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AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

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Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#291
post #267
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compute functions != Intelligence though. For example learning from experience (which LLMs cannot do because they cannot experience anything and they cannot learn) is clearly an attribute of an intelligent machine. LLMs can tell you about the taste of a beer, but we know that they have never tasted a beer. Flight simulators can't take you to Australia, no matter how well they simulate the experience.

> Compute functions != Intelligence though. If that is true, you have a proof that the Church-Turing thesis is false. > LLMs can tell you about the taste of a beer, but we know that they have never tasted a beer. Flight simulators can't take you to Australia, no matter how well they simulate the experience. For this to be relevant, you'd need to show that there are possible sensory inputs that can't be simulated to a…

I think that may depend on how someone defines intelligence. For example, if intelligence includes the ability to feel emotion or appreciate art, then I think it becomes much more plausible that intelligence is not the same as computation.

Of course, simply stating that isn't in of itself a philisophically rigorous argument. However, given that not everyone has training in philosophy and it may not even be possible to prove whether "feeling emotion" can be achieved via computation, I think it's a reasonable argument.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your paper it states: AGI as commonly defined However I don’t see where you go on to give a formalization of “AGI” or what the common definition is. can you do that in a mathematically rigorous way such that it’s a testable hypothesis?

I don't think it exists. We can't even seem to agree on a standard criteria for "intelligence" when assessing humans let alone a rigorous mathematical definition. In turn, my understanding of the commonly accepted definition for AGI (as opposed to AI or ML) has always been "vaguely human or better". Unless the marketing department is involved in which case all bets are off.

It can exist for the purpose of the paper. As in "when I write AGI, I mean ...". Otherwise what's the point in any rigour if we're just going by "you know what I mean" vibes.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#293
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What program would a Turing machine run to spontaneously prove the incompleteness theorem? Can you prove such a program may exist?

Assuming the Church-Turing thesis is true, the existence of any brain now or in the past capable of proving it is proof that such a program may exist. If the Church-Turing thesis can be proven false, conversely, then it may be possible that such a program can't exist - it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the Church-Turing thesis to be false. Given we have no evidence to suggest the Church-Turing thesis…

> Assuming the Church-Turing thesis is true, the existence of any brain now or in the past capable of proving it is proof that such a program may exist.

Doesn't that assume that the brain is a Turing machine or equivalent to one? My understanding is that the exact nature of the brain and how it relates to the mind is still an open question.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#294
post #211

FTA: > Strange, isn't it? The AI hasn’t crashed. It’s still running. As a human I answer a question because my time to do so is finite. Why can't we just ask an AI to give its best answer in due time ? As a human I can do that easily. Will my answer be optimal ? No of course, but every manager on earth do that all the time. We're all happy with approximate answers. (and I would add: approximation are sometimes based…

> Why can't we just ask an AI to give its best answer in due time ?

Sure you can. One approach is https://arxiv.org/html/2505.11274v2 another is having a parallel "do you want to do more analysis?" agent, and I'm sure someone's already at least experimenting with building the confidence measurement into the layers as well.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#295
post #59

This sounds rather silly. Given the usual definition of AGI as being human like intelligence with some variation on how smart the humans are, and the fact that humans use a network of neurons that can largely be simulated by an artificial network of neurons, it's probably twaddle largely.

Whether human thought can be reduced to the actions of a network of neurons is still an open question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#296
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea how you believe this relates to the comment you replied to.

If I'm understanding correctly, they are arguing that the paper only requires that an intelligent system will fail for some inputs and suggest that things like propaganda are inputs for which the human intelligent system fails. Therefore, they are suggesting that the human intelligent system does not necessarily refute the paper's argument.

If so, then the papers argument isn't actually trying to prove that AGI is impossible, despite the title, and the entire discussion is pointless.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#297
Without taking this rather sketchy paper too seriously, my simple and heuristic take is as follows: AGI constructed through raw information processing in the way an LLM works probably won't go anywhere near AGI, but since something, though we don't know what, gives us self-directed reasoning and sentience, and thus natural general intelligence, than some form of AI is at least a possibility.

This applies unless we discover either some essentially non-physical aspect of consciousness that can't be recreated through any artificial compute we're capable of, or fail to discover a mechanism by which artificial reasoning can imitate the heuristic mechanisms that we humans apparently use to navigate the world and our internal selves. (since we don't know what consciousness is, either one is possible)

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#298
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Oh no, I am not at all trying to find an explanation of why this is (qualia etc.). There is simply no necessity for that. It is interesting, but not part of the scientific problem that i tried to find an answer to. The proof (all three of them) holds without any explanatory effort concerning causalities around human frame-jumping etc. For this paper, It is absolutely sufficient to prove that a) this cannot be reached…

> For this paper, It is absolutely sufficient to prove that a) this cannot be reached algorithmically and that b) evidence clearly shows that humans can (somehow) do this , as they have already done this (quite often).

The problem with these kinds of arguments is always that they conflate two possibly related but non-equivalent kinds of computational problem solving.

In computability theory, an uncomputability result essentially only proves that it's impossible to have an algorithm that will in all cases produce the correct result to a given problem. Such an impossibility result is valuable as a purely mathematical result, but also because what computer science generally wants is a provably correct algorithm: one that will, when performed exactly, always produce the correct answer.

However, similarly to any mathematical proof, a single counter-example is enough to invalidate a proof of correctness. Showing that an algorithm fails in a single corner case makes the algorithm not correct in a classical algorithmic sense. Similarly, for a computational problem, showing that any purported algorithm will inevitably fail even in a single case is enough to prove the problem uncomputable -- again, in the classical computability theory sense.

If you cannot have an exact algorithm, for either theoretical or practical reasons, and you still want a computational method for solving the problem in practice, you then turn to heuristics or something else that doesn't guarantee correctness but which might produce workable results often enough to be useful.

Even though something like the halting problem is uncomputable in the classical, always-inevitably-produces-correct-answer-in-finite-time sense, that does not necessarily stop it from being solved in a subset of cases, or to be solved often enough by some kind of a heuristic or non-exact algorithm to be useful.

When you say that something cannot be reached algorithmically, you're saying it's impossible to have an algorithm that would inevitably, systematically, always reach that solution in finite time. And you would in many cases be correct. Symbolic AI research ran into this problem due to the uncomputability of reasoning in predicate logic. (Uncomputability is not the main problem that symbolic AI ran into but it was one of them.)

The problem is that when you say that humans can somehow do this computationally impossible thing, you're not holding human cognition or problem solving to the same standard of computational correctness. We do find solutions to problems, answers to questions, and logical chains of reasoning, but we aren't guaranteed to.

You do seem to be aware of this, of course.

But you then run into the inevitable question of what you mean by AGI. If you hold AGI to the standard of classical computational correctness, to which you don't hold humans, you're correct that it's impossible. But you have also proven nothing new.

A more typical understanding of AGI would be something similar to human cognition -- not having formal guarantees but working well enough for operating in, understanding, or producing useful results the real world. (Human brains do that well in the real world -- thanks to having evolved in it!)

In the latter case, uncomputability results do not prove that kind of AGI to be impossible.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#299
I asked some LLMs all the questions stated in section 3, and they found an answer without diverging. So the entire premise seems speculative: just try out the LLMs to find how they act instead of 'straw-man'-ing what their response is.

In addition, how does the example in 3.1 about answering one's wife's question about her weight even fall within the bounds of "have a high relevance/effect (e.g., economic, scientific, strategic, societal, existential, pivotal, etc.... ) in human existence"..?

I was excited by the buildup and the link between philosophy and math, but the publication seems terribly hobby-ist and lacking of peer-review.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#300
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compute functions != Intelligence though. If that is true, you have a proof that the Church-Turing thesis is false. > LLMs can tell you about the taste of a beer, but we know that they have never tasted a beer. Flight simulators can't take you to Australia, no matter how well they simulate the experience. For this to be relevant, you'd need to show that there are possible sensory inputs that can't be simulated to a…

I think that may depend on how someone defines intelligence. For example, if intelligence includes the ability to feel emotion or appreciate art, then I think it becomes much more plausible that intelligence is not the same as computation. Of course, simply stating that isn't in of itself a philisophically rigorous argument. However, given that not everyone has training in philosophy and it may not even be possible t…

I think if they define intelligence that way, it isn't a very interesting discussion, because we're back to Church-Turing: Either they can show that this actually has an effect on the ability to reason and the possible outputs of the system that somehow exceeds the Turing computable, or those aspects are irrelevant to an outside observer of said entity because the entity would still be able to act in exactly the same way.

I can't prove that you have a subjective experience of feeling emotion, and you can't prove that I do - we can only determine that either one of us acts as if we do.

And so this is all rather orthogonal to how we define intelligence, as whether or not a simulation can simulate such aspects as "actual" feeling is only relevant if the Church-Turing thesis is proven wrong.

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