When I finished reading this article, several of its resource articles, and the HN comments, I returned to my HN feed, and a few HN posts down, I come across:
DARPA Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures. What an interesting intersection.
A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
181–190 of 240 posts
Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
The correct term isn't "hallucinate", it's "bullshit". I mean that in the casual sense of "a bullshitter" - every LLM is a moderately knowleable bullshitter that never stops talking (In a literal sense - even the end of responses is just a magic string from the LLM that cues the containing system to stop the LLM, and if not stopped like that it would just keep going after the "end".) The remarkable thing is that we e…
You could probably s/LLM/human/ in your comment. Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs. In between there may be thoughts in there, like 'I've no more to say', or 'Shut your mouth before they figure you out'. The question is, how is it that hum…
> Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs.
This metaphor of the pachinko machine (or Plinko game) is exactly how I explain LLMs/ML to laypersons. The process of training is the act of discovering through trial and error the right settings for each peg on the board, in order to consistently get the ball to land in the right spot-ish.
Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
#183I found it fascinating how this discussion dovetails with the discussion around free will. In both cases, defining the actual thing under discussion is hard. If you can accurately predict a decision in advance, is that "free will"? If an organism reacts to a stimulus in an appropriate manner, is that "intelligence"? In both cases, we're complex chemical organisms doing all of this with complex chemistry. If we rule o…
One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of. And this is where these arguments that seek to reduce intelligence to purely mechanistic processes breaks down. For sure, everything the article is saying is true, and indeed, the system could be classified as intelligent, but this is a wholly different question from 'agency' or 'free will'. Even exceptionally dumb people have free…
> One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of.
Can one? One of the most disturbing short stories I've ever read is "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death" by Alice Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree). It is the first-person narrative of an unusually self-aware member of a non-technological intelligent species trying to make a life different from "the plan", the species' instincts, in the face of an oncoming slow-motion multigenerational catastrophe. His efforts end up, all for contextually rational and agentive reasons, reiterating his species instinctual lifecycle.
My takeaway from that, from other readings, and from self reflection, is that we are puppets that may or may not become aware of our strings; but if we cut them, we die.
Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
C’mon now, you and I know both know your program is discontinuous. A few null or unknown inputs that you didn’t even consider will break it. You’ll have to keep going in there and adding more if/else statements. Your program couldn’t survive a 100 years without you debugging it.
> your program is discontinuous Not sure I follow your usage of discontinuous: clearly the load inputs are continuous variables (albeit discretely sampled in time and magnitude, but I don’t see the significance of either of those sampling frequencies, each of which can be chosen to be effectively arbitrarily small). Also don’t understand the relevance of continuity at all since you didn’t reference it in the post I r…
Also don’t understand the relevance of continuity at all since you didn’t reference it in the post I replied to.
A calculator is discontinuous graph/program because there is no point to plot when you divide by 0 (undefined). This is true for your classical program. Over time it won't know how to adapt its f(x) function to handle something as crazy as dividing by zero (it can never do it, but unless you put in an error output for that input, the program will never do so on its own).
The belief is these AI programs will be able to make that adaptation. All the changes you bring up that your program can apparently handle are still under your conceptual control (you can map in your mind if this happens, then that happens). You can prove this to yourself when you read your own statement "inputs have already been normalized" - sure, in a world you control.
I'm suggesting a world where your telemetry monitoring function can change into a Reddit function if need be, so yeah, kinda batshit. Why would it need to do that? Remember, we can't imagine why, that's the whole point.
That's how a program could possibly live a hundred years in a world that is constantly changing. Your program can only exist in a very static and predefined world.
There are some that will tell you that you are an ever-changing function. I try to stay out of that simulation :)
Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
One's observations of one's own agency is really the only thing one can be assured of. And this is where these arguments that seek to reduce intelligence to purely mechanistic processes breaks down. For sure, everything the article is saying is true, and indeed, the system could be classified as intelligent, but this is a wholly different question from 'agency' or 'free will'. Even exceptionally dumb people have free…
> Even exceptionally dumb people have free will “Free will” does not exist because the world is deterministic. In other words, if you have made a decision, you couldn’t have made any other decision, so there wasn’t any choice in the first place. A persons IQ has nothing to do with this.
One may object that at the quantum level, the world really is nondeterministic. Epicurus also argued this over 2000 years ago - that sometimes atoms "swerved" unpredictably in their movements, accounting for free will. Of course, the counterpoint to this argument is that randomness is not free will any more than determinism is; neither offers any space for agency as something that's causal rather than just experienced.
Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness And I don't get why, it seems to me quite self evident that you yourself can experience reduced-consciousness states, be it being half-asleep or quite drunk.
The problem for me is that we haven't conceptualized what we mean by "reduced" consciousness. Reduced in what way? If we create an analogy with audio - audio can have 2 properties: frequencies and volume. Frequencies are the content of the audio and volume is how "present" the sound is. Well the same could be applied to consciousness. When we say reduced consciousness do we mean that the mind experiences less content…
Reduced in what way?
In any.
C. is a complex thing, and these can fail to lower level in myriads of ways. You have to align millions* of things to make it work. The biological (in our case) nature of it allows for some slack rather than immediate breakdown, so there are thousands of parameters to play with.
* numbers arbitrary
Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I were to say this is just a coincidence, how would you respond? If it’s not: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01676... If everything is pulsing with electricity and they are syncing to something global … From the paper: Examples of biological systems that have been modeled using PCOs include cardiac pacemakers [2], crickets that chirp in unison [3], and rhythmic flashing of fireflies [4]
> If I were to say this is just a coincidence, how would you respond? I'd say you probably don't know enough to say that with such certainty, and should probably avoid jumping to conclusions lest you be Dunning-Krugered. I would then encourage you to ask ChatGPT something like: "How are SELFOS (Spontaneous electrical low-frequency oscillations) different to PCOs (pulse-coupled oscillators)". Tl;dr - SELFOs and PCOs a…
I'd say you probably don't know enough to say that with such certainty, and should probably avoid jumping to conclusions lest you be Dunning-Krugered.
I'll absolutely take that.
Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
#188Just read an interesting sci-fi novel grappling with this question very directly - Blindsight by Peter Watts, if anyone is interested.
The problem with sci-fi and this matter is that the author can portray anything that suits his/her ideas. Can Rorschach exist as described? Who knows.
Watts also believes in the Ganzfeld effect, as per Starfish, yeah so his beliefs in the mind should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.
Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. it nicely encapsulates why AI aficionados use words like "hallucinate" which become secret clues to belief around the G part of AGI. If it's just a coding mistake, how can the machine be "alive" but if I can re-purpose "hallucinate" as a term of art, I can also make you, dear reader, embue the AI with more and more traits of meaning which go to "it's alive" It's language Jim, but more as Chomsky said. or maybe…
The correct term isn't "hallucinate", it's "bullshit". I mean that in the casual sense of "a bullshitter" - every LLM is a moderately knowleable bullshitter that never stops talking (In a literal sense - even the end of responses is just a magic string from the LLM that cues the containing system to stop the LLM, and if not stopped like that it would just keep going after the "end".) The remarkable thing is that we e…
[deleted]
Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
The correct term isn't "hallucinate", it's "bullshit". I mean that in the casual sense of "a bullshitter" - every LLM is a moderately knowleable bullshitter that never stops talking (In a literal sense - even the end of responses is just a magic string from the LLM that cues the containing system to stop the LLM, and if not stopped like that it would just keep going after the "end".) The remarkable thing is that we e…
You could probably s/LLM/human/ in your comment. Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs. In between there may be thoughts in there, like 'I've no more to say', or 'Shut your mouth before they figure you out'. The question is, how is it that hum…
[deleted]