dealt with this, there is no reason to consider the rest of the paper.
> In plain language: > No matter how sophisticated, the system MUST fail on some inputs. Well, no person is immune to propaganda and stupididty, so I don't see it as a huge issue.