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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#111

Post by darkwater »

throwaway173738 wrote: post #74
doctoboggan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own. C…

I think consciousness is going to turn out to be very challenging to define rigorously enough that we can test for its presence or absence. Emergent or not, the question is how do you determine when it has emerged? Is it a quantity or an attribute? Discrete or continuous? Does it have a finite or infinite range? We can all agree on what color something is, but we can’t describe the color a priori, only by example. I…

I like the color example, but colors can be reproduced at will by trial and error and by observing the results (and collectively compare them to our shared experience).

Why cannot this be applied to consciousness as well? I mean, it's surely much more difficult to do compared to colors but... impossible?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#112

Post by trick-or-treat »

doctoboggan wrote: post #65
eternauta3k wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if most people would dismiss the sentence "all matter has a sort of proto-subjectivity very different from ours but which gives rise to ours". And it solves some problems (introducing others).

Panpsychism is certainly an interesting idea but I wouldn't consider it a popularly held view.

That's because Panpsychism is silly.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#113

Post by ArnoVW »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #38
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve wondered the same myself, without being a cunning linguist. I understand the math pretty well but still find it crazy that a bunch of matrices can converse in human languages without ever being “taught”. Imagine decoding an encyclopedia written in a foreign language where the characters, punctuation, and grammar are unknown — supplemented by a million other texts the same way. Feels like it should be utterly imp…

If time dilation is said to being a product of computation, why is it that anaesthetic drugs that are taken not to the point of actual unconsciousness cause it. Dont anaesthetics sort of shut everything down/inhibit all that kind of cognitive activity (compute?)

Yes. Or at least that is what I understood from the Radiolab episode on “how do aesthetics work”

https://radiolab.org/podcast/anesthesia

Re: They’re made out of weights

#115

Post by danans »

famouswaffles wrote: post #36
noosphr wrote: post #4

It's not often I see something that's fractally wrong but here we are. There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer. There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 The point of the original sh…

>There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 That paper did not train the models on 'a language with strong consistent grammars'. Mathematical Operation tables are not a language. Grammar itsel…

> Mathematical Operation tables are not a language.

Not a natural language, but they are certainly a language as in a symbolic representation of information.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#116

Post by bux93 »

vkazanov wrote: post #70
bulbar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to be sure: The "neurons" in today's AI have nothing to do whatsoever with real neurons. What we can do is simulate very simple brains by simulating relatively few neurons as they appear in worms. In this sense we are multiple magnitudes away where the increasing complexity implies exponential increasing difficulty. I would think we are so far away that there will be unknown unknowns we encounter on the way.

Yes, physically absolutely nothing. But conceptually they seem to to form this very generic function from inputs to outputs that neurons also form.

Only if you ignore almost every input and output that neurons have.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothing-like-a-brain-an... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9665914/

This is why making more neuromorphic NNs is still an active area of research, although they typically all focus on another extremely simplified model (spiking neural networks).

Re: They’re made out of weights

#117

Post by lloeki »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #81
lloeki wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're Made out of Meat - Terry Bisson, 1991 https://web.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think... Radio play by Miriam Tolan and Russ Armstrong: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/studio/segments/168264-... (EDIT: the original parent was missing "rather adapting from the original")

Your EDIT is untrue, but thanks for linking to originals . Here is Jon Benjamin reading Bisson's original text: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usXhX0zaO4 >

Hmm. I could swear it wasn't there, hence my posting. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Sorry for that.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#118

Post by dsign »

Oh, this was a fun read and one that kids should have in school before they turn ten.

Because we are not taking things seriously. If ClosedAI or DeepDisTrust or Posthropic come up with something that quacks like a sentient being, our built-in innate reaction is going to be to scorn it, dismiss it and end the conversation. The alternative, to even consider that we fungible creatures who live in apple-eating-sin that got us expelled from Eden can create alien souls, souls that are at the very least our equals, would be teleological Armageddon. It would force us to acknowledge the mutable nature of souls and the malleability of being. We would have to stop believing that the nature of disease and death is more divine than ourselves.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#119

Post by vouwfietsman »

bulbar wrote: post #55
doctoboggan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own. C…

I think the alternative is that our brain, somehow, is connected to some metaphysical aspect of reality which is what most religions believe.

"an", not "the" alternative.

Consciousness can be not-emergent but also not metaphysical, think sci-fi-type undiscovered physics or matter.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#120

Post by eszed »

slopinthebag wrote: post #68
eszed wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a gotcha at all, but I don't have a satisfying answer, nor am I confident there even is one. Best I can do is to say that I think consciousness and sense of self are at the very least closely related, and perhaps the very same phenomenon. "I" am the entity that realizes my own consciousness; consciousness is the qualia that makes "me" separable from all other entities. Or something like that. This gets to the "do…

Yeah, I guess what I'm trying to ask is that if it is an emergent property but not a physical part of the brain, doesn't that imply something metaphysical about consciousness? Almost as if it's a non-physical phenomenon? At least when I hear people talk about emergent behaviour I see it as a refutation of the spiritual, but to me it seems like it actually implies we have a "soul". Idk, it's really hard to articulate…

I don't know if it implies that. Someone up-thread mentioned temperature as an emergent property: individual atoms don't have it, but a sufficiently large group of them do. That would, I guess, make temperature meta-physical in the most literal possible sense. That's not how we typically think of that term as applied to consciousness or soul or whatever, but I'd agree it fits, without implying any kind of specialness beyond that.
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