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MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

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Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#51

Post by eli_gottlieb »

ScottBurson wrote: post #3

I still remember a story I heard Gerry Sussman tell about Marvin, from when Gerry was a grad student. Gerry was programming a neural net (or something like it; I forget exactly what) and told Marvin he was planning to use a random number generator to initialize the weights in the network "so it won't have any biases". Marvin replied, in his careful, laconic way, "Of course it will have biases. You just won't know wha…

You know, I just now finally understood what was going on there: a randomized map matches no territory. Enlightenment achieved.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#52

Post by slacka »

anateus wrote: post #21
yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: My thermostat has three possible beliefs: 1) It is too warm in here. 2) It is too cold in here. 3) It is just about right. Minsky is wrong about AI in the same way that McCarthy was wrong. McCarthy really "believed" that his thermostat had three possible beliefs, and that his thermostat really "believed" one of them at any given time. http://Books.Google.com/books?id=yNJN-_jznw4C&pg=PA30&lpg=PA... Searle debu…

I applaud your clever replacement of the now trite "paradigm shift" with "Kuhnian". I haven't read the latest from Nagel so can't speak to that, but Searle's arguments work against only the most simplistic approaches to symbolic AI (which is no longer a very common framework) and his continued willful misunderstanding of how people in the field tend to think about cognition betray a lot of essentialism on the topic.…

> but no one cares that "Watson doesn't know it won".

I care, especially that Watson doesn't know when it lost or learn from its mistakes, because it doesn't actually understand anything. Watson's fragile intelligence relies on the programmers tweaking its algorithms for every particular subject. It's a glorified search engine, as opposed to a true advance in general AI.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#53

Post by vidarh »

yc-kjh wrote: post #48
vidarh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You apparently don't understand how computers work. You appears to like to jump to conclusions. > There is no "meaning" associated with any variable or its value, and there cannot be. Please give me a definition of "meaning" that can be applied to a human brain and not to a computer. And what is the evidence that it can not be applied to a computer? You are also jumping to the conclusion that, if as you claim, the…

> Please give me a definition of "meaning" that can be applied to a human brain and not to a computer. You associate a meaning to the symbol "dog". You think of an animal that barks, wags its tail, chases cats and squirrels, and is happy to see you when you get home. You associate something in the real world what that symbol. (That is the very meaning of doing semantics.) The computer does nothing of the sort with th…

Please provide a definition of "associate a meaning to the symbol" that can be applied to a human brain and not a computer.

The plain reading of what you've written above is so trivially simple to implement in a computer that it is covered in every introductory algorithm course, so I presume you have either given a definition of "meaning" that is overly simplistic, or have a definition of "associate a meaning" that is substantially more complicated than a plain reading of the words.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#54

Post by vidarh »

yc-kjh wrote: post #45
vidarh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since electromagnetism cannot cause intentions, or goals, and since the human obviously has both intentions and goals (teleology) You're begging the question here. If the world is materialistic, then physical processes can cause intentions, hence this claim is false if your conclusion is false.

No, I'm not begging the question. In another response, I readily admit that if materialism is true, then AI is a foregone conclusion. Please prove that mere electromagnetism can cause intentions, goals, and teleology. Limit yourself to Maxwell's equations, and the consequences thereof. I look forward to your response, but I am not hopeful that you will provide a cogent answer.

> In another response, I readily admit that if materialism is true, then AI is a foregone conclusion.

Of course, that is a meaningless admission when you repeatedly claim that it is proven that materialism is false elsewhere.

I do not need to prove anything. I've already explained why your claims are unproven and why your arguments does not support your conclusions unless your stated conclusions are already true.

I am not the one repeatedly making strong assertion of fact about controversial claims. The only thing I've made strong claims about is the logical validity of some of your arguments.

You might note that I've carefully tried to avoid making strong assertions at all in this matter. While I default to the materialistic hypothesis, I do so in the absence of evidence of anything else. Because of this default assumption, I by extension assume that human level intelligent AIs - and above - will eventually happen.

Those assumptions are as far as I'll go with respect to making claims about it, and there's nothing there that demands a proof, since I've not claimed they're proven, unless - given the context of this discussion - you want me to prove I actually hold those assumptions, rather than being some automaton that is somehow only capable of syntax.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#55

Post by mikhael »

yc-kjh wrote: post #44
mikhael wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if i understand you correctly, you seem to believe that qualia definitely affects physical reality. we don't know whether that's true or whether qualia is just a byproduct of physical reality, and given the probabilistic nature of what we can observe physically, we may never know.

I think that "qualia" is the wrong question. Please see my other comments on this story.

i do not believe in materialsm, but i do believe that intention and goals are emergent phenomena. nevertheless, i think that's mostly a separate issue.

it is a false equivalency to say that materialism is false and that it is impossible to build strong AI. if the material world alone can be described by laws of causality, then we should expect to be able to simulate some significant part of it. if it cannot, and if extra-material forces impact the material world, then we may have no hope. but existence of extra-material stuff (which i call "qualia") may or may not assert a force that affects the material world.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#56

Post by iamevil »

yc-kjh wrote: post #38
vidarh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The computer is still doing only syntax, even while appearing to do semantics. Why do you assume people are not doing the same? > But humans really do semantics. Nobody questions this, or challenges it, because it is self-evident. It is no more self evident than your claim that computers don't do semantics. Your argumentation is circular: IF computers can't do semantics, and IF humans do, then clearly the humans an…

You apparently don't understand how computers work. There is no "meaning" associated with any variable or its value, and there cannot be.

What is this thing we call "meaning"? Can it be a point in a vast and complex "pattern space" and the meaning of that point is the structure of all the "paths" that map that point to other points in this same pattern space?

Our act of arbitrary categorization of patterns into "syntax" and "semantics" just seems to obscure that fact that they are just two arbitrary encodings of patterns.

How can we know that one pattern is equal to another pattern in a different encoding? Don't we agree on these mappings with other pattern spaces (read humans)? As we communicate, so do our pattern spaces start interacting, and all we can hope for is a convergence on the mappings sans encoding.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#57

Post by eli_gottlieb »

yc-kjh wrote: post #25
gphilip wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But for any task which requires semantics -- real human intelligence -- it is foolish to attempt to replace humans. It cannot be done. Well we don't know this for sure, do we? "It's an open empirical question whether there are actual deterministic physical processes that, in the long run, elude simulation by a Turing machine; furthermore, ... it is an open empirical question whether any such processes are involved…

If you accept materialism as true, then by the Church-Turing hypothesis it is a necessary and foregone conclusion that computers will achieve full human intelligence, and even more, because they do not get tired and are not distracted. But the hypothesis of materialism is what is in question here, both by my citation of the difference between syntax and semantics, and the obvious (to anybody who understands what a co…

If humans and other animals have some nonmaterialist magic sauce in us that enables us to actually think when nothing else in the universe can do that, then a few questions follow quickly from there:

1) Why have we never observed the magic sauce directly in an experiment?

2) Why does the magic sauce only ever explain the otherwise-not-yet-explained instead of making novel predictions? How can the magic sauce fit in with the "AI Effect", in which AI detractors continually move the goalposts for "intelligence" the instant an algorithm can solve any particular problem intelligently?

3) In a related matter to the "AI Effect", how can we use the magic sauce to take over the world and kill all humans? Since this is the current standard for well and truly forever defeating the "AI Effect" and getting detractors to admit (possibly from beyond the grave) that your software really was intelligent, a magic sauce of human intelligence should be able to accomplish the same goal.

4) How does the magic sauce causally interact with the material world to generate our thoughts and consciousness?

5) Where does the magic sauce come from?

6) How can we make more of the magic sauce?

7) What other nonmaterial, irreducible phenomena does the magic sauce exist alongside, and how does it interact with those other phenomena?

If you really believe in nonmaterialist magic sauce, and aren't just engaging in a "dualism of the gaps" argument, you should be able to at least propose scientific avenues for investigating these seven questions.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#58

Post by eli_gottlieb »

Jtsummers wrote: post #35
thewarrior wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't compilers and type checkers do rudimentary semantics ?

If I understand yc-kjh's point, their "semantics" are really just more complicated syntactic rules. No real understanding occurs within the code. Or, the code doesn't understand what it's doing it's just doing what it's been instructed to do by us. (On that note, the code doesn't understand anything because the code is a non-entity, it's a thing, like a book or a car engine. A car engine doesn't understand the fuel i…

>If I understand yc-kjh's point, their "semantics" are really just more complicated syntactic rules. No real understanding occurs within the code.

Excuse me, but did you actually intend to express that anything which can be encoded in second-order logic is just syntax and has no semantic meaning? Because a reasonably sophisticated type system can in fact express arbitrary propositions in second-order logic; the resulting compiler might have undecidable type inference or checking, but it will in fact be following second-order logic.

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#59

Post by vidarh »

Groxx wrote: post #39
yc-kjh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Au contraire. Since electromagnetism cannot cause intentions, or goals, and since the human obviously has both intentions and goals (teleology), it is clear that the human brain does encompass something in addition to electromagnetism. (The same statement applies to all of the chemical processes involved in the human brain.) Please read Nagle's work. Read Searle's work. Read all of the philosophical literature on "in…

> ... since the human obviously has both intentions and goals ... You're just arguing past people. Humans obviously do this, computers obviously don't, therefore computers cannot do what humans do. There's nothing "obvious" about this. It's a completely subjective interpretation. How do you respond to people who say humans obviously do act precisely like a very-complex computer?

In fact one of the reasons I bothered answering him on this, is that the more I learn about how humans respond, the less I am inclined to consider the possibility that we're not machines, and I find it extremely fascinating how someone can feel so sure we're not.

More and more, I am coming to terms with seeing humans as far simpler machines in many respects than what we'd like to think, on the basis of how many response patterns appears to be largely "hard-wired" and require little to no higher thought processes, even though we often make up elaborate explanations after the fact if challenged (as can be demonstrated by asking people why they did )

Re: MIT professor Marvin Minsky wins $540,000 award

#60

Post by leoc »

yc-kjh wrote: post #9

Idiocy: My thermostat has three possible beliefs: 1) It is too warm in here. 2) It is too cold in here. 3) It is just about right. Minsky is wrong about AI in the same way that McCarthy was wrong. McCarthy really "believed" that his thermostat had three possible beliefs, and that his thermostat really "believed" one of them at any given time. http://Books.Google.com/books?id=yNJN-_jznw4C&pg=PA30&lpg=PA... Searle debu…

Eh, this is ungracious. Of course computationalism, eliminative materialism and so on are bosh. But AI research has has produced many practical advances and will produce more. And not just AI advances: look what JMC and the AI labs did for programming languages, algs & DS, and operating systems. Hard to grudge the lads some recognition for that.
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