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A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

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Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#191

Post by [deleted] »

Xmd5a wrote: post #165
mcswell wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word "langu…

Here lies the promised land: the possibility of a precise and concise nomenklatura that assigns each thing a unique name, perfectly matching its unique position in the world, derived from the complete determination of the laws governing what it is and how it interacts with others. The laws of what is shall dictate how things ought to be named. What a motivating carrot—let’s keep following these prescriptions, for sur…

[deleted]

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#192

Post by wruza »

h0l0cube wrote: post #126
crooked-v wrote: post #108

Earlier 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…

It’s survival in reality. Bullshit doesn’t survive (at least on the lower levels of existense, corporate and cultural bs easily does) and that’s why people are so angry at it. We hate absurdity because using absurd results yields failures and loses time or resources that were important to stay fed and warm.

People also can lose your time or resources (first line support, women’s shopping, etc) and the reaction is the same.

I don’t know why there’s still no LLM with a constant reality feedback loop yet. Maybe there’s a set of technical issues that prevents it. But until this happens, pretrained AI will bullshit itself and everyone cause there’s nothing that could hit it on the head.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#193

Post by bloomingkales »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #172
xg15 wrote: post #24

Maybe the definition of what "intelligence" is could be sharpened by having a look at LLMs and "traditional" computer programs and asking what exactly the difference between the two is. Almost all the traditional criteria of intelligence - reasoning, planning, decisionmaking, memory etc - are exhibited pretty trivially by standard computer programs. Nevertheless no one would think of them as "intelligent" in the sens…

The only proof of intelligence that humans accept are where they are utterly dominated by the more intelligent “thing.” In my experience it comes down to speed of processing and response Nobody views trees as intelligent because despite having extremely complex interdependencies with their ecology, including fungus and all kinds of other organisms, they don’t move quickly or appear to respond to input (even though th…

Nobody views trees as intelligent

Because we take freely from trees. They must be stupid or something because they give things freely. It's kind of why many employers view labor as stupid. They give their labor for very little. Humans dabble in arrogance.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#194

Post by photonthug »

NoGravitas wrote: post #178
skissane wrote: post #61

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinction…

So, I think you' are wrong about this: the article is discussing a change in perspective that would largely make the classic debates in philosophy of mind irrelevant in the same way that heliocentrism made classic debates within the geocentric paradigm (about epicycles, and such) irrelevant. Highly worthwhile, if insufficiently in-depth.

It seems like this might be missing or just talking past parents point. Sure, new paradigms might always make old lines of research irrelevant. But otoh, something like idealism vs materialism vs dualism can’t just be dismissed because the categories are exhaustive! So new paradigms might shed light on it but can’t just cancel out the question. So yes, to parents point some stuff is fundamental, and if you’re not acquainted with the fundamentals then it’s hard to discuss the deep issues coherently. It’s possible I guess that a plant biologist or a journalist or a ML engineer for that matter is going to crack the problem wide open with new lines of inquiry that are completely ignorant about historical debates in theory of mind, but in that case it will still probably take someone else to explain what /how that actually happened.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#195

Post by [deleted] »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #127
_1tem wrote: post #121

Here's an interesting thought experiment. Take any definition of consciousness or intelligence that is not based on biological components. For example "reacts to stimuli, exhibits anger". You can apply that definition to other entities like the United States. Does the United States react to stimuli (i.e. invasion) and exhibit anger? Yes (e.g. Pearl Harbor). Therefore the United States is conscious? If a person argues…

> Therefore the United States is conscious? Assuming the United States react to stimuli and exhibit anger, and assuming that the definition of being conscious is reacting to stimuli and exhibiting anger, yes, the United States are conscious.

[deleted]

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#196

Post by jarkami »

vidarh wrote: post #166
torginus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about aphantasia - if I asked you to draw a floorplan of your home/office etc. would you not be able to do it? If you could wouldn't that involve you imagining what the building looks like from the inside and how the rooms are connected together? Or would do it some other way? (I'm assuming you could do it, since if you couldn't I think that would be a majorly debiliating condition rather than just some a…

Yes, in fact my ability to draw from memory places I've seen is, if anything, from experience, substantially above average. However, when I draw from memory, my drawings do tend to be more stylized. I can "imagine" what a building looks like, but I can't see it. Even our language makes this hard to describe, and the reason why I didn't realise that this isn't how other people do it, because most of our language for r…

I am largely in the same boat -- I've taken to telling people that I think very well spatially (that is my primary method of thought) but not at all visually. I am much better than most people seem to be when it comes to tasks involving space, direction, and so on -- basically abstractions of reality, not images of it. But if you want me to actually visualize an apple in my head? Yeah, I can't do that at all. Not even a "stylized" apple.

If you wanted me to draw an abstract floorplan of my house, or the layout of my town, I can do that easily. I can navigate an extended road trip unassisted by simply looking at a map ahead of time and mentally storing an abstraction of where I need to go. But if you wanted, say, an image of my house, or the main intersection in the middle of town, or anything like that -- I'm no good. I can't "see" it, and I would not be able to draw anything remotely accurate.

To circle back around too your "imagine" vs. "see" problem -- my response to the often-referenced "imagine a ball rolling on a table" exercise often elicits some confusion from people. I can imagine a ball rolling on a table just fine. What color is the ball, though? It has no color. What size is it? It has no size. It is just "a ball", in the abstract -- its only property is shape (spherical), which is ultimately all that is necessary for imagining rather than seeing. If you wanted me to visualize a large red ball on a green table, though, that's beyond me.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#197

Post by SilasX »

NoGravitas wrote: post #178
skissane wrote: post #61

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinction…

So, I think you' are wrong about this: the article is discussing a change in perspective that would largely make the classic debates in philosophy of mind irrelevant in the same way that heliocentrism made classic debates within the geocentric paradigm (about epicycles, and such) irrelevant. Highly worthwhile, if insufficiently in-depth.

I agree in spirit, that it's possible for a field to be so lost that a new paradigm fundamentally obviates it and frees you from having to recapitulate the entire thicket. But still, a minimal test for whether you've actually obviated them would be whether you can double back and show how the new paradigm resolves/makes them look naive and confused. And so I'd expect an author to do that for at least one such school of thought as part of their exposition.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#198

Post by koakuma-chan »

NoGravitas wrote: post #185
koakuma-chan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 experience…

Is there evidence that quantum mechanics is not deterministic?

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#199

Post by scotty79 »

tristramb wrote: post #160
scotty79 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no contradiction. Philosophy is something everybody does after a beer. No point in pretentding that it's a relevant profession for hundreds of years already.

Philosophy can be safely ignored until you start making philosophical mistakes.

There's no such thing as philosophical mistake because there's no correct philosophy.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#200

Post by anon291 »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #198
NoGravitas wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experience…

Is there evidence that quantum mechanics is not deterministic?

Yes, the entirety of the math behind it which says that various quantities are unknowable except as a distribution of probabilities. Various experiments have shown these formulas to be 'real', as in, the alternative deterministic version is untenable unless you make new and equally disturbing assumptions.
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