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S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

timkellogg.me

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Re: S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

#401

Post by eru »

Ringz wrote: post #400
eru wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The compatibility of determinism and freedom of will is still controversially debated. There is a good chance that Humans don’t „create“. Determinism and free will are pretty irrelevant here. Unless P=NP, there's no way for us to distinguish in general between eg pseudo random systems and truly random systems from the outside. Btw, I don't think determinism in humans/AI has anything to do with deliberation. The new…

> Determinism and free will are pretty irrelevant here. No. It’s the other way around. Free will is the basic for „creating something new“. > Btw, I don't think determinism in humans/AI has anything to do with deliberation. With determinism there is no deliberation.

> With determinism there is no deliberation.

As far as we can tell, all the laws of the universe are completely deterministic. (And that includes quantum mechanics.) As far as we can tell, human beings obey the laws of physics.

(To explain: quantum mechanics as a theory is completely deterministic and even linear. Some outdated interpretations of quantum mechanics, like Copenhagen, use randomisation. But interpretations don't make a difference to what the underlying theory actually is. And more widely accepted interpretations like 'Many Worlds' preserve the determinism of the underlying theory.)

Btw, neural nets are typically sampled from, and you can use as good a random number generator (even a physical random number generator) as there is, if you want to. I don't think it'll change what we think neural nets are capable of.

Re: S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

#402

Post by vidarh »

advael wrote: post #399
vidarh wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is so bizarre to me . There is no evidence whatsoever to support that humans create "new, spontaneous thoughts" in any materially, qualitatively different way than an AI. In other words: As a Turing-computable function over the current state. It may be that current AI's can't, but the notion that there is some fundamental barrier is a hypothesis with no evidence to support it. > Even if you give GenAI u…

This argument, by now a common refrain from defenders of companies like OpenAI, misses the entire putative point of intellectual property, and the point of law in general. It is a distraction of a common sort - an attempt to reframe a moral and legal question into an abstract ontological one The question of whether the mechanism of learning in a human brain and that in an artificial neural network is similar is a phi…

I wasn't responding to a moral and legal question. I was responding to a comment arguing that humans are some magical special case in nature.

If you want to argue it's a distraction, argue that with the person I replied to, who was the person who changed the focus.

Re: S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

#403

Post by vidarh »

eru wrote: post #393
vidarh wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is so bizarre to me . There is no evidence whatsoever to support that humans create "new, spontaneous thoughts" in any materially, qualitatively different way than an AI. In other words: As a Turing-computable function over the current state. It may be that current AI's can't, but the notion that there is some fundamental barrier is a hypothesis with no evidence to support it. > Even if you give GenAI u…

> In other words: As a Turing-computable function over the current state. You need to be a bit more expansive. Turing-computable functions need to halt and return eventually. (And they need to be proven to halt.) > We know of no mechanism that could allow humans to exceed the Turing computability that AI models are limited to. Depends on which AI models you are talking about? When generating content, humans have acce…

> You need to be a bit more expansive. Turing-computable functions need to halt and return eventually. (And they need to be proven to halt.)

This is pedantry. Any non-halting function can be decomposed into a step function and a loop. What matters is that step function. But ignoring that, human existence halts, and so human thought processes can be treated as a singular function that halts.

> Depends on which AI models you are talking about? When generating content, humans have access to vastly more computational resources than current AI models. To give a really silly example: as a human I can swirl some water around in a bucket and be inspired by the sight. A current AI model does not have the computational resources to simulate the bucket of water (nor does it have a robotic arm and a camera to interact with the real thing instead.)

An AI model does not have computational resources. It's a bunch of numbers. The point is not the actual execution but theoretical computational power if unconstrained by execution environment.

The Church-Turing thesis also presupposes an unlimited amount of time and storage.

Re: S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

#404

Post by vidarh »

eru wrote: post #401
Ringz wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Determinism and free will are pretty irrelevant here. No. It’s the other way around. Free will is the basic for „creating something new“. > Btw, I don't think determinism in humans/AI has anything to do with deliberation. With determinism there is no deliberation.

> With determinism there is no deliberation. As far as we can tell, all the laws of the universe are completely deterministic. (And that includes quantum mechanics.) As far as we can tell, human beings obey the laws of physics. (To explain: quantum mechanics as a theory is completely deterministic and even linear. Some outdated interpretations of quantum mechanics, like Copenhagen, use randomisation. But interpretati…

That's exactly their point (and mine), with respect to the person above arguing humans unlike AI can create "new things". For that distinction to make sense "new things" must be interpreted as "something that can't be deterministically derived from the current world state", as they're trying to create a distinction between a purely deterministic algorithm and human consciousness.

Re: S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

#405

Post by t_mann »

dragonwriter wrote: post #388
t_mann wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, Lagrangian mechanics makes exactly the same predictions as Newtownian, and it starts from a foundation of just one principle (least action) instead of three laws, so it's arguably a sparser theory. It just makes calculations easier, especially for more complex systems, that's its raison d'être. So in a world where we don't know about relativity yet, both make the best predictions we know (and they alway…

Laws (in science, not government) are just a relationship that is consistently observed, so Newton's laws remain laws until contradictions were observed, regardless of the existence of or more alternative models which would predict them to hold. The kind of Occam’s Razor-ish rule you seem to be trying to query about is basically a rule of thumb for selecting among formulations of equal observed predictive power that…

Newtownian and Lagrangian mechanics are equivalent only in their predictions, not in their complexity - one requires three assumptions, the other just one. Now you say the fact that they have the same predictions makes them equivalent, and I agree. But it's clearly not compatible with what the other poster said about looking for the simplest possible way to explain a phenomenon. If you believe that that's how science should work, you'd need to discard theories as soon as simpler ones that make the same predictions are found (as in the case of Newtownian mechanics). It's a valid philosophical standpoint imho, but it's in opposition to how scientists generally approach Occam's razor, as evidenced eg by common physics curricula. That's what I was pointing out. Having to exclude Newtownian mechanics from what can be considered science is just one prominent consequence of the other poster's philosophical stance, one that could warrant reconsidering whether that's how you want to define it.

Re: S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

#406

Post by advael »

vidarh wrote: post #402
advael wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument, by now a common refrain from defenders of companies like OpenAI, misses the entire putative point of intellectual property, and the point of law in general. It is a distraction of a common sort - an attempt to reframe a moral and legal question into an abstract ontological one The question of whether the mechanism of learning in a human brain and that in an artificial neural network is similar is a phi…

I wasn't responding to a moral and legal question. I was responding to a comment arguing that humans are some magical special case in nature. If you want to argue it's a distraction, argue that with the person I replied to, who was the person who changed the focus.

Yea I'll give you that. But many people seem to have the argument you've made - which is dubious on its own terms, by the way, as we don't really have a complete picture of human learning and the assumption that it simply follows the mechanisms we understand from machine learning is not a null hypothesis that doesn't demand justification - loaded up for these conversations, and it needs to be addressed wherever possible that the ontological question is not what matters here

Re: S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

#408

Post by Cleonis »

t_mann wrote: post #384
timschmidt wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm just a filthy computationalist, but the way I see it, the most accurate model of the universe is the one which makes the most accurate predictions with the fewest parameters. The Newtonian model makes provably less accurate predictions than Einsteinian (yes, I'm using a different example), so while still useful in many contexts where accuracy is less important, the number of parameters it requires doesn't m…

The thing is, Lagrangian mechanics makes exactly the same predictions as Newtownian, and it starts from a foundation of just one principle (least action) instead of three laws, so it's arguably a sparser theory. It just makes calculations easier, especially for more complex systems, that's its raison d'être. So in a world where we don't know about relativity yet, both make the best predictions we know (and they alway…

I will argue that 'has least action as foundation' does not in itself imply that Lagrangian mechanics is a sparser theory:

Here is something that Newtonian mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics have in common: it is necessary to specify whether the context is Minkowski spacetime, or Galilean spacetime.

Before the introduction of relativistic physics the assumption that space is euclidean was granted by everybody. The transition from Newtonian mechanics to relativistic mechanics was a shift from one metric of spacetime to another.

In retrospect we can recognize Newton's first law as asserting a metric: an object in inertial motion will in equal intervals of time traverse equal distances of space.

We can choose to make the assertion of a metric of spacetime a very wide assertion: such as: position vectors, velocity vectors and acceleration vectors add according to the metric of the spacetime.

Then to formulate Newtonian mechanics these two principles are sufficient: The metric of the spacetime, and Newton's second law.

Hamilton's stationary action is the counterpart of Newton's second law. Just as in the case of Newtonian mechanics: in order to express a theory of motion you have to specify a metric; Galilean metric or Minkowski metric.

To formulate Lagrangian mechanics: choosing stationary action as foundation is in itself not sufficent; you have to specify a metric.

So: Lagrangian mechanics is not sparser; it is on par with Newtonian mechanics.

More generally: transformation between Newtonian mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics is bi-directional.

Shifting between Newtonian formulation and Lagrangian formulation is similar to shifting from cartesian coordinates to polar coordinates. Depending on the nature of the problem one formulation or the other may be more efficient, but it's the same physics.

Re: S1: A $6 R1 competitor?

#409

Post by t_mann »

Cleonis wrote: post #408
t_mann wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, Lagrangian mechanics makes exactly the same predictions as Newtownian, and it starts from a foundation of just one principle (least action) instead of three laws, so it's arguably a sparser theory. It just makes calculations easier, especially for more complex systems, that's its raison d'être. So in a world where we don't know about relativity yet, both make the best predictions we know (and they alway…

I will argue that 'has least action as foundation' does not in itself imply that Lagrangian mechanics is a sparser theory: Here is something that Newtonian mechanics and Lagrangian mechanics have in common: it is necessary to specify whether the context is Minkowski spacetime, or Galilean spacetime. Before the introduction of relativistic physics the assumption that space is euclidean was granted by everybody. The tr…

You seem to know more about this than me, but it seems to me that the first law does more than just induce a metric, I've always thought of it as positing inertia as an axiom.

There's also more than one way to think about complexity. Newtownian mechanics in practice requires introducing forces everywhere, especially for more complex systems, to the point that it can feel a bit ad hoc. Lagrangian mechanics very often requires fewer such introductions and often results in descriptions with fewer equations and fewer terms. If you can explain the same phenomenon with fewer 'entities', then it feels very much like Occam's razor would favor that explanation to me.

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