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A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

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Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#91

Post by bloomingkales »

szvsw wrote: post #69
andoando wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that's true at all for traditional computer programs. They're doing explicitly what they are designed to do, there is no adaptation/learning.

How do you define adaptation and learning? What about say, an autoscaler which is programmed to just track the the load for every hour over the last week, and use the average of the last 7 days at 8am to pre-emptively auto-scale? Is that learning and adapting? Alternatively, neural networks are also just doing explicitly what they are designed to do… sure there is a larger computational graph with lots of operations,…

What if we define adaptation and learning as the ability to concentrate. Our single cell ancestors would have to concentrate and deliberately store the first memory. Otherwise it would have just taken in the world with its sensors but never do anything with it.

Adapting and learning means it chose to concentrate on packing the world into retrievable storage.

When do we not adapt and learn? When we ignore our inputs and do nothing with it (don’t store it, don’t retrieve it).

In the example you gave, those classical programs cannot concentrate, it’s a one and done.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#92

Post by tweaqslug »

geuis wrote: post #82
skissane wrote: post #61

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinction…

[flagged]

Philosophy is precisely the domain of things that cannot be objectively testable because they are grounded in experience. You can not prove that you are conscious (especially in a world of LLMs) but you know it to be true. Should I assume you are an automaton simply because I can’t prove you are conscious?

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#93

Post by bloomingkales »

giorgioz wrote: post #35

I've been thinking as well that from some perspective a human being isn't actually a single life but rather itself a multitude of separate tiny-life forms that cooperate to survive (the cells). The voice in our head is the emerging consciouness that act as a captain, it's useful for the captain to think of itself as one being. Now this said, I feel the article is jumping a bit too much on the Animism hippie bandwagon…

Trees giving you the very thing you need to live every minute wasn’t enough of a compromise for you? They’ve quite negotiable with us.

Gotta watch The Happening again.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#94

Post by raindeer2 »

xg15 wrote: post #24

Maybe the definition of what "intelligence" is could be sharpened by having a look at LLMs and "traditional" computer programs and asking what exactly the difference between the two is. Almost all the traditional criteria of intelligence - reasoning, planning, decisionmaking, memory etc - are exhibited pretty trivially by standard computer programs. Nevertheless no one would think of them as "intelligent" in the sens…

The difference between traditional software and LLMs is the generality of their intelligence, and there are formal definitions of general intelligence such as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI

AIXI is a definition of the optimal agent and is hence uncomputable but LLMs are approximations which are approaching AIXI. I recommend Fridman's interview with Hutter.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#95

Post by geuis »

skissane wrote: post #87
geuis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Your position is self-refuting: you are dismissing philosophy, yet simultaneously making philosophical claims in doing so-claiming that all knowledge is empirical is itself a philosophical claim (empiricism)

This is a philosophical argument, therefore dismissible by science.

Unless you can rephrase your argument as something testable, it's philosophy and thereby not relevant.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#96

Post by geuis »

tweaqslug wrote: post #92
geuis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Philosophy is precisely the domain of things that cannot be objectively testable because they are grounded in experience. You can not prove that you are conscious (especially in a world of LLMs) but you know it to be true. Should I assume you are an automaton simply because I can’t prove you are conscious?

Consciousness is not philosophy. In the past, it was. People didn't have the tools or theoretic background to even approach it in an empiric way.

However we now have at least the basics to hypothesize and perform experiments. So it's no longer philosophy and is in the realm of understanding what actually are the mechanisms of consciousness.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#97

Post by geuis »

DrFalkyn wrote: post #86
geuis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So you’re an empiricist. Is science “reality” or is it just a series of models/ conceptual frameworks ?

Keep walking into a glass door a few dozen times. Is the door a reality even though you can't see it, or just a conceptual framework you keep bouncing off of?

At some point you have to stop thinking in your head why you can't walk through the window and start testing and figuring out what keeps breaking your nose.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#99

Post by antihipocrat »

geuis wrote: post #82
skissane wrote: post #61

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinction…

[flagged]

A lot of philosophy is testable and the inspiration for scientific enquiry. Philosophy contains logic as a major area of study and the results of this work are core tenets in mathematics which enables the ability to conduct rigorous science.

Science itself is the product of philosophical enquiry.

Re: A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter

#100

Post by School-Cotton »

mcswell wrote: post #71
skissane wrote: post #61

Articles like this annoy me: it seems to want to comment on philosophy of mind, but shows zero awareness of the classic debates in that discipline - materialism vs idealism vs dualism vs neutral monism, and the competing versions of each of those, e.g. substance dualism vs hylemorphic dualism, eliminativist vs reductionist/emergentist materialism, property dualism, epiphenomenalism, panpsychism, Chalmers’ distinction…

As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word "langu…

I’m a linguistics layman, but can’t you make an even stronger claim about human language? Apparently there are certain constructs in Swiss German that are not context-free.
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