Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you genuinely want the strongest statement of it, read The Emperor's New Mind followed by Shadows of the Mind, both by Roger Penrose. These books often get shallowly dismissed in terms that imply he made some elementary error in his reasoning, but that's not the case. The dispute is more about the assumptions on which his argument rests, which go beyond mathematical axioms and include statements about the nature o…
Gonna grab those, thanks for the recommendation. If you are interested in the opposite point of view, I can really recommend "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" by V. Braitenberg. Basically builds up to "consciousness as emergent property" in small steps.
You are the scariest monster in the woods
391–400 of 405 posts
Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods
#392I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence. Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals? I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line eith…
> I'm not buying the whole "AI has no agency" line either; this might be true for now, but this is already being circumvented with current LLMs (by giving them web access etc). They don't have agency, because they don't have persistent state. They're like a function that you can query and get an answer. During that answer the LLM has state, but once it's done the state is gone. Humans (and other "agents") have persis…
Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying to save up for better housing. I just can’t justify a data center in my budget.
pretty selfish to prioritize your housing situation over unlocking the AGI golden age
Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods
#394"Humans will do what they’ve always tried to do—gain power, enslave, kill, control, exploit, cheat, or just be lazy and avoid the hard work—but now with new abilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of." -- A pretty bleak, and also accurate, observation of humanity. I have to hope that the alternative sentence encompassing all of the good can lead to some balance.
I don't think it's that accurate. Evil people are rare - and lazy people usually don't cause problems. The most real damage comes from human stupidity - from the mass of people that just want to help and do something good. Stupid People blindly believe anything they're told. And they do a lot of really bad things not because they're evil and lazy, but because they want to help achieve even the most stupid goal. Usual…
Then tell them all the right things!
Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree what people probably actually want is continual training, I disagree continual training is the only way to get persistent state. The GP is (explicitly) talking about long term memory alone and in the examples. If you have an e.g. 10 trillion token context then you have long term memory, which can give the ability and enable long term goals and affect actions over tasks as listed, even without continual traini…
A giant, even infinite, context cannot overcome the fundamental limitations a model has - the limitations in processing come from the "shape" of the weights in latent space, not from the contextual navigation through latent space through inference using the context. The easiest way to understand the problem is like this: If a model has a mode collapse, like only displaying watch and clock faces with the hands display…
Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods
#396Sure it’s true, in the absolute sense, but it’s more helpful to specify AI than it is to specify humans.
Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dismissal is on point. The whole category of ideas of "Magic Fairy Dust is required for intelligence, and thus, a computer can never be intelligent" is extremely unsound. It should, by now, just get thrown out into the garbage bin, where it rightfully belongs.
In what way is it unsound? To be clear, any claim that we have mathematical proof that something beyond algorithms is required is unsound, because the argument is not mathematical. It rests on assumptions about human perception of mathematical truth that may or may not be correct. So if that's the point you're making I don't dispute it, although to say an internally consistent alternative viewpoint should be "thrown…
It needs too many unlikely convenient coincidences. The telltale sign of wishful thinking.
At the same time: we have a mounting pile of functions that were once considered "exclusive to human mind" and are now implemented in modern AIs. So the case for "human brain must be doing something Truly Magical" is growing weaker and weaker with each passing day.
Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scale qua scale does not transcend the limits of the activity occurring in the system. Meaning, each ant in an ant colony has a set of fixed powers to do X, Y, and Z. Adding more ants doesn't change what an individual ant is capable of per se . Now, you might say that while an individual ant exercising its power X cannot lift a tree branch, a colony of a thousand, with each ant exercising its power X, might. But this…
I think you misunderstand. I am not talking about physical ability. Ant colonies act as a complex system even though ants individually are incredibly simple. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_self-organization_...
Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you misunderstand. I am not talking about physical ability. Ant colonies act as a complex system even though ants individually are incredibly simple. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_of_self-organization_...
I don't misunderstand. And if your comment has any relevance to the discussion, you're using it as an analogy to suggest that something like syntax can somehow produce semantics, which is impossible - actually worse, it's incoherent. It's an intellectual muddle. Obviously simple entities can compose into complex aggregates and produce net effects that no individual could on its own, but it doesn't follow that they ca…
If consciousness can emerge from neurons and life can emerge from chemical reactions then saying that "it doesn't follow that they can generate things that were not in power of these individuals to generate" is what is incoherent and intellectually muddled.
Re: You are the scariest monster in the woods
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way is it unsound? To be clear, any claim that we have mathematical proof that something beyond algorithms is required is unsound, because the argument is not mathematical. It rests on assumptions about human perception of mathematical truth that may or may not be correct. So if that's the point you're making I don't dispute it, although to say an internally consistent alternative viewpoint should be "thrown…
It is unsound because: not only it demands an existence of a physical process that cannot be computed (so far, none found, and not for the lack of searching), but it also demands that such a physical process would conveniently be found to be involved in the functioning of a human brain, and also that it would be vital enough that you can't just replace it with something amenable to computation at a negligible loss of…
There's nothing wrong with seeing the evidence and reaching your own conclusions, but I see exactly the same evidence and reach very different ones, as we interpret and weight it very differently. On the "existence of a physical process that cannot be computed", I know enough of physics (I have a degree in it, and a couple of decades of continued learning since) to know how little we know. I don't find any argument that boils down to "it isn't among the things we've figured out therefore it doesn't exist" remotely persuasive. On the achievements of AI, I see no evidence of human-like mathematical reasoning in LLMs and don't expect to, IMO demos and excitable tweets notwithstanding. My goalpost there, and it has never moved and never will, is independent, valuable contributions to frontier research maths - and lots of them! I want the crank-the-handle-and-important-new-theorems-come-out machine that people have been trying to build since computers were invented. I expect a machine implementation of human-like mathematical thought to result in that, and I see no sign of it on the horizon. If it appears, I'll change my tune.
I acknowledge that others have different views on these issues and that however strongly I feel I have the right of it, I could still turn out to be wrong. I would enjoy some proper discussion of the relative merits of these positions, but it's not a promising start to talk about throwing things in the garbage right at the outset or, like the person earlier in this thread, call the opposing viewpoint "stupid".