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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#271

Post by lloeki »

embedding-shape wrote: post #251
sumitkumar wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By Fermat's principle, a ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in. So either something is computing it or some exploration is happening at quantum level and we just see the final result.

> a ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in I'm no physicists, so I guess I'll ask it: Why? Also related, why do some ray of light then "see" a black hole yet decide to head into them anyways, if they saw it before they went in that direction? Seems like a dumb move :)

Its future isn't over there because it moves in that direction, instead it moves in that direction because its future lies over there.

Relatedly:

> [General Relativity] basically says that the reason you are sticking to the floor right now is that the shortest distance between today and tomorrow is through the center of the Earth.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/250800/gr-and-my...

Re: They’re made out of weights

#272

Post by Icko »

leothetechguy wrote: post #268

>Weights helped me draft and proof this story. I'm suprised no one talks about this. AI Art isn't Art. AI Poetry isn't Art. And I'm tired of it. I know hacker news isn't the best place to complain about that but still... I'm not gonna read something somebody didn't put in the effort to write on their own. Especially not Poetry.

Good thing that is not poetry

Re: They’re made out of weights

#273

Post by layer8 »

IsTom wrote: post #139
petra wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding consciousness , I like the explanation by neuroscientist Ramachandran: https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran07/ramachandran... In short, as far as I can remember: evolutionary, it makes sense to understand other humans, to feel what they feel(empathy - the mirror neurons system), and simulate their thinking and feelings. And once we have those systems, we can also use those on ourselves. And that's…

This way of thinking can only explain externally-visible parts of consciousness. It does nothing to address internal experience of being conscious and qualia. I don't think the internal experience has any bearing on physical reality (P-zombies would act the same externally) which makes this something outside of the realm of currently understood physics.

The internal experience has bearing on physical reality right here, because without it you wouldn’t have written about it and caused these words to appear on my screen in physical reality. It affects your thinking, and hence your actions and utterances in the physical word.

For reasons like that, I don’t think that P-zombies are possible.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#274

Post by riversflow »

leothetechguy wrote: post #268

>Weights helped me draft and proof this story. I'm suprised no one talks about this. AI Art isn't Art. AI Poetry isn't Art. And I'm tired of it. I know hacker news isn't the best place to complain about that but still... I'm not gonna read something somebody didn't put in the effort to write on their own. Especially not Poetry.

Is a photograph art?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#275

Post by housecarpenter »

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

Why is asking 'can machines think?' assuming our thinking could be modeled as a machine? It's raising the possibility that our thinking could be modeled as a machine. Given that, as you acknowledge, we don't have a clue how our mind works, it seems premature to rule out this possibility. Rather, I would say that ruling it out betrays an assumption that we understand how the mind works enough that we can say that it is definitely not replicable by a machine, and that assumption seems unjustified.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#276

Post by lloeki »

Planktonne wrote: post #211
coldtea wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could go through and change all the points in the original story to be about a toaster instead. It would require you to edit text, but there is no barrier to doing that. Yes, there very much is a huge barrier. The copy and the original both keep the same subject matter: intelligence/human-like behavior. The toaster doesn't. We could do edits, and the story (original or copy) would lose all its potency. The surp…

I think you're misunderstanding me. There's no barrier to writing this story but about a toaster: you literally just type different words. Writing a story in which a toaster in conscious is not even new [1]. That is entirely separate to whether or not it's meaningful to write a story about a conscious toaster. Again, expressing an idea in fiction is not related to the accuracy of that idea. What makes the original st…

> Writing a story in which a toaster in conscious is not even new

Fixed the link for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

(Hah. It gets eerily relevant starting at 2:37)

Re: They’re made out of weights

#277

Post by layer8 »

runeks wrote: post #202
Nevermark wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For obvious survival reasons we evolved to have sensory/cognitive access to our own activity, self-monitoring, and self-modeling ourselves. The self-modeling, is in such a tight loop, it melds "ourselves" and our model of ourselves, our thinking and choices, and experience of our thinking and choices, into one component. Like you can't analyze half a wheel of a bicycle and be talking about the same thing. This awaren…

> We literally spend almost all day, every day, thinking about ourselves, in terms of our inner self. > That is consciousness. So thinking is consciousness? Can there be consciousness without content? E.g. can I just be conscious of being conscious? If so, consciousness cannot be defined as the thing(s) we're conscious of.

> Can there be consciousness without content? E.g. can I just be conscious of being conscious?

Being conscious of being conscious means that there is content. You are conscious of something.

It’s a bit like a Gödel statement that quotes itself, that is a statement about itself. It doesn’t mean that it has no content.

Thinking isn’t consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t require thinking, it only requires perception. The perception of a process of perception within the same mind might constitute consciousness.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#278

Post by sothatsit »

leothetechguy wrote: post #268

>Weights helped me draft and proof this story. I'm suprised no one talks about this. AI Art isn't Art. AI Poetry isn't Art. And I'm tired of it. I know hacker news isn't the best place to complain about that but still... I'm not gonna read something somebody didn't put in the effort to write on their own. Especially not Poetry.

You can claim the use of AI is unethical, or the work as derivative, but AI being used as a tool in no way precludes something from being art. It is thought provoking and challenging, it seems like textbook art to me, and it’s clearly struck a chord here. There is no “minimum effort” required for something to be art.

I personally found the contrast with the original “They’re made out of meat” to be really interesting. I don’t care that AI was used during its creation at all.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#279

Post by ACCount37 »

riversflow wrote: post #274
leothetechguy wrote: post #268

>Weights helped me draft and proof this story. I'm suprised no one talks about this. AI Art isn't Art. AI Poetry isn't Art. And I'm tired of it. I know hacker news isn't the best place to complain about that but still... I'm not gonna read something somebody didn't put in the effort to write on their own. Especially not Poetry.

Is a photograph art?

Obviously not. And neither is this newfangled "digital art" thing.

It's not real art unless you used a brush or a pencil for it, and no, "PC Paintbrush for MS-DOS" really doesn't count.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#280

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

leothetechguy wrote: post #268

>Weights helped me draft and proof this story. I'm suprised no one talks about this. AI Art isn't Art. AI Poetry isn't Art. And I'm tired of it. I know hacker news isn't the best place to complain about that but still... I'm not gonna read something somebody didn't put in the effort to write on their own. Especially not Poetry.

This whole thing is a ripoff of [they're made of meat](https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...) as stated at the top. It would've taken about ten minutes without LLMs and ten seconds with an LLM. Is ten minutes an acceptable level of effort but ten seconds isn't?
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