The short film version of the original is great, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg It stars Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey!
Film featuring meat? Spare me
Meat flapping at each other, no less. /shudder
They’re made out of weights
631–640 of 739 posts
Re: They’re made out of weights
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no need to assume the supernatural. They are machines based on what? By definition, a machine is something build by humans, or any intelligent life form (because we extend the definition from our own experience as self defined 'intelligent life forms'). Living organisms and machines do share traits under our current frame of reference in modern science. But that doesn't mean cells are machines. The right fra…
By what definition? Anyway, seems like an argument over said definitions rather than the underlying characteristics. The relevant question is whether they're purely physical objects behaving according to rules, which is being described as "machine," or whether there is something beyond that. Current understanding is contradictory: all indications are that cells and bodies are purely physical objects, except that ther…
> By what definition?
We have this definition from the history of western languages, the history of western philosophy, and works by Lewis Mumford and Franz Reuleaux, among others authors.
> The relevant question is whether they're purely physical objects behaving according to rules, which is being described as "machine," or whether there is something beyond that. Current understanding is contradictory: all indications are that cells and bodies are purely physical objects, except that there is this phenomenon of subjective experience which doesn't fit with that at all.
Then you would say that you dog broke (died), or that the vet fixed your cat (cured). Which by all means we might speak that way, but surely you would notice that it is not accurate.
Saying that a living organism is just a machine because it is a physical object behaving according to rules is like saying that a beautifully built house is just a bunch of bricks layed in rows and something on top.
But assuming that we say 'purely physical objects behaving according to rules' are machines, then:
1) there is no difference between you, your dog, your fridge and the snail in you garden 2) It would be semantically valid in all languages to say 'my dog broke' instead of it died, 'i got fixed' instead of 'the doctor cured me' 3) Machines vary in complexity and we would still have 'degrees of complexity' regarding machines (human bodies being the most complex, perhaps, toasters being fairly simple), but fundamentally, all of them would follow the same rules for 'fixing', 'breaking' and 'repairing'. Which is not the case. 4) You would have to come up with some kind of theology regarding how we were built. There is no evidence that we have been 'built', quite the contrary.
And most probably there are quite more reasons not to regard machines as living organisms nor living organisms as machines.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Blind people learn concepts of bikes too and in a smiliar way: by description. And by touch and sound. And maybe some were daring enough to drive one, or unlucky enough to get hit by one. But have way more input than just texts.
LLMs also have other inputs, like audio and images. They get encoded (just like a human eye encodes an image) and passed to the weights.
I don’t think this analogy holds. The whole way through the processing pipeline in the brain, different sensory data is ingested separately and processed separately; and we still don’t understand how that data is then integrated into a cohesive experience.
LLMs have the same fundamental input regardless of modality, tokens. There is a preprocessing step before the “brain”, which is more akin to some super-synesthesia where all senses are translated into sound before becoming experience.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think cognitive linguistics has that much to say about AI nowadays. Let alone philosophy. I would like to read those sources. > The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with,…
Again: either stop using > quotes or learn to use them better. Fucking unreadable. I reiterate: philosophy is almost entirely worthless for AI design. We want to design systems that work, not systems that sound good on paper. If philosophy had a practical application in that, we'd stop calling it "philosophy" and start calling it "math", "science" or "engineering".
Again: don't be rude. Not nice. As 'not nice' as my bad formatting.
Philosophy is there precisely to critique and analyze what we build and how we behave in the world. Without it, by the way, there would be no science and no engineering.
Dismissing philosophy in AI is like dismissing philosophy in any other applied, practical or creative field. It is precisely because there is a philosophical investigation on each practical, applied or creative field, that that field can actually make progress.
There's philosophy in biology, which helps biology go further. Philosophy in engineering, which makes engineering go further. In architecture, film, photography, painting, literature, medicine, physics, linguistics, mathematics, etc, etc. In all those fields, there is also a philosophical investigation taking place. Right now.
Maybe you confound practical AI design (you should be talking of 'building AI systems') with AI as a research field. I get that, because lots of people cannot make the distinction (calling yourself 'AI researcher' when you actually tinker a model is not scientific. It might follow a scientific method, but it is engineering research, not scientific research).
Re: They’re made out of weights
#635Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not an insult to suggest one is out of the depth on a topic, especially when it isn't one's field of expertise. You are giving the pop science explanation of various things.
Why did you feel the need to add it though? > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nobody called anyone any name.
If you are going to quote rules, be bothered to read what was actually written. Your behavior ruins things, it doesn't make it better.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
So basically there are rules, we just can’t articulate them and so we can’t decode them from the weights. The Goedel Numbering metaphor is pretty appealing to me. You can represent any finite series of real numbers with a series of computations performed on some other finite series of real numbers. We just happen to be using matrices because the math is easy to parallelize. The trick is to realize that when you know…
> You can represent any finite series of real numbers with a series of computations performed on some other finite series of real numbers. That statement caught my eye. It's either trivially true or quite clearly wrong, depending on how you mean it. In the literal meaning it's true. Given any finite set of real numbers, I can easily produce a different set (like taking the original set and adding a number which wasn'…
Sorry I’m not a mathematician but just grug brain and try to make number speak from memory.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like the color example, but colors can be reproduced at will by trial and error and by observing the results (and collectively compare them to our shared experience). Why cannot this be applied to consciousness as well? I mean, it's surely much more difficult to do compared to colors but... impossible?
You and previous comment seem to agree that trial and error/shared experience can determine if consciousness has emerged. And this might/will be challenging. Previous comment used the word "anticipate" and I think they mean that we won't know in advance before we run the trial and error process. When they say "deep trouble" I assume they mean because creating a non-friendly conscious AI might pose an existential risk…
Basically all of that, yes.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#638After 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…
> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. It would be a valid argument if you could explain us what subjective experience and agency are. No one can explain this, so the arguments sounds like "AI doesn't have something I don't really know what, but they have to miss something, sure". > But the truth is that we don't know. Yes! This is…
> It would be a valid argument if you could explain us what subjective experience and agency are. No one can explain this, so the arguments sounds like "AI doesn't have something I don't really know what, but they have to miss something, sure".
Subjective experience is what you and only you, different from other beings, experience in and about the world.
> Yes! This is the point. If we don't know how our minds work, how can we be sure that a machine doesn't work like our minds?
You can't be sure that machine do not work like our minds or brains. But you cannot say the opposite either, so saying 'machines could think' base on a false assumption (because you cannot say it is true. It doesn't matter if you could be true).
> Linguists are linguists, they don't know about consciousness, they specialists in language.
That's a very narrow understanding of what language is, what linguists do/research, and the contributions made in the field. Linguists are (since already 2 o 3 decades) focusing more and more on psychological/cognitive matters. The intertwined topics of language, mind, body and though has a long way in the western philosophical tradition.
> I believe, that all this philosophy is... well... philosophy. Meta-physics. It doesn't matter. What does matter is how we should deal with machines? Do we have to treat them as human beings? Should we accept that they have "human rights"? Can a machine be held accountable for its mistakes? Can we talk about "intentional" and "unintentional" mistakes of a machine?
Exactly because of this. And is this what I am talking about... the topics you mention here are already settled in the philosophy space, but the AI research space keeps going 'round them...
Re: They’re made out of weights
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is basically reductionism , or in the extreme atomism , and (as I understand it) it has largely fallen out of fashion both in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of mind, since it heyday in the 1970s. And I don’t see it coming back into fashion any time soon. I can definitely see why reductionism would appeal to an educated public. We learn about the periodic table; we are able to break sentences down…
Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory don't preclude reductionism, and I wouldn't say it has fallen out of favor as a whole. Certain types certainly have, but not the overall idea. Also, nothing about the idea of the mind only being made up of physical processes means things have to be deterministic.
It doesn’t preclude it correct, however it provides a pretty strong examples of where reductionism is lacking, which what I believe has turned a lot of philosophers of science against pure reductionism (I am probably oversimplifying here. An expert science historian [which I am not] could probably write a whole book about why reductionism is not as popular today as it was in the 1970s).
There are a whole lot more physical processes going on in our bodies then just neural activity. And my best guess is that is exactly where reductionism fails. It is possible that neural activity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for consciousness. It is also possible that we are looking in the wrong direction, that consciousness arises via interactions with the world. In either case (of which I find the former quite convincing) we will never be able to describe the mind by just looking at neural activity.
I am actually of the opinion that cognitive scientists are doing an excellent job describing the mind with our current theoretical models which excludes the tough questions of consciousness.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did you feel the need to add it though? > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nobody called anyone any name. If you are going to quote rules, be bothered to read what was actually written. Your behavior ruins things, it doesn't make it better.
You don't think "Respectfully, you are miles out of your depth here." couldn't have just been left off?