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Life is more than an engineering problem

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Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#201

Post by bell-cot »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #148
abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

In theory you can prove a theorem just by enumerating all the possible proofs until you find the one for the theorem you want. This is extremely slow, but do you think there's any reasoning in doing this? Of course we don't know whether an LLM is doing something like this or actually reasoning. But this is also the point, we don't know. If you ask a question to a person you can be confident to some degree that they d…

> In theory you can prove a theorem just by enumerating all the possible proofs until ...

An interesting hypothesis! I'm neither a mathematical logician, nor decently up to date in that field - is the possibility of this, at least in the abstract, currently accepted as fact?

(Yes, there's the perhaps-separate issue of only enumerating correct proofs.)

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#202

Post by hnisoss »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #150
weego wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

> No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. This is not a good argument. Natural systems, the subject of neuroscience/psychology, are much harder to analyze than artificial systems. For example, it's really difficult to study atmospheric gases and figure out Boyle's/Charles law. But put a gas in a close…

Yea but following your example/analogy you have gas-gas but brain-llm. So how can we then experiment? It's a simulation at best.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#203

Post by aaarrm »

acchow wrote: post #171
weego wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

The assumption is that since there is already a neural network that “got there” (our brains), we should be able to achieve the same thing synthetically. We just need to figure out how to train that network.

Neural networks are a simplification of our brains, they are not a replication of it. It is just a modeling method that was inspired by how human neurons work, that's it. It's not 1 to 1 or anything.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#204

Post by teleforce »

bee_rider wrote: post #64
mantas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think so. That brings such bastardized result as English spelling. And there are many different ways and purposes to be best at. For example modern English is compact language with simple grammar. But at the same time it’s rather ambiguous compared to more verbose languages.

The idea of a perfect language seems somewhat ill defined in the first place. The definition used in the original comment seems to be more-or-less “most divinely inspired,” which is… not really something they can be argued about usefully. If we’re going to discuss the idea of a perfect language, there will be a strong tendency for people to pick the language they can best use to express their thoughts—most likely the…

> The idea of a perfect language seems somewhat ill defined in the first place

I'm not a linguistic expert but let's say that a person know ten languages then accoding to that person it must be one of them is the best comparatively, because each of them has exactly same purpose of expressing and articulating the speakers thought and ideas. Whether the person admit it honestly, that's a different story.

I'd suggest you go to any random person that speaks several languages including Arabic, and ask the person which one is the best according to his opinion. Do this over large samples perhaps several thousands multi-lingual persons to get rid of the bias, I think the answers will most probably Arabic.

Fun facts, original Gospel is being spoken in Aramaic, and the language is much closer to Arabic than Hebrew [1]. Another fact, scholars agreed the original name of Jesus is without J, most probably Isa or Iso, and in the Quran the Isa is the name correctly given in the Quran. If Jesus is walking in the street of Bethlehem today, he probably will not has responded if someone call him with his Bible name.

The Old Testament of Bible, is considered by most scholars was originally spoken and written in Hebrew but the language was dead for several centuries, that's why eventhough Jesus is Jewish they didn't speak Hebrew at the time. Hebrew is a close cousin of Arabic, and both are Semitic languages. Based on the experts of Hebrew and Arabic (in which I'm not), the Hebrew language is like a dialect of Arabic. Both has Allah, the name of almighty God as singular deity without gender. There's no such thing in Arabic or Hebrew the plural for Allah, gender or extension thereof like you have in God, with plural God, or woman Goddes. That's why in Islam and Jewish, you have committed the biggest sin if ascribing any partners in worship to God.

[1] Aramaic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#205

Post by bonoboTP »

dutchbookmaker wrote: post #92
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even most intelligent people can hallucinate, we still haven't fixed this problem. There's a lot of training material and bias which leads many to repeat those things "LLM's are just a stochastic parrot, glorified auto complete/google search, Markov chains, just statistics", etc. The thing is, these sentences sound really good and so it's easy to repeat them when you have made up your mind. It's a shortcut.

I feel like at this point we have to separate LLMs and reasoning models too. I can see the argument against chatGPT4 reasoning. The reasoning models though I think get into some confusing language but I don't know what else you would call it. If you say a car is not "running" the way a human runs, you are not incorrect even though a car can "outrun" any human obviously in terms of moving speed on the ground. To say s…

This was precisely what motivated Turing to come up with the test named after him, to avoid such semantic debates. Yet here we are still in the same loop.

"The terminator isn't really hunting you down, it's just imitating doing so..."

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#206

Post by BrenBarn »

x-complexity wrote: post #200
BrenBarn wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's wrong with people getting rich by producing goods and services, and selling these to willing buyers? If you take this sentence and change "people getting rich" to something else (like "fomenting drug addiction" or "polluting the environment"), does anything change? Whether the inequality is a result of "selling goods to willing buyers" is a complete red herring. If that consequence is bad, it doesn't really…

> If you take this sentence and change "people getting rich" to something else (like "fomenting drug addiction" or "polluting the environment"), does anything change? False equivalency. It is possible to gain wealth without performing any of the listed/possible negative global effects. Furthermore, it is a backdoor towards injecting ideas of poverty being a morally positive position. > Even if markets were free, ther…

> Having a free society implies the freedom to exchange with each other with minimal restrictions.

I don't think that it implies "with minimal restrictions", any more than it implies the freedom to do anything else with minimal restrictions. In any case, a free society also implies a lot of other freedoms, and insofar as wealth accumulation interferes with those other freedoms, it's not adding to net freedom. An abstract "freedom from market restriction" is not useful if you don't have things like the freedom to eat or the freedom to sleep peacefully.

> Not allowing people to do so runs opposite to the ideals of the stated intention.

Not necessarily. Not allowing anyone to engage in market activity probably does; allowing everyone to engage without restrictions also does. The point is that markets don't have some magical special status as a component of freedom.

> But the outright banning of markets is equivalent to the banning of hammers, just because hammers are sometimes used to bludgeon people to death.

I'm not suggesting banning markets, I'm just saying that the mirror image of your position is also true: elevating markets to some mythical status and insisting that they are the ultimate litmus test of freedom is like saying that because hammers can be used to build houses, everyone must be allowed to use hammers however they please. Markets (just like everything else) are okay when controlled and regulated within their bounded role as a component of society.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#207

Post by martin-t »

dexwiz wrote: post #159
inglor_cz wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so I asked ChatGPT how to plant potatoes on Mars... ================================================= Planting potatoes on Mars would be a pretty fascinating (and challenging) task! While Mars has conditions that make growing traditional crops difficult—like low temperatures, low atmospheric pressure, and a lack of oxygen—scientists have been experimenting with ways to grow plants in Martian-like conditions. Here…

What is this supposed to prove? The question isn’t particular novel. There are decades of speculative terraforming discussions on the internet that you can search via Google, especially after the Martian book and movie.

I get replies like this all the time and I am starting to conclude that most of the people arguing that LLMs are intelligent/reasoning are either completely clueless about what those words mean or are arguing in bad faith.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#208

Post by martin-t »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #127
analog31 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody needs to be rich enough to own a 747, in order to justify making one. In fact, I doubt there are more than a dozen individually owned jetliners in the world. All you need is for a lot of people to pool their wealth and allow it to be directed towards a common purpose. In turn, this happens because society provides entitlements (such as financial and corporate regulations, the money system, etc.) that allow gre…

>Nobody needs to be rich enough to own a 747, in order to justify making one My argument is not about the justification to making or owning a 747. It's the justification for how is it realistically possible for ONE person to own enough wealth to buy a 747 EVEN when his own intrinsic abilities are not great enough to build a 747. This is orthogonal to society pooling together wealth and building a 747 AND orthogonal t…

Yesterday I had a very similar argument. Maybe I haven't been paying attention until now but this is the first time I see somebody else summarize it so clearly.

I've come to the conclusion that value (you call it wealth) is created by work. Yet the fastest way to get rich is to own already created value (a fixed amount) and use that to buy power/influence (e.g. buy a company) to take a cut from value created by other people over time (an unbounded amount).

IMO this one-time vs indefinite distinction is the core of inequality.

Currently, reward is based on capital invested, it should be based on work invested.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#209

Post by willy_k »

aaarrm wrote: post #203
acchow wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption is that since there is already a neural network that “got there” (our brains), we should be able to achieve the same thing synthetically. We just need to figure out how to train that network.

Neural networks are a simplification of our brains, they are not a replication of it. It is just a modeling method that was inspired by how human neurons work, that's it. It's not 1 to 1 or anything.

Furthermore, neurons alone do not led to consciousness. At the very least, their modulation, mainly by glial cells, is essential as well.

Personally, my money is on quantum coherence within microtubules being the mechanism of conscious experience, with the brain essentially being a quantum/classical hybrid computer.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#210

Post by munksbeer »

daveguy wrote: post #182
munksbeer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chiang has it exactly right with his doubts, and the notion that pattern recognition is little different from the deeply complex navigation of reality we living things do is the badly misguided notion. How do you know this?

The same way that we know interpolation of a linear regression is not the same as the deeply complex navigation of reality we do as living things.

I wasn't trying to be flippant but challenge the excessive confidence people have on this topic.
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