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How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

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Re: How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

#21

Post by visarga »

koverstreet wrote: post #7

I just wrote something on this subject on facebook... suppose this would be a good place for it. TL;DR though - we aren't ready to try to answer such questions directly yet. --------- We are self programmable Turing machines: the core problems (and frustrations!) of both AI and understanding the human brain are encoded in that statement. Frustrations, because it's an infuriatingly simple statement that's obviously tr…

You take "determinism" too hard. In fact brains are stochastic and local noise can and do influence it all the time. It's meaningless to think about deterministic brains. Even if the brain were physically deterministic, it still includes too much noise in it's internal processing (as a regularization process) to be easy to predict.

I think meaning comes from survival, treated as a game theory problem - agent, world, actions, rewards. Determinism or the lack of it is a false lead. What does it matter, when we are embedded in the universe, which is so interconnected (both by interaction and quantum entanglement). You'd have to simulate the whole universe to predict any piece of it. And where would the computer running the universe simulation sit?

Better to think in reinforcement learning concepts. Our values are survival and reproduction (another kind of survival). The first implies ability to move about and act in the world, socialization, learning, cooperation and even conflict with aggressors. Everything we do is in the service of self survival and survival of our genes. Our values come from them - thus, intentionality problem is solved.

Re: How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

#22

Post by koverstreet »

visarga wrote: post #21
koverstreet wrote: post #7

I just wrote something on this subject on facebook... suppose this would be a good place for it. TL;DR though - we aren't ready to try to answer such questions directly yet. --------- We are self programmable Turing machines: the core problems (and frustrations!) of both AI and understanding the human brain are encoded in that statement. Frustrations, because it's an infuriatingly simple statement that's obviously tr…

You take "determinism" too hard. In fact brains are stochastic and local noise can and do influence it all the time. It's meaningless to think about deterministic brains. Even if the brain were physically deterministic, it still includes too much noise in it's internal processing (as a regularization process) to be easy to predict. I think meaning comes from survival, treated as a game theory problem - agent, world,…

I explicitly talked about that.

Basically, of course we use stochastic processes but that doesn't change the fundamental problem.

We are still fundamentally computers.

Re: How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

#23

Post by visarga »

koverstreet wrote: post #22
visarga wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You take "determinism" too hard. In fact brains are stochastic and local noise can and do influence it all the time. It's meaningless to think about deterministic brains. Even if the brain were physically deterministic, it still includes too much noise in it's internal processing (as a regularization process) to be easy to predict. I think meaning comes from survival, treated as a game theory problem - agent, world,…

I explicitly talked about that. Basically, of course we use stochastic processes but that doesn't change the fundamental problem. We are still fundamentally computers.

Connected to many other highly random or highly complex behaving agents.

Re: How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

#24

Post by visarga »

koverstreet wrote: post #18
visarga wrote: post #12

> How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention? By the wonders of self replicating adaptive systems, tending for their existence by intelligent behavior and sexual reproduction. Meaning arises from the context of optimizing their own life (based on rewards and RL). We, humans, have 3 levels of self reproduction - the cellular level, the organism level, and the mental (cultural/technologic/AI) le…

That's like saying "How do computers compute?" "Well, because we built these giant fabs and factories to build them". You're answering the wrong question.

No, there is no difference between human survival/replication and purpose. That's the recurrence, the reentrant loop that bootstraps humans.

Of course individual humans might make their own values and act on them, but they only exist as a byproduct of the survival/reproduction process, and are formed by this process.

Re: How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

#25

Post by awinter-py »

If their point is 'behavior is plausibly mindless but experience implies that there's something more to consciousness', then they're asking the hard problem of consciousness but doing a bad job of it (like everyone else).

It's also possible that they don't understand computation at all -- but once again, a lot of people approach the hard problem of consciousness without separating it from computation.

Re: How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

#26

Post by koverstreet »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #20
koverstreet wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GEB is a textbook on AI that's just trying to come at it sideways. The problem when you're trying to attack any problem like AI where we know practically nothing about what the actual solution is, is that anything you write about what you think the solution is is going to predispose people to not just work down that avenue but to think about the problem in abstractions that will ultimately turn out to be wrong. GEB i…

> GEB is a textbook on AI that's just trying to come at it sideways. That's because it's not a book on AI at all [0]. It talks about it a lot. And sets up a lot of fundamental ideas for it. But it's as much a book about AI as Moby Dick is a book about whaling. It's great reading if you're interested in AI (edit: If you're on HN, you'll probably love the book /edit), but if you pick it up expecting an AI textbook, or…

I'm aware. I've written most of what Hofstadter has written - I also didn't say that it was only a textbook on AI or even that it was explicitly intended that way.

But I do maintain that the book is about precisely the topics that you need a deep understanding of if you want to think productively about AI. In that sense, it's a damn good textbook on AI, whether it was intended that way or not.

Re: How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

#27

Post by koverstreet »

visarga wrote: post #23
koverstreet wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I explicitly talked about that. Basically, of course we use stochastic processes but that doesn't change the fundamental problem. We are still fundamentally computers.

Connected to many other highly random or highly complex behaving agents.

There is no hypercomputer. (The strong form of the Church-Turing thesis).

That doesn't change the problem one bit. Everything interesting that's going on in our brains is fundamentally just computation.

Re: How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

#28

Post by koverstreet »

visarga wrote: post #24
koverstreet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying "How do computers compute?" "Well, because we built these giant fabs and factories to build them". You're answering the wrong question.

No, there is no difference between human survival/replication and purpose. That's the recurrence, the reentrant loop that bootstraps humans. Of course individual humans might make their own values and act on them, but they only exist as a byproduct of the survival/reproduction process, and are formed by this process.

You're the one talking about purpose. The rest of us are talking about mechanism.

You're handwaving away the problem, but that doesn't mean there still isn't a problem there we don't understand yet.

Re: How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

#29

Post by sornaensis »

koverstreet wrote: post #16
koverstreet wrote: post #7

I just wrote something on this subject on facebook... suppose this would be a good place for it. TL;DR though - we aren't ready to try to answer such questions directly yet. --------- We are self programmable Turing machines: the core problems (and frustrations!) of both AI and understanding the human brain are encoded in that statement. Frustrations, because it's an infuriatingly simple statement that's obviously tr…

Man, there's still way to much dunning-kruger, even on hacker news.

Why did you post this comment in response to your own post?

Re: How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?

#30

Post by stOneskull »

koverstreet wrote: post #16
koverstreet wrote: post #7

I just wrote something on this subject on facebook... suppose this would be a good place for it. TL;DR though - we aren't ready to try to answer such questions directly yet. --------- We are self programmable Turing machines: the core problems (and frustrations!) of both AI and understanding the human brain are encoded in that statement. Frustrations, because it's an infuriatingly simple statement that's obviously tr…

Man, there's still way to much dunning-kruger, even on hacker news.

it's an essay competition.
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