131–140 of 159 posts
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We won't be able to recognize intelligence if it is not anthropocentric. The Earth could be sentient but we won't be able to tell.
That is the premise of Solaris, from Stanislaw Lem. Great book, and movie too (the original, not the remake).
It's not embodiment that's important so much as situatedness. An agent can be situated without having a physical instantiation. An agent which does not have a place or time is not recognisable as being autonomous, or capable of recognising others as such.
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Eh? I’m not surprised that AI researchers are not informed about the philosophy of mind, and I doubt that they need to be in order to do their work. But the quale is an important concept and just assuming it doesn’t exist because AI researchers don’t need it is a bit silly.
It's just not relevant. It's an ill-defined measure for something that (all due respect) makes philosophy majors feel like they're participating in something they're unqualified to participate in.
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Can't speak for other humans of course, but I'm more certain my sensory experiences exist than anything else, to the point searching for an evidence base for their existence or concluding they didn't exist unless explained would just be weird. I'm also certain my sensory experiences are not identical to attempts to quantify them or describe them in language or interpretive dance (philosophers struggling to define and…
> The alternative: that its a practical possibility to translate all parts of my sensory experiences into data which can be transmitted and parsed in exactly the same way by other minds feels like the proposition needs some evidence or justification [beyond "Your brain is composed of atoms. Other atoms exist"] In theory, if we had high-throughput brain-brain interfaces that could be connected between your thalamus an…
That's sort of the point though, it's incredibly low fidelity (so low fidelity that computers we're absolutely sure don't have sensory experiences can appropriately and plausibly describe them) yet just about high fidelity enough for me to be sure that people experiencing synesthesia must be having different experiences than me, and there's no particular reason to believe we are or ever will be on a path to me being able to experience their experience in any meaningful way. Even in the twins' case where the transmission mechanism is literally the same substrate connected to the same physical organs that have developed simultaneously, the reports of them having different personalities and preferences suggests that they have different sensory experiences from [partially] shared inputs.
The thorny question then becomes whether sensory experiences are important to independent goal formation and other stuff often considered part of general intelligence. I don't think we know enough to answer that question, but we certainly don't know enough to dismiss it.
The idea that embodiment is necessary for intelligence is just another example of anthropocentrism. It's likely that we will soon have AGI that can solve the protein folding problem, play go at a superhuman level, and create arbitrary images from a text prompt, yet still underperform humans when it comes to proprioception and object manipulation. Humans have evolved specifically for proprioception for billions of yea…
An AI can never truly understand the physical world without direct experience of it. Now, I believe you probably could build something that could be called an AGI without embodiment, but it would be greatly limited by its lack of experience of the physical.
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It's not micrometers vs meters, or electrons vs macro objects. It's primarily a matter of sensor density. That is, I feel my fingers move in a way that a CPU does not feel an electron move. When I speak, I experience far more than a CPU experiences writing some bits to some output ports. And so on. Does that mean that embodiment is required? No. But your definition of "embodied" misses the point of the discussion.
It's trivial to give a regular CPU better sensing than you in dozens of variables (pressure, temperature, voltage, CO concentration, etc), so your point is rather weak.
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This sounds like a wise thing to do, although to play devil’s advocate, if the AGI is hyper intelligent then it may be able to detect it’s inside a simulation and conceal any malicious intentions it may have.
Interesting thought. A small correction, from the AGI perspective, its intentions are pure and good. All beings are value function maximizers. The choice of the value function however... "To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law" -- Solzhenitsyn
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It's trivial to give a regular CPU better sensing than you in dozens of variables (pressure, temperature, voltage, CO concentration, etc), so your point is rather weak.
Sensation isn't the issue here, perception is.
This conclusion was sealed when they settled on the definition of AGI as being "as good or better than humans at things humans do ", emphasis mine. Things humans do require embodiment. The more interesting proposition (that I'm inclined to believe FWIW) is that "common sense" requires high-bandwidth interaction with an environment, complex inputs and outputs. The environment could be Reality, it could be a simulation…
I think the problem with this assertion is that how do you differentiate between specialization and the "G" for general in AGI. ... in many ways, wouldn't a tree meet your definition of AGI? (Perhaps it should?) Like, at a sufficiently granular level, I probably couldn't "tree" very well, even with the assistance of tremendous computing power. There's vast amounts of computation being performed during a tree doing it…
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Your conclusion doesn’t follow from your premises, and your second premise is false besides as others have pointed out — CPUs CANNOT simulate even classical physics exactly, and certainly not quantum physics. But even if such a complete simulation were possible, there’s every reason to assume a CPU would lack the consciousness to experience anything. When you simulate a hurricane does the CPU get wet?
> your second premise is false besides as others have pointed out — CPUs CANNOT simulate even classical physics exactly, and certainly not quantum physics. Both classical and quantum physics can be simulated on a classical computer, to an arbitrary degree of precision. Granted, the case in which infinite precision (if such a thing even exists in reality) is required is not simulatable on a discrete computer, but do a…
Again, a simulation is not the thing. The map is not the territory. If consciousness truly emerges from actual physical processes of interacting brain matter (seems plausible), those _don’t exist_ in a computer simulation.
In a simulation of a brain, from what substrate could consciousness emerge? The state of the simulated brain is stored in an arbitrary subset of locations in RAM, unknown to and non-interactive with each other, along with loads of other stuff the computer is keeping track of. Do you think consciousness could emerge automatically from the state of the right subset of locations in RAM, or is it whenever a relevant value in memory is changed due to a transistor opening, or is it when the simulation computation that will result in the RAM update is happening, or is complete? Per the Chinese Room argument, would consciousness still emerge if half the operations were actually performed off-CPU by human mechanical turkers with rule books and notecards? Nothing in the abstract computation will have changed.
Consider also that physical reality runs in full parallel, while simulations on computers run serially per core. So if consciousness emerging requires the simultaneous interaction of many moving brain parts, that isn’t something that happens in a computer simulation.
> Both classical and quantum physics can be simulated on a classical computer, to an arbitrary degree of precision
Quantum physics can’t be simulated on a classical computer to an arbitrary degree of precision. Feynman didn’t think so, and he hasn’t been gainsayed yet. And classical physics is full of chaos and very sensitive to precision.