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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

#401

Post by pixl97 »

somenameforme wrote: post #374
pixl97 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Why not? You can do a simple add with assembly language in a few operations. But if you put millions and millions of operations together you can get a video game with emergent behaviors. If you're just looking at the additions, where does the game come from? Is…

You're not speaking of a behavior but of a "thing." Your consciousness sits idly inside your body, feeling as thought it's the driving all actions of its free will. There's no necessity, reason, or logical explanation for this thing to exist, let alone why or where it comes from. No matter how many instructions you might use to create the most compelling simulation of a dragon in a video game, neither that dragon or…

>There's no necessity, reason, or logical explanation for this thing

I mean, I disagree. It's a internal virtual 'playground' you can bounce ideas off of and reason against. Obviously it imparts some survival benefits to creatures that have one at this point in evolution.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#402

Post by int_19h »

alganet wrote: post #380
int_19h wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say anything about "emergent superintelligent AI".

I'm confused. We are on a comment section about a post with AGI in the title. The term is scientifically vague, but it is estabilished in the popular culture that it is related to superintelligence and emerging behavior. If you don't agree, you owe the reader a better definition. Given this context, if you're not talking about that, what are you talking about then?

The thread though is more broadly about AI in general. My remark was wrt the fact that talk of "souls" in context of AI usually boils down to drawing a red line between what AI could be even in principle, as humans (i.e. "no soul" -> "it's not actually intelligent" etc; some folk use "no qualia" to the same effect, and it's the same argument in disguise). The problem with it is that there's nothing about either AI or human intelligence so far that requires a concept such as soul, so religion aside, the only reason to reach for it is if you're trying to draw that line and running out of arguments as to why it should be there.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#403

Post by eru »

catoc wrote: post #375
giardini wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

catoc states, amongst other things, that: >"Intelligence is clearly possible." Perhaps not a citation but a proof is required here!

Clearly possible in humans - the statement in the parent I was replying to. I would indeed definitely like to see proof - mathematical or applied - of in silico intelligence

Do you expect silicon to be less capable of the necessary computation than cells?

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#405

Post by eru »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #181
dragonwriter wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alternatively, in order to not be contradictory doesn't it require the assumption that humans are not "algorithmic"? But does that not then presuppose (as the above commenter brought up) that we are not a biochemical machine? Is a machine not inherently algorithmic in nature? No, computation is algorithmic, real machines are not necessarily (of course, AGI still can't be ruled out even if algorithmic intelligence i…

> No, computation is algorithmic, real machines are not necessarily As the adjacent comment touches on are the laws of physics (as understood to date) not possible to simulate? Can't all possible machines be simulated at least in theory? I'm guessing my knowledge of the term "algorithmic" is lacking here.

As far as we can tell, all the known laws of nature are computable. And I think most of them are even efficiently computable, especially if you have a quantum computer.

Quantum mechanics is even linear!

Fun fact, quantum mechanics is also deterministic, if you stay away from bonkers interpretations like Copenhagen and stick to just the theory itself or saner interpretations.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#406

Post by eru »

zapperdulchen wrote: post #373
kolinko wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using computation/algorithmic methods we can simulate nonalgorithmic systems. So the world within a computer program can behave in a nonalgorithmic way. Also, one might argue that universe/laws of physics are computational.

> Also, one might argue that universe/laws of physics are computational. Maybe we need to define "computational" before moving on. To me this echoes the clockwork universe of the Enligthenment. Insights of quantum physics have shattered this idea.

> Insights of quantum physics have shattered this idea.

Not at all. Quantum mechanics is fully deterministic, if you stay away from bonkers interpretations like Copenhagen.

And, of course, you can simulate random processes just fine even on a deterministic system use a pseudo random number generator or you can just connect a physical hardware random number generator to your otherwise deterministic system. Compared to all the hardware used in our LLMs so far, random number cards are cheap kit.

Though I doubt a hardware random number generator will make the difference between dumb and intelligent systems: pseudo random number generators are just too good, and generalising a bit you'd need P=NP to be true for your system to behave differently with a good PRNG vs real random numbers.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#407

Post by eru »

stevenhuang wrote: post #135
fc417fc802 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this cannot be reached algorithmically > humans can (somehow) do this Is this not contradictory? Alternatively, in order to not be contradictory doesn't it require the assumption that humans are not "algorithmic"? But does that not then presuppose (as the above commenter brought up) that we are not a biochemical machine? Is a machine not inherently algorithmic in nature? Or at minimum presupposes that humans are mo…

OP seems to have a very confused idea of what an algorithmic process means... they think the process of humans determining what is truthful "cannot possibly be something algorithmic". Which is certainly an opinion. > whatever it is: it cannot possibly be something algorithmic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349299 Maybe OP should have looked at a dictionary for what certain words actually mean before defining…

> Maybe OP should have looked at a dictionary for what certain words actually mean before defining them to be something nonsensical.

Making non-standard definitions of words isn't necessarily bad, and can be useful in certain texts. But if you do so, you need to make these definitions front-and-centre instead of just casually assuming your readers will share your non-standard meaning.

And where possible, I would still use the standard meanings and use newly made up terms to carry new concepts.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#408

Post by eru »

Delk wrote: post #298
ICBTheory wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed. And it's fairly trivial to see that computability isn't the right lens to view intelligence through:

The classic Turing test takes place over a finite amount of time. Normally less than an hour, but we can arbitrarily give the interlocutor, say, up to a week. If you don't like the Turing test, then just about any other test interaction we can make the system undergo will conclude below some fixed finite time. After all, humans are generally intelligent, even if they only get a handful of decades to prove it.

During that finite time interaction, only a finite amount of interaction will be exchanged.

Now in principle a system could have a big old lookup table with all prefixes of all possible interactions as keys, and values are probability distributions for what to send back next (and how long to wait before sending the reply). That table would be finite. And thus following it would be computable.

Of course, the table would be more than astronomical in size, and utterly impossible to manifest in our physical universe. But computability is too blunt an instrument to formalise this with.

In the real universe, you would need to _compress_ that table somehow, eg in a human brain or perhaps in an LLM or so. And then you need to be able to efficiently uncompress the parts of the table you need to produce the replies. Whether that's possible and how are all questions of complexity theory, not computability.

See Scott Aaronson's excellent 'Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity': https://arxiv.org/abs/1108.1791

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#409

Post by eru »

ben_w wrote: post #227
somenameforme wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Boltzmann brains and A. J. Ayer's "There is a thought now". 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/2018/08/26-0…

Human minds are fairly free to believe untruths. At least to a certain extent: it's rather hard to _really_ believe things that contradict your lived experience.

You can _say_ that you believe them, but you won't behave as if you believe them.

Re: AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns

#410

Post by eru »

ben_w wrote: post #390
bluefirebrand wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What scientific evidence is there that we are anything other than a biochemical machine? And if we are a biochemical machine, how is that inherently capable of more than a silicon based machine is capable of Iron and copper are both metals but only one can be hardened into steel There is no reason why we should assume a silicon machine must have the same capabilities as a carbon machine

> There is no reason why we should assume a silicon machine must have the same capabilities as a carbon machine Then make your computer out of carbon. While the broader principle, that we don't know what we're doing and AI as it currently exists is a bit cargo-culty, this is a critique of the SOTA and is insufficient to be generalised: we can reasonably say "we probably have not", we can't say "we definitely cannot e…

> Who knows, perhaps our brains do somehow manage to do whacky quantum stuff despite seeming to be far too warm and messy for that. But even that is just an implementation detail.

Yes. And we are pretty close to building practical quantum computers. Though so far, we haven't really found much they would be good for. The most promising application seems to be for simulating quantum systems for material science.

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