Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out • Hacker News Board

Re: Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out

#261

Post by lostmsu » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 6:54 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #179

lostmsu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be a very poor argument. How do you know what humans do is not what deep nets do now, but a bit more accurately?

The complexity and variety of biology vastly outstrips anything like DNN — the many types of cells, the chemical gradients, the types of connections, all the massive varieties of support glues like Myelin sheaths and their effects, the connectivity to nerves and our organs, our relationship and feedback loops with bacteria... it goes on and on. Just because DNNs are hot right now doesn’t mean much. If you follow mach…

In your previous argument you were comparing what nets did years ago vs now, claiming the only difference is accuracy. Obviously, you either were referring to the results (which now are clearly more accurate), not the methods, or you incorrectly assumed nothing have changed in the methods.

In the first case, your new argument does not make sense, because the complexity of implementation does not matter to the result, and there's a clear improvement to it.

In the second case, I can assure you lots changed. The recent major things being ReLUs, self-supervised learning and attention mechanisms.

Re: Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out

#262

Post by lostmsu » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 6:59 AM UTC

short_sells_poo wrote: post #158

lostmsu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be a very poor argument. How do you know what humans do is not what deep nets do now, but a bit more accurately?

We don't, which validates parents point that we are basically pre-kindergarten in terms of actual understanding.

I don't think we are pre-kindergarten. Mathematical theory of backprop is quite clear. Now we are simply scanning through the space of all functions we can efficiently encode and backpropagate through.

Re: Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out

#263

Post by slantaclaus » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 12:16 PM UTC

longsangstan wrote: post #33

mkagenius wrote: post #11

Talking about we being in simulation will go down in history as the "era of stupid thoughts"

Do you have any argument against this "stupid thought"?

Occams Razor

Re: Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out

#264

Post by thecupisblue » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 3:20 PM UTC

ozzmotik wrote: post #251

thecupisblue wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the scope you put on it. Large scale universe lifetime? determinism. Your thoughts? Not. Your actions? Combination of both, expression of all the influencing factors and what your model brings. That's why you can override your biological self (not walk to the fridge when you're hungry but stay in the chair reading a book). You might say "but oh this is also predetermined", but I say there a space…

it's nice to see that there is someone else who more or less understands my conception of determinism existing on a spectrum that can directly be mapped the the order of complexity that one is describing :)

it's also nice to see there's other hacker psychonauts who enjoy writing rhymes, making music and understand same things about reality :)

Re: Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out

#265

Post by azinman2 » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

lostmsu wrote: post #261

azinman2 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complexity and variety of biology vastly outstrips anything like DNN — the many types of cells, the chemical gradients, the types of connections, all the massive varieties of support glues like Myelin sheaths and their effects, the connectivity to nerves and our organs, our relationship and feedback loops with bacteria... it goes on and on. Just because DNNs are hot right now doesn’t mean much. If you follow mach…

In your previous argument you were comparing what nets did years ago vs now, claiming the only difference is accuracy. Obviously, you either were referring to the results (which now are clearly more accurate), not the methods, or you incorrectly assumed nothing have changed in the methods. In the first case, your new argument does not make sense, because the complexity of implementation does not matter to the result,…

I haven’t stated nothing has changed — obviously much has to get better results (and I wasn’t talking about just NN — the field is far bigger). But fundamentally the types of problems being solved — identifying and segmenting images, speech-to-text, etc, are the same. We haven’t gotten anywhere in terms of _understanding_ what’s in that speech that just got turned into text, for example. Sure models like BERT have more command of language than anything previously, but it cannot be used in an AGI sense to make sense of a passage at a fundamental level, or tell you _why_ something it “read” occurred.

Re: Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out

#266

Post by lostmsu » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #265

lostmsu wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your previous argument you were comparing what nets did years ago vs now, claiming the only difference is accuracy. Obviously, you either were referring to the results (which now are clearly more accurate), not the methods, or you incorrectly assumed nothing have changed in the methods. In the first case, your new argument does not make sense, because the complexity of implementation does not matter to the result,…

I haven’t stated nothing has changed — obviously much has to get better results (and I wasn’t talking about just NN — the field is far bigger). But fundamentally the types of problems being solved — identifying and segmenting images, speech-to-text, etc, are the same. We haven’t gotten anywhere in terms of _understanding_ what’s in that speech that just got turned into text, for example. Sure models like BERT have mo…

Here's the problem as I see it: you assume "understanding" and "why" are somehow fundamentally different from what BERT/GPT-2 does, but I see no arguments for that point of view.

Re: Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out

#267

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 10:01 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #265

lostmsu wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your previous argument you were comparing what nets did years ago vs now, claiming the only difference is accuracy. Obviously, you either were referring to the results (which now are clearly more accurate), not the methods, or you incorrectly assumed nothing have changed in the methods. In the first case, your new argument does not make sense, because the complexity of implementation does not matter to the result,…

I haven’t stated nothing has changed — obviously much has to get better results (and I wasn’t talking about just NN — the field is far bigger). But fundamentally the types of problems being solved — identifying and segmenting images, speech-to-text, etc, are the same. We haven’t gotten anywhere in terms of _understanding_ what’s in that speech that just got turned into text, for example. Sure models like BERT have mo…

> We haven’t gotten anywhere in terms of _understanding_ what’s in that speech that just got turned into text, for example

What test is there to quantify understanding that has been used to determine that it hasn't gotten better?

It seems to me that a lot of the things that are posed as hard things for AI to do are poorly defined phenomenon which we have no empirical test for that we simply infer to be explanations for observed behavior of humans that critics assert that AI can't do without evidence or even a definition upon which a search for evidence could be based.