21–30 of 32 posts
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier Clickable link
> Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)
The irony of posting this on HN isn't lost on me (though hopefully HN avoids many of Lanier's criticisms.)
I suspect my own comments on this site will probably age just as goatily. There was something that happened in the late 80s and 90s where difficult philosophy and just riffing on the logic of an idea got conflated. My 90's alternative high school english class taught by a cultural studies PhD assigned us BBS t-files and we got a lot of stuff like this. It was like philosophy, but without rigor or competence, and when…
There was a strong sense that AI was around the corner. Marvin Minsky gave our commencement address and expressed anger at us that we hadn't solved the problem of copying his consciousness onto a computer yet, and expressed the urgency that this problem be solved before he died (it was 2016 when he died, and we failed).
Goatishness was in the air, but it smelled like techno-optimism. Remember also that this was a brief, bright period between the fall of the Berlin wall but before 9/11 and well before climate change seemed all that serious, so we felt free to speak like this because it helped us convince ourselves and each other we were tackling big challenges so fearlessly we couldn't help but speak gibberish.
Sometimes I wonder if the core problem of this disagreement depends on the certainty of our understanding of information - how it works and scales. This isn’t a strong rebuttal to this paper, though I read it closely, enjoy both sides of the mind-body problem, and do my best to seek some sort of external truth in the matter… But I’m inclined to disagree with Jaron on the following point: What if the contents of the m…
Speaking of, I'll take you up on the offer for a drink.
I tend to think something like a combination of the 3rd substance and panpsychism model accounts for our experience in context of discoveries that make descartes pineal gland theory seem dubious.
Of course, any real-life attempts to use a box of gas to do such computations will fail. What's missing is the enormously complicated mapping between the starting and ending states of the gas, and the inputs and outputs of the factoring problem. This mapping is not just a matter of mapping bits in a local way into positions of gas atoms, but requires incredibly non-local dependencies between components. Interpreting the position of just a single atom in the gas requires knowing what pretty much all the other atoms in the gas are doing as well. If you had to actually compute that mapping, it would be about as difficult as both both simulating the gas's dynamics, and factoring the number.
At this point, a reasonable person would probably start to suspect that the actual factoring calculation is being shoved into the interpretation of the inputs/outputs of the system, and that the box of gas itself is not doing any calculations at all. Indeed, suppose that rather than letting the gas sit for a time t equalling perhaps a few seconds in order to do its computation, we instead let t=0. In this case, that atoms don't move at all during the "computation", but by clever mapping of inputs and outputs, we can still interpret this as "factorizing the number". Clearly the actual computation is happening in the "mappings" not in the gas.
I replaced all the footnotes with markdown notation footnotes (sadly github gist doesn't understand them), but I can't figure out the heading layout.
Waste of time like most philosophy.
This seems to imply that every rock (complex body of information) contains infinite consciousnesses, variable by interpretation.
This seems to imply that the interpretation of data is the key element of computation, but that view is confounded by a scenario where a huge flip book contains all of the possible screen presentations of a simulation, and the following page is determined by the choices of the observer. In this case, the computation and the data is arguably both contained within the data, with the act of representation carried out by the act of observation.
This suggests that the act of observation is in fact the critical second component, data and observation with computation being an integral part of one, or the other, rather than a distinct entity at all.
This indeed suggests that computation is not real- ultimately there is only data and observation.
Where that leads us is squarely into the quantum realm, with “wave collapse” due to measurement of information. I’m not sure where we go from there but I thought that was an interesting intersection.
If a box of gas (or a bar of iron, or a meteor shower) is capable to doing arbitrary computations, then go ahead and use a box of gas to factor some big numbers. The gas has 10^23 atoms that are all colliding with other atoms extremely often, so the amount of computing power available should be vastly greater than our current capabilities and it should be possible to factor correspondingly larger numbers. Of course,…
I suspect my own comments on this site will probably age just as goatily. There was something that happened in the late 80s and 90s where difficult philosophy and just riffing on the logic of an idea got conflated. My 90's alternative high school english class taught by a cultural studies PhD assigned us BBS t-files and we got a lot of stuff like this. It was like philosophy, but without rigor or competence, and when…
I don't think there's any less rigour or competence here than in "respectable" philosophy; quite the opposite. There is no excess of metaphor, just an exploration of a technical subject in the terminology that it requires. It's using plenty of jargon and references, sure, but programmers are in no position to throw stones about such things; the jargon is meaningful and clearly defined (indeed, defined clearly at the…
Few people are really dumb, but when we're designing, writing and teaching, it's important to keep track of what logical level of abstraction we are speaking at. My reading was that Lanier in this piece seemed to take a joke reference and a codeword (zombie/zagnet) and treat them both as black boxes, where there was no logical coherence in what the relationship or effect of one was on the other, and it just produced a wandering narrative.
Twenty years later, we have fed data into a machine learning algorithm that does indeed, spit out scientific theories to explain the data. Maybe not "best possible", but perhaps even more interestingly, solutions the almighty human mind hasn't already thought of.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-generates-hypo...
Loved the essay, very fun read.