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David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

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Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#31

Post by nzp »

varjag wrote: post #29
nzp wrote: post #16

I can just say that Deutsch is another victim of what being good at theoretical physics tends to do to one's mind. The amount of intellectual hubris and arrogance we can develop is staggering. Sheldon Cooper is not really a parody, it's what many theoretical physicists actually think (but are to socially adapted to say out loud), as in: "Penny - I'm a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and e…

> He does make a few good points, like the one that quantum phenomena do not give rise to mental processes, but that is trivial in the sense it's obvious to anyone with some knowledge of quantum mechanics on one hand, and what neurons are and how they work on the other. This didn't prevent Penrose (surprise, another physicist) from establishing his little cult with Quantum Theory of Mind.

Right, I remembered him after I posted. I don't know what to think of that. He obviously knows quantum theory. He can open any undergraduate textbook on neurophysiology and read all about how neurons work. So is he merely crazy, filling some emotional void religion might had filled in the old days, or something else? I don't know.

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#32

Post by tcgv »

ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #20
nzp wrote: post #16

I can just say that Deutsch is another victim of what being good at theoretical physics tends to do to one's mind. The amount of intellectual hubris and arrogance we can develop is staggering. Sheldon Cooper is not really a parody, it's what many theoretical physicists actually think (but are to socially adapted to say out loud), as in: "Penny - I'm a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and e…

Speaking as someone with a physics degree, I like to quote Peter Thiel (for once): > This is why physics Ph.D’s are notoriously difficult to work with; because they know fundamental things, they think they know all things. - http://blakemasters.com/post/22866240816/peter-thiels-cs183-...

This kind of discussion always brings J. B. S. Haldane to my mind:

- Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.[1]

[1] Possible Worlds and Other Papers (1927), p. 286

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#33

Post by maaku »

nzp wrote: post #31
varjag wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He does make a few good points, like the one that quantum phenomena do not give rise to mental processes, but that is trivial in the sense it's obvious to anyone with some knowledge of quantum mechanics on one hand, and what neurons are and how they work on the other. This didn't prevent Penrose (surprise, another physicist) from establishing his little cult with Quantum Theory of Mind.

Right, I remembered him after I posted. I don't know what to think of that. He obviously knows quantum theory. He can open any undergraduate textbook on neurophysiology and read all about how neurons work. So is he merely crazy, filling some emotional void religion might had filled in the old days, or something else? I don't know.

Consciousness and free will seem mysterious, so he posits the only mystery he knows in the universe at that scale. Predictable human bias not unique to physicists.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_...

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#34

Post by mcguire »

The difficulty I'm having with this article is that many people, when discussing intelligence, invoke some specific capability, X; for Deutsch, X seems to be "creativity", for Penrose, X may or may not be the ability to grok the truth or falsehood of an arbitrary statement as if one has the personal cellphone number of God. Then, they go on to assert "computers (or whatever) cannot (currently) do X, therefore we need to create a grand theory of X to create Artificial (General) Intelligence" (or "computers cannot do X, therefore A(G)I is doomed").

Unfortunately, they never seem to provide proof that X exists, or is true. Sure, you can provide a plethora of examples of creativity, but the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", the plural of "data" isn't really "proof", and I don't know what creativity is well enough to tell what I do commonly (or even occasionally) is creative and a forward-chaining formal logic thingy printing out a novel, true formula isn't creative.

Ultimately, that is why I like the Turing test---I don't have to understand all sorts of magical X's, all I have to do is to give you the benefit of the doubt if you don't have to have a bunch of truly arbitrary conditions on what you do.

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#36

Post by jimbokun »

"‘Smartest machine on Earth’, the PBS documentary series Nova called it, and characterised its function as ‘mimicking the human thought process with software.’ But that is precisely what it does not do."

I heard a grad student who did some work on the Watson project say basically the same thing.

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#37

Post by ScottBurson »

nzp wrote: post #31
varjag wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He does make a few good points, like the one that quantum phenomena do not give rise to mental processes, but that is trivial in the sense it's obvious to anyone with some knowledge of quantum mechanics on one hand, and what neurons are and how they work on the other. This didn't prevent Penrose (surprise, another physicist) from establishing his little cult with Quantum Theory of Mind.

Right, I remembered him after I posted. I don't know what to think of that. He obviously knows quantum theory. He can open any undergraduate textbook on neurophysiology and read all about how neurons work. So is he merely crazy, filling some emotional void religion might had filled in the old days, or something else? I don't know.

Do you really believe we know all there is to know about how neurons work? I don't. I think there are lots of surprises lurking.

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#38

Post by nitrogen »

ScottBurson wrote: post #37
nzp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, I remembered him after I posted. I don't know what to think of that. He obviously knows quantum theory. He can open any undergraduate textbook on neurophysiology and read all about how neurons work. So is he merely crazy, filling some emotional void religion might had filled in the old days, or something else? I don't know.

Do you really believe we know all there is to know about how neurons work? I don't. I think there are lots of surprises lurking.

So is this a "Quantum Mind of the Gaps" argument?

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#39

Post by nitrogen »

ansible wrote: post #12
rdtsc wrote: post #9

> So, why is it still conventional wisdom that we get our theories by induction? I thought the other conventional wisdom is that we get our theories by building mental models. I throw a ball, and I can either remember how it flew in the past and use that to predict, I can also build a mental model from first principles to find out what will happen. Maybe run a short 5 second idealized simulation in my head and I can…

I thought the other conventional wisdom is that we get our theories by building mental models. I throw a ball, and I can either remember how it flew in the past and use that to predict, I can also built a mental model from first principles to find out what will happen. Maybe run a short 5 second idealized simulation in my head and I can predict what might happen. Well then I might realize that there was wind that my…

Our brains are not, as far as I know, running any kind of recognizable simulation like we would with a computer.

By this logic, a professional ball player should miss any ball thrown at an unfamiliar angle, and amateurs should only be able to catch balls thrown to them at specific angles and velocities. It doesn't take much to build an integrator or differentiator out of electronics, so with [big number] neurons available to the task, I'd be surprised if we weren't running some kind of predictive analog simulation.

And so they 'remember' where the ball is going to land, and they remember how to move to get there.

Do you have a mechanism in mind for how this 'remembering' takes place, if not via simulation encoded by DNA marked, proteins folded, and/or synapses grown in response to successes and failures over time?

Re: David Deutsch On Artificial Intelligence

#40

Post by nitrogen »

jorleif wrote: post #11
senorgomez wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a difference between reasoning and predicting? It seems you don't think so and the author does.

I think there is a difference, but my view is that it is impossible to reason without sufficiently accurate prediction, and that the concepts we use for reasoning are largely formed based on how predictive they are. Consider playing a game where two players throw dice, and the one with the larger number wins. There is no predictability between turns, so there is no point in reasoning far into the future, unlike in ch…

I would define reasoning as answering a question or optimization problem, e.g. What is my best move? What is a good move? This can be formalized as calculating some kind of score for a possible action, whereas prediction is just about assigning a probability value to an event.

So would it be fair to summarize this as "reason is prediction with a goal"?

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