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Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

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Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#201

Post by hackinthebochs »

hnfong wrote: post #63
gnull wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes the simulation we live in special compared to the simulation of a burning candle that you or I might be running? That simulated candle is perfectly melting wax in its own simulation. Duh, it won't melt any in ours, because our arbitrary notions of "real" wax are disconnected between the two simulatons.

They do have a valid subtle point though. If we don't think the candle in a simulated universe is a "real candle", why do we consider the intelligence in a simulated universe possibly "real intelligence"? Being a functionalist ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_(philosophy_of_m... ) myself, I don't know the answer on the top of my head.

>If we don't think the candle in a simulated universe is a "real candle", why do we consider the intelligence in a simulated universe possibly "real intelligence"?

I can smell a "real" candle, a "real" candle can burn my hand. The term real here is just picking out a conceptual schema where its objects can feature as relata of the same laws, like a causal compatibility class defined by a shared causal scope. But this isn't unique to the question of real vs simulated. There are causal scopes all over the place. Subatomic particles are a scope. I, as a particular collection of atoms, am not causally compatible with individual electrons and neutrons. Different conceptual levels have their own causal scopes and their own laws (derivative of more fundamental laws) that determine how these aggregates behave. Real (as distinct from simulated) just identifies causal scopes that are derivative of our privileged scope.

Consciousness is not like the candle because everyone's consciousness is its own unique causal scope. There are psychological laws that determine how we process and respond to information. But each of our minds are causally isolated from one another. We can only know of each other's consciousness by judging behavior. There's nothing privileged about a biological substrate when it comes to determining "real" consciousness.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#202

Post by fabianhjr »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #47

It's unfortunate that there's so little (none in the article, just 1 comment here as of this writing) mention of the Turing Test. The whole premise of the paper that introduced that was that "do machines think" is such a hard question to define that you have to frame the question differently. And it's ironic that we seem to talk about the Turing Test less than ever now that systems almost everyone can access can argu…

> “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

The point of the Turing Test is that if there is no extrinsic difference between a human and a machine the intrinsic difference is moot for practical purposes. That is not an argument to whether a machine (with linear algebra, machine learning, large language models, or any other method) can think or what constitutes thinking or consciousness.

The Chinese Room thought experiment is a compliment on the intrinsic side of the comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#203

Post by t23414321 »

dang wrote: post #188
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #170

Provocative title with a much more reasoned lede. I'm pretty sure a set of workshops isn't ACTUALLY going to solve a problem that philosophers have been at each other's throats for for the past half century. But BOY does it get people talking! Both sides of the debate have capital-O Opinions, and how else did you want to drum up interest for a set of mathematics workshops. O:-)

Yes, that word 'think' is a hell of a distraction. We've replaced that bit of the title with a less provocative / more interesting phrase from the article. Hopefully we can talk about the actual math and stuff (although the article doesn't go into much of that).

artificial intelligence in place of artificial knowledge is confusing distraction too, at least artificial is a good reminder since beginning

(IMHO its not provocative but well catching a point.. about so called "intelligence" - what if we could look for intelligent knowledge - made in not statistic but semantic(?) and converging way - instead - of being distracted, afraid and.. outpriced, peanuts for the essence it doesn't have ?)

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#204

Post by pegasus »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #141
pegasus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that you might have become polarized yourself. I often encounter good arguments against current AI systems emulating all essential aspects of human thinking. For example, the fact that they can't learn from few examples, that they can't perform simple mathematical operations without access to external help (via tool calling) or that they have to expend so much more energy to do their magic (and yes, to me th…

For example, the fact that they can't learn from few examples For one thing, yes, they can, obviously [1] -- when's the last time you checked? -- and for another, there are plenty of humans who seemingly cannot. The only real difference is that with an LLM, when the context is lost, so is the learning. That will obviously need to be addressed at some point. that they can't perform simple mathematical operations witho…

> For one thing, yes, they can

That's post-training. The complaint I'm referring to is to the huge amounts of data (end energy) required during training - which is also a form of learning, after all. Sure, there are counter-arguments, for example pointing to the huge amount of non-textual data a child ingests, but these counter-arguments are not waterproof themselves (for example, one can point out that we are discussing text-only tasks). The discussion can go on and on, my point was only that cogent arguments are indeed often presented, which you were denying above.

> there are plenty of humans who seemingly cannot

This particular defense of LLMs has always puzzled me. By this measure, simply because there are sufficiently impaired humans, AGI has already been achieved many decades ago.

> But yet you are fine with humans requiring a calculator to perform similar tasks

I'm talking about tasks like multiplying two 4-digit numbers (let's say 8-digit, just to be safe, for reasoning models), which 5th or 6th graders in the US are expected to be able to do with no problem - without using a calculator.

> To me, the magical thing is that they have shown us, more or less undeniably (Penrose notwithstanding), that that is all we do.

Or, to put it more tersely, they have shown you that that is all we do. Penrose, myself, and lots of others don't see it quite like that. (Feeling quite comfortable being classed in the same camp with the greatest living physicist, honestly. ;) To me what LLMs do is approximate one aspect of our minds. But I have a strong hunch that the rabbit hole goes much deeper, your assessment notwithstanding.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#205

Post by nkrisc »

djeastm wrote: post #152
nkrisc wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. The AI companies themselves are the ones drawing the parallels to a human being. Look at how any of these LLM products are marketed and described.

Is it not within our capacity on HN to ignore whatever the marketers say and speak to the underlying technology?

Given the context of the article, why would you ignore that? It's important to discuss the underlying technology in the context in which it's being sold to the public at large.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#206

Post by dang »

t23414321 wrote: post #196
dang wrote: post #190

[stub for offtopicness] (in this case, thinkiness)

@dang offtopicness started from using word thinking in place of calculating what is the common objection in this thread.

Yes. But it's offtopic because the presence of a provocative word 'thinking' in the title led to a lot of generic tangents that don't engage with anything interesting in the article, and mostly just express people's pre-existing associations about a controversial point.

Trying to avoid this kind of thing is why the guidelines say things like:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#207

Post by kipchak »

bondarchuk wrote: post #117
kipchak wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider for example Orch OR theory. If it or something like it were to be accurate, the brain would not "obey physical laws that can be described by mathematics".

> Consider for example Orch OR theory Yes, or what about leprechauns?

Orch OR is probably wrong, but the broader point is that we still don’t know which physical processes are necessary for cognition. Until we do, claims of definitive brain simulability are premature.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#208

Post by mediaman »

omnicognate wrote: post #124
tracerbulletx wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. This whole AI situation has really exposed how bad most people are at considering the ontological and semantic content of the words they use.

Indeed, people confidently assert as established fact things like "brains are bound by the laws of physics" and therefore "there can't be anything special" about them, so "consciousness is an illusion" and "the mind is a computer", all with absolute conviction but with very little understanding of what physics and maths really do and do not say about the universe. It's a quasi-religious faith in a thing not fully com…

If your position is that brains are not actually bound by the laws of physics -- that they operate on some other plane of existence unbound by any scientifically tested principle -- then it is not only your ideological opposites who have quasi-religious faith in a thing not fully comprehended.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#209

Post by Tadpole9181 »

kipchak wrote: post #199
Tadpole9181 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The complete function may or may not be pen and paper-able. Would you mind expanding on this? At a base read, it seems you implying magic exists.

It could well be the case that the brain can be simulated, but presently we don't know exactly what variables/components must be simulated. Does ongoing neuroplasticity for example need to be a component of simulation? Is there some as of yet unknown causal mechanisms or interactions that may be essential?

None of those examples cannot be done on pen and paper or otherwise simulated with a different medium, though.

AFAICT, your comment above would need some mechanism that is physically impossible and incalculable to make the argument, and then somehow have that happen in a human brain despite being physically impossible and incalculable.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#210

Post by Retric »

t23414321 wrote: post #178
Retric wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking is different than forming long term memories. An LLM could be thinking in one of two ways. Either between adding each individual token, or collectively across multiple tokens. At the individual token level the physical mechanism doesn’t seem to fit the definition being essentially reflexive action, but across multiple tokens that’s a little more questionable especially as multiple approaches are used.

An LLM ..is calculated ..from language (or from things being said by humans before being true or not). It's not some antropomorfic process what using the word thinking would suggest (to sell well). > across multiple tokens - but how many ? how many of them happen in sole person life ? How many in some calculation ? Does it matter, if a calculation doesn't reflect it but stay all the same ? ( conversation with.. a rad…

The general public have no issue saying a computer is thinking when you’re sitting there waiting for it to calculate a route or doing a similar process like selecting a chess move.

The connotation is simply an internal process of indeterminate length rather than one of reflexive length. So they don’t apply it when a GPU is slinging out 120 FPS in a first person shooter.

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