61–70 of 112 posts
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> Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do. I don't understand this, all the programs I've ever written make decisions based on some factors. Are you talking about free will? If so, what is free will?
Doing things because you can and not because you have to? Creative endeavors in the largest sense?
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Am I ever doing things because I can and not because I have to? Also, what mechanism determines what things I want to do because I can do them? And isn’t that mechanism then just not just another part of the machine. Just because it feels as though I do things because I can doesn’t mean that is actually true.
As long as you can imagine different possible futures and decide upon which one you want to try and realize, I think you have choice. Choice stems from uncertainty, partial knowledge. It might be an illusion for an observer outside of the system, but as far as a participant within the system is concerned, there is choice, then there is free will. I am writing this because I ca n but I don't need to do it. I have futu…
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> Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do. I don't understand this, all the programs I've ever written make decisions based on some factors. Are you talking about free will? If so, what is free will?
snippet from the WP article on the book: > Weizenbaum makes the crucial distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. It is the capacity to choose that ultimately makes one a human being. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation. Comprehensive human judgment is able to include non-mathematical factors such as emotions.…
It's little more than arguing for a "soul" with no evidence for any effect that can't be explained by cause and effect.
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He originally made the argument about gender, not intelligence. I think he was arguing for a whole class of properties for which there's no difference between authenticity and convincing fakery. I think the point is less that there is a truth and we're too dumb to figure it out, and more that in certain circumstances we'll just have to accept a lower bar for evidence about whether those properties apply. It reminds m…
Or another way to put this, it's not a binary problem, it's a probability continuum. Even the definition of 'human intelligence' is a continuum from the smartest to the dumbest of us, that doesn't even stop there and descends thought all animal life.
> In short, then, there might be men cleverer than any given machine, but then again there might be other machines cleverer again, and so on.
So now I think you're both wrong :) Particularly I take issue with the assumption that the "cleverer" relation is transitive. We've only really studied a few relations in this space:
- pushdown automatons are cleverer than finite state machines
- turing machines are cleverer than pushdown automata
- humans are cleverer than turing machines (I'd argue for this, but others would disagree)
Presumably there are other points which we have overlooked or not yet discovered. For instance, maybe something which has the "memory" quality of a pushdown automaton, but lacks the "state tracking" property of a finite state machine. When compared with an FSM, such a thing would not be more or less clever than it, it would just be clever in an orthogonal way.
I strongly suspect that two intelligences (of greater power than the theoretical machines that we yet have) could meet and discover that they each have a capability that the other lacks. This would be a situation that you couldn't map onto a continuum--you'd need something with branches, a tree or a dag or a topological space: something on which the two intelligences could be considered cousins: neither possessing more capabilities than the other, but each possessing different capabilities. (Unlike the FSM example, they would have to share some capabilities, otherwise they couldn't recognize each other as intelligent).
Further, I suspect that in order to adequately classify both intelligences as cousins, you'd have to be cleverer than both. Each of the cousin-intelligences would be able to prove among themselves that theirs is the superior kind, but they'd also have to doubt these proofs because the unfamiliar intelligence would be capable of spooky things which the familiar intelligence is not.
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snippet from the WP article on the book: > Weizenbaum makes the crucial distinction between deciding and choosing. Deciding is a computational activity, something that can ultimately be programmed. It is the capacity to choose that ultimately makes one a human being. Choice, however, is the product of judgment, not calculation. Comprehensive human judgment is able to include non-mathematical factors such as emotions.…
It's basically a religious view. For a "judgement" to be non-computable, it'd need to come from some factor in the human brain which violates know physics and can't be reproduced outside a human brain. It's little more than arguing for a "soul" with no evidence for any effect that can't be explained by cause and effect.
You say this as if we are even close to understanding much less reproducing the human brain completely, which probably would have to include the web of relations with all sorts of other living things that also go into the judgements we make, and the emotions we have while making them. Until you actually do draw the rest of the owl, it's not exactly "religious" to say there's no owl.
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It's basically a religious view. For a "judgement" to be non-computable, it'd need to come from some factor in the human brain which violates know physics and can't be reproduced outside a human brain. It's little more than arguing for a "soul" with no evidence for any effect that can't be explained by cause and effect.
> For a "judgement" to be non-computable, it'd need to come from some factor in the human brain which violates know physics and can't be reproduced outside a human brain. You say this as if we are even close to understanding much less reproducing the human brain completely, which probably would have to include the web of relations with all sorts of other living things that also go into the judgements we make, and the…
> Until you actually do draw the rest of the owl, it's not exactly "religious" to say there's no owl.
The "real owl" here is to assume the human brain does something non-computable, in violation of all known physics and logic.
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"GPT-4 achieved a success rate of 41 percent, second only to actual humans" also feels like a (much bigger) lie of omission looking at the original paper. GPT4's performance was in the range of 6% to 41%, Eliza's 27% score sat in the upper middle of that range, and considering the bots tested consisted of 8 GPT4 prompts, 2 GPT3.5 prompts and a naive script from the 1960s, GPT4 would have had to be remarkably consiste…
Yea, It's really hard to get GPT to sound human because the RLHF really wants to let you know it's not a human. GPT4 + a RLHF that was trained to think it was human would be a much different beast.
Imagine you take a human and train them to be an AI assistant since they were a baby. I imagine their behaviour would also be very odd compared to average people.
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Weizenbaum even wrote an entire book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment To Calculation, on how AI is a crank term for computer science. The basic premise is that humans are not machine so stop using language that treats them as such. Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do. The book also has one of the best and most succinct descriptions of Turing mach…
> Especially that computers can decide what comes next, but only a human can choose what to do. I don't understand this, all the programs I've ever written make decisions based on some factors. Are you talking about free will? If so, what is free will?
A computer can do all the calculations to decide on if it's a good idea. Given the inputs of the time they have spent together, the number of glances that are passed between then in the halls between classes, if he doesn't have a date yet or not, etc. The probability adds up to ask.
So the machine decides to ask.
The girl feels it. Has all the time they've spent together has made her feel a certain way? Maybe a weird tingle each time their arms touch. Is that glance in the hall this morning not just an accident, but him going a little out of his way for her to notice? She's asked around and knows that no one else has asked him, but doe he really not have a date yet? Can she overcome the bit of anxiety about asking a boy to the dance? Will she be able to accept the risk of rejection knowing that the chances may be high he says yes?
Only she can choose.
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> For a "judgement" to be non-computable, it'd need to come from some factor in the human brain which violates know physics and can't be reproduced outside a human brain. You say this as if we are even close to understanding much less reproducing the human brain completely, which probably would have to include the web of relations with all sorts of other living things that also go into the judgements we make, and the…
No, it's an argument from logic that applies to any claim that any given entity can do things that are not computable. > Until you actually do draw the rest of the owl, it's not exactly "religious" to say there's no owl. The "real owl" here is to assume the human brain does something non-computable, in violation of all known physics and logic.
And "computable" and "computable for us" are very different things. It's not about the machines or algorithms we might make one day, provided that we fully understand everything that goes into our our thoughts and emotions with nothing left unaccounted for, and everything turning out to be countable; it's about the ones we are actually making, back then and today, and then in some cases outsource our decisions to.
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No, it's an argument from logic that applies to any claim that any given entity can do things that are not computable. > Until you actually do draw the rest of the owl, it's not exactly "religious" to say there's no owl. The "real owl" here is to assume the human brain does something non-computable, in violation of all known physics and logic.
You cannot compute what you don't understand, and even if you did by accident, you wouldn't know you computed it, as long as you don't understand what you're trying to do. That seems obvious to me. And "computable" and "computable for us" are very different things. It's not about the machines or algorithms we might make one day, provided that we fully understand everything that goes into our our thoughts and emotions…
For something to be computable, it only needs to be possible to show that it is logically possible, by e.g. decomposing the problem into elements we know are computable or showing an example.
The existence of the human brain absent any evidence of any supernatural element is strong evidence that human reasoning is computable, and it's a reasonable, testable, falsifiable hypothesis to make: If you want to counter it "all" you need to do is to show evidence of any state transition in even a single brain that does not follow known laws of physics. Just one.
Alternatively, even just coherently describing a decision-making process that it is possible to construct a proof wouldn't be computable using known logic.
Either would get you a Nobel Prize, in either physics or maths. Absent that, even just a testable hypothesis that if proven would increase the likelihood of finding either of the above would be a huge step.
In the absence of all of that, it's pure faith to presume human reasoning isn't computable.