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1) One of the biggest reasons they fell out of favor for more "mathematical" approaches was that no one could really explain why exactly they worked. Kind of l

1) One of the biggest reasons they fell out of favor for more "mathematical" approaches was that no one could really explain why exactly they worked. Kind of like how nobody can really explain how the brain works, or life in general. My gut feeling is that it is hubris to think that we are going to "figure out" intelligence with increasingly sophisticated mathematical models anytime soon. We are not giving proper credit to how complex it is, and the multi-billion year developmental process that it took. We think we can just short-circuit that with some fancy math because we've had success with planetary orbits and other comparatively rudimentary phenomena. The current industry approaches are great for extracting certain kinds of value out of large data sets, but in terms of producing a result that could even begin to be considered as interesting as life (i.e. AGI or "strong AI"), I believe we will have to rely on creating a system whose inner workings are too complex for us to understand. In other words, going off of Arthur C Clarke's definition, life is magic. And we're trying to create something equally magical. Almost by definition, if we can analytically understand it, it's not going to be interesting enough.

pas 9y ago
> We are not giving proper credit to how complex it is, and the multi-billion year developmental process that it took. Or we are simply not ready to accept that it's simply a big book of heuristics fine-tuned over biological eons. It's just big. We have too many interwoven, interdependent, synergistic faculties. Input, output, and a lot of mental stuff for making the right connections between the ins and the outs. Theory of mind, basic reasoning, the whole limbic system (emotions, basic behavior, dopaminergic motivaton), the executive functions in the prefrontal cortex, all are very specialized things, and we have a laundry list of those, all fine-tuned for each other. And there's no big magic. Nothing to "understand", no closed formula for consciousness. It's simply a faculty that makes the "all's good, you're conscious" light go green, and it's easy to do that after all the other stuff are working well that does the heavy lifting to make sense of reality.
- resu_nimda 9y ago
  Your last paragraph seems to contain the kind of overconfidence that I'm talking about. I don't understand how you can say "consciousness is simply X" or "it's easy to do that [if you handwave away the hard parts]." Clearly it's not that simple or easy, or we would have done it. We can't even create life from non-life. How can we begin to understand all the stuff you're talking about that's been layered on top? We don't understand this stuff well enough to just handwave it away as unimportant or trivial.
  - 0xfeba 9y ago
    > We can't even create life from non-life. We can't really define life in the first place. But this is not necessarily to your favour. I think it's more of an indication of how the world doesn't fit into our... anthropomorphic way of thinking. That is, everything follows the laws of physics, no magic involved. We aren't special.
    - Retra 9y ago
      We certainly can define life, it's just that people don't generally agree on a definition. Some people get offended if you don't include their favorite things in your definition. Even so, we understand it just the same no matter how you define it, because what we understand is not a function of word choice or definition. It's a function of capability.
  - pas 9y ago
    I'm assuming a simpler model, no need for magic, because so far I don't see what behavior/data this simple model cannot explain. > Clearly it's not that simple or easy, or we would have done it. We don't have the computational power yet. Not to mention the vast amount of development required. Think of the climate models, that are huge (millions of lines of code), but they're still nowhere near complete enough, and they only have to model sunlight (Earth's rotation, orbital position, albedo), clouds, flows (winds and currents), some topography (big mountains, big flats), ice (melting, freezing), some chemistry (CO2, salts). And they only have to match a simple graph, not the behavior of a human mind (eg Turing test). So, it's not easy, even if simple. > We can't even create life from non-life. We understand life. Cells, RNA, DNA, proteins, mitochondria, actins, etc. It's big, it's a lot of moving parts, and we understand it, but we can't just pop a big chunk of matter into an atomic assembler and make a cell. And I think intelligence/sentience is similar. It's big, not magic.
- padthai 9y ago
  There is plenty of magic going on. Today we cannot replicate or understand how emergent properties born of biological structures. Not even in "simple" systems as the metabolic pathways.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pas 9y ago
    We mapped the whole genome and connectome of C. elegans, no? And most of that is understood. For example, it seems to be a good model for substance addiction (especially for nicotine). That seems a pretty complex emergent behavior to me. If you mean bigger biology, yes, sure, we don't have a full map of functional genomics for humans, but we're getting there. Or maybe not, maybe it's so exponentially more complex, that it'd take as much time to understand it as it took for evolution to work it out. (Especially considering that evolution played with every individual, whereas we like to constrain our data gathering to non-aggressive methods.)
    - ronjobber 9y ago
      We have the connectome of C. elegans, yes, but we are still pretty far from understanding how it 'works'. The functional connections are still an active area of research, and it is greatly complicated by connections not explicit in the connectome (neuromodulator effects), as well as the internal dynamics of neurons and non-linear network dynamics. The connectome is necessary, but far from sufficient, to 'understand' a brain, even one made from only 302 neurons as in C. elegans.
  - ozy 9y ago
    Same way waves emerge in water. The rules that govern a system can create patterns, which themselves behave according to rules, but with a set of rules that was "hard to predict" from the underlying system.
    - padthai 9y ago
      That is exactly my point. We can use fluid dynamics and PDEs in waves. We understand some properties and processes. We are nowhere as close in biological system. I put the example of the metabolic pathways because last time checked (~2015) the most advanced things in the field were extremely simple and without any predictive power. Things like calculating the kernel of a stoichiometric matrix or the centrality of a node in the interactomic graph.
- ozy 9y ago
  https://psyarxiv.com/387h9 https://psyarxiv.com/387h9
- jcora 9y ago
  I'd call this pulling a Dennett: trivializing complexity to something that cannot or just doesn't have to be explained. Being unable to conceive consciousness at this moment doesn't mean there's nothing to conceive of: even if we never get to the final satisfactory answer, there is undoubtedly much more room left for useful concepts we don't have yet, around or inside this idea
  - clicea 9y ago
    I'd call bullshit. Dennett's argument not that the brain is complex but that it's not obvious it is not reductible.
    - sgt101 9y ago
      That's a lot of nots. So you are saying that Dennett says that the brain might be reducible[1]? I don't think that's a strong claim or that it even qualifies as a claim at all. Lots of things might decompose into simple components if subjected to the right analysis, very few things definitely won't - for example many clever people have spent a great deal of time attempting to reduce quantum and cosmic scale physics to simple intuitively founded laws... If Dennett's claim is that the human brain is the same order of object as the universe I can accept it only if we agree that all objects share the same order. Where does that get us? [1] Apologies, I don't know what reductible means, but guessed typo - I'm open to education though and unworried by typos!
- resource0x 9y ago
  200 years ago there was nothing to understand in electricity: it was just a liquid :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_theory_of_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_theory_of_electricity
  - pas 9y ago
    There were experiments that were not explained by the liquid theory. Now we have data and people for some reason want to claim that a theory with magical super complex and not-even-yet-describable and very-very-irreducible element(s) is a better fit than a good old box full of tiny yet specialized parts fine-tuned to work together over millions of years.
    - resource0x 9y ago
      Can you think of any experiment that cannot be explained by your theory?
      - pas 9y ago
        You mean, is this a falsifiable/testable theory? Yes, it's testable, we see very specific neuropathologies, almost like on-off switches affecting very specific functions/faculties of the mind, and they usually correspond well to brain damage locations. So in that sense the experiment is to enumerate the basic (built-in) functional components of the mind and corresponding implementational level machinery, and the of course the reverse (try to enumerate the implementation components and match them with functions) can generate important data (is there a function that has no implementation?). That said, since the claim is that there's no magical component in the mind, and that's kind of hard to prove, but easily falsifiable, just find a/the magical component. The problem is the same as with the soul, and the self, and so on.
- mrfusion 9y ago
  Keep in mind the genome really isn’t big enough to store enough hueristics to make a functioning human.
  - pas 9y ago
    Yes, of course, the problem of bootstrapping consciousness from blueprints of a human mind is that we depend on our parents' whole epigenetic and other extra informational make up, plus their support for years while our mind finishes setting up.
TaylorAlexander 9y ago
While I can’t predict that we can solve intelligence completely any time soon, I would argue that machine intelligence allows us to examine the phenomena of intelligence more thoroughly than anything else in the past. I would expect this to yield new insights. So at a minimum, I’d think we can learn more now than we have been able to before. Maybe that will lead to a great increase in understanding of intelligence or a slight one, but it will lead to an increase in our understanding of the phenomena.
- oldandtired 9y ago
  The only insights will be related to what insights we get about the programming we are doing with machines. It is an entirely different order to providing insights into even the simplest of organic neurological systems. Computer simulations can give insight into simple systems like water flows, etc. Simulating more complex systems like a single living cells or any system built on livings cells would require systems that would not really be worth building. It would be simpler to use cells directly.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dorgo 9y ago
> My gut feeling is that it is hubris to think that we are going to "figure out" intelligence with increasingly sophisticated mathematical models anytime soon. We did it already. Compter understand language, translate it, react to it. They can recognize items on a picture. Is there a task left which can't be done by computers better and faster than by humans? >Almost by definition, if we can analytically understand it, it's not going to be interesting enough. I think current ML is magic. I understand the math behind it. But still, I'm amazed every time when the training is over and it actually works like intended. Everything which is big enough is more than the sum of it's parts.
- tree_of_item 9y ago
  > Is there a task left which can't be done by computers better and faster than by humans? Are you serious? You think we're done?
  - oldandtired 9y ago
    Probably better if you gave a task example like being a mother or a father or a grandparent or an uncle or an aunt or a mentor or a friend or anything to do with human interaction.
    - dorgo 9y ago
      There is no market for fathers and uncles. Nobody wants a roboter as father. Mentor of friend sounds more interesting though.
- flavio81 9y ago
  >I'm amazed every time when the training is over and it actually works like intended. Everything which is big enough is more than the sum of it's parts. What about when it doesn't work as intended and fails ridiculously, even though it usually works perfectly well? http://www.labsix.org/physical-objects-that-fool-neural-nets/ http://www.labsix.org/physical-objects-that-fool-neural-nets...
JunkDNA 9y ago
Taking your point a step further, I often wonder if mathematics is a local minimum for humans. It has been so damn effective in so many ways that we can’t imagine that there might be some other mechanism for solving hard problems. In cases where the mathematics gets really complex, I wonder if this is a hint that there’s some other way to represent the situation.
- theparanoid 9y ago
  Computational processes have picked up where mathematics stops.
jamesrcole 9y ago
> going off of Arthur C Clarke's definition, life is magic. And we're trying to create something equally magical. I assume you're referring to his "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"? If so, you're misrepresenting it, because he's clearly saying it's not magic, it just appears that way to the unadvanced. And there's a big difference between "appears to be" and "is".
- ramblerman 9y ago
  But we are the unadvanced on this matter, so it's magic. Also 'appears to be' != 'indistinguishable', the latter is far closer to 'is' imo.
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    The quote is about something seeming a certain way when we don't understand it, not about it actually being that way. It is not saying the thing itself is literally indistinguishable from magic. Anyone who understood the thing (eg an advanced alien race who created a technology far beyond our current capabilities) would not see it as magic, and would know that it isn't magic.
hnuser1234 9y ago
>The current industry approaches are great for extracting certain kinds of value out of large data sets, but in terms of producing a result that could even begin to be considered as interesting as life (i.e. AGI or "strong AI"), I believe we will have to rely on creating a system whose inner workings are too complex for us to understand. Speak for yourself.

pas 9y ago

> We are not giving proper credit to how complex it is, and the multi-billion year developmental process that it took. Or we are simply not ready to accept that it's simply a big book of heuristics fine-tuned over biological eons. It's just big. We have too many interwoven, interdependent, synergistic faculties. Input, output, and a lot of mental stuff for making the right connections between the ins and the outs. Theory of mind, basic reasoning, the whole limbic system (emotions, basic behavior, dopaminergic motivaton), the executive functions in the prefrontal cortex, all are very specialized things, and we have a laundry list of those, all fine-tuned for each other. And there's no big magic. Nothing to "understand", no closed formula for consciousness. It's simply a faculty that makes the "all's good, you're conscious" light go green, and it's easy to do that after all the other stuff are working well that does the heavy lifting to make sense of reality.

resu_nimda 9y ago
Your last paragraph seems to contain the kind of overconfidence that I'm talking about. I don't understand how you can say "consciousness is simply X" or "it's easy to do that [if you handwave away the hard parts]." Clearly it's not that simple or easy, or we would have done it. We can't even create life from non-life. How can we begin to understand all the stuff you're talking about that's been layered on top? We don't understand this stuff well enough to just handwave it away as unimportant or trivial.
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  > We can't even create life from non-life. We can't really define life in the first place. But this is not necessarily to your favour. I think it's more of an indication of how the world doesn't fit into our... anthropomorphic way of thinking. That is, everything follows the laws of physics, no magic involved. We aren't special.
  - Retra 9y ago
    We certainly can define life, it's just that people don't generally agree on a definition. Some people get offended if you don't include their favorite things in your definition. Even so, we understand it just the same no matter how you define it, because what we understand is not a function of word choice or definition. It's a function of capability.
- pas 9y ago
  I'm assuming a simpler model, no need for magic, because so far I don't see what behavior/data this simple model cannot explain. > Clearly it's not that simple or easy, or we would have done it. We don't have the computational power yet. Not to mention the vast amount of development required. Think of the climate models, that are huge (millions of lines of code), but they're still nowhere near complete enough, and they only have to model sunlight (Earth's rotation, orbital position, albedo), clouds, flows (winds and currents), some topography (big mountains, big flats), ice (melting, freezing), some chemistry (CO2, salts). And they only have to match a simple graph, not the behavior of a human mind (eg Turing test). So, it's not easy, even if simple. > We can't even create life from non-life. We understand life. Cells, RNA, DNA, proteins, mitochondria, actins, etc. It's big, it's a lot of moving parts, and we understand it, but we can't just pop a big chunk of matter into an atomic assembler and make a cell. And I think intelligence/sentience is similar. It's big, not magic.
padthai 9y ago
There is plenty of magic going on. Today we cannot replicate or understand how emergent properties born of biological structures. Not even in "simple" systems as the metabolic pathways.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- pas 9y ago
  We mapped the whole genome and connectome of C. elegans, no? And most of that is understood. For example, it seems to be a good model for substance addiction (especially for nicotine). That seems a pretty complex emergent behavior to me. If you mean bigger biology, yes, sure, we don't have a full map of functional genomics for humans, but we're getting there. Or maybe not, maybe it's so exponentially more complex, that it'd take as much time to understand it as it took for evolution to work it out. (Especially considering that evolution played with every individual, whereas we like to constrain our data gathering to non-aggressive methods.)
  - ronjobber 9y ago
    We have the connectome of C. elegans, yes, but we are still pretty far from understanding how it 'works'. The functional connections are still an active area of research, and it is greatly complicated by connections not explicit in the connectome (neuromodulator effects), as well as the internal dynamics of neurons and non-linear network dynamics. The connectome is necessary, but far from sufficient, to 'understand' a brain, even one made from only 302 neurons as in C. elegans.
- ozy 9y ago
  Same way waves emerge in water. The rules that govern a system can create patterns, which themselves behave according to rules, but with a set of rules that was "hard to predict" from the underlying system.
  - padthai 9y ago
    That is exactly my point. We can use fluid dynamics and PDEs in waves. We understand some properties and processes. We are nowhere as close in biological system. I put the example of the metabolic pathways because last time checked (~2015) the most advanced things in the field were extremely simple and without any predictive power. Things like calculating the kernel of a stoichiometric matrix or the centrality of a node in the interactomic graph.
ozy 9y ago
https://psyarxiv.com/387h9 https://psyarxiv.com/387h9
jcora 9y ago
I'd call this pulling a Dennett: trivializing complexity to something that cannot or just doesn't have to be explained. Being unable to conceive consciousness at this moment doesn't mean there's nothing to conceive of: even if we never get to the final satisfactory answer, there is undoubtedly much more room left for useful concepts we don't have yet, around or inside this idea
- clicea 9y ago
  I'd call bullshit. Dennett's argument not that the brain is complex but that it's not obvious it is not reductible.
  - sgt101 9y ago
    That's a lot of nots. So you are saying that Dennett says that the brain might be reducible[1]? I don't think that's a strong claim or that it even qualifies as a claim at all. Lots of things might decompose into simple components if subjected to the right analysis, very few things definitely won't - for example many clever people have spent a great deal of time attempting to reduce quantum and cosmic scale physics to simple intuitively founded laws... If Dennett's claim is that the human brain is the same order of object as the universe I can accept it only if we agree that all objects share the same order. Where does that get us? [1] Apologies, I don't know what reductible means, but guessed typo - I'm open to education though and unworried by typos!
resource0x 9y ago
200 years ago there was nothing to understand in electricity: it was just a liquid :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_theory_of_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_theory_of_electricity
- pas 9y ago
  There were experiments that were not explained by the liquid theory. Now we have data and people for some reason want to claim that a theory with magical super complex and not-even-yet-describable and very-very-irreducible element(s) is a better fit than a good old box full of tiny yet specialized parts fine-tuned to work together over millions of years.
  - resource0x 9y ago
    Can you think of any experiment that cannot be explained by your theory?
    - pas 9y ago
      You mean, is this a falsifiable/testable theory? Yes, it's testable, we see very specific neuropathologies, almost like on-off switches affecting very specific functions/faculties of the mind, and they usually correspond well to brain damage locations. So in that sense the experiment is to enumerate the basic (built-in) functional components of the mind and corresponding implementational level machinery, and the of course the reverse (try to enumerate the implementation components and match them with functions) can generate important data (is there a function that has no implementation?). That said, since the claim is that there's no magical component in the mind, and that's kind of hard to prove, but easily falsifiable, just find a/the magical component. The problem is the same as with the soul, and the self, and so on.
mrfusion 9y ago
Keep in mind the genome really isn’t big enough to store enough hueristics to make a functioning human.
- pas 9y ago
  Yes, of course, the problem of bootstrapping consciousness from blueprints of a human mind is that we depend on our parents' whole epigenetic and other extra informational make up, plus their support for years while our mind finishes setting up.

TaylorAlexander 9y ago

While I can’t predict that we can solve intelligence completely any time soon, I would argue that machine intelligence allows us to examine the phenomena of intelligence more thoroughly than anything else in the past. I would expect this to yield new insights. So at a minimum, I’d think we can learn more now than we have been able to before. Maybe that will lead to a great increase in understanding of intelligence or a slight one, but it will lead to an increase in our understanding of the phenomena.

oldandtired 9y ago
The only insights will be related to what insights we get about the programming we are doing with machines. It is an entirely different order to providing insights into even the simplest of organic neurological systems. Computer simulations can give insight into simple systems like water flows, etc. Simulating more complex systems like a single living cells or any system built on livings cells would require systems that would not really be worth building. It would be simpler to use cells directly.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dorgo 9y ago

> My gut feeling is that it is hubris to think that we are going to "figure out" intelligence with increasingly sophisticated mathematical models anytime soon. We did it already. Compter understand language, translate it, react to it. They can recognize items on a picture. Is there a task left which can't be done by computers better and faster than by humans? >Almost by definition, if we can analytically understand it, it's not going to be interesting enough. I think current ML is magic. I understand the math behind it. But still, I'm amazed every time when the training is over and it actually works like intended. Everything which is big enough is more than the sum of it's parts.

tree_of_item 9y ago
> Is there a task left which can't be done by computers better and faster than by humans? Are you serious? You think we're done?
- oldandtired 9y ago
  Probably better if you gave a task example like being a mother or a father or a grandparent or an uncle or an aunt or a mentor or a friend or anything to do with human interaction.
  - dorgo 9y ago
    There is no market for fathers and uncles. Nobody wants a roboter as father. Mentor of friend sounds more interesting though.
flavio81 9y ago
>I'm amazed every time when the training is over and it actually works like intended. Everything which is big enough is more than the sum of it's parts. What about when it doesn't work as intended and fails ridiculously, even though it usually works perfectly well? http://www.labsix.org/physical-objects-that-fool-neural-nets/ http://www.labsix.org/physical-objects-that-fool-neural-nets...

JunkDNA 9y ago

Taking your point a step further, I often wonder if mathematics is a local minimum for humans. It has been so damn effective in so many ways that we can’t imagine that there might be some other mechanism for solving hard problems. In cases where the mathematics gets really complex, I wonder if this is a hint that there’s some other way to represent the situation.

theparanoid 9y ago
Computational processes have picked up where mathematics stops.

jamesrcole 9y ago

> going off of Arthur C Clarke's definition, life is magic. And we're trying to create something equally magical. I assume you're referring to his "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"? If so, you're misrepresenting it, because he's clearly saying it's not magic, it just appears that way to the unadvanced. And there's a big difference between "appears to be" and "is".

ramblerman 9y ago
But we are the unadvanced on this matter, so it's magic. Also 'appears to be' != 'indistinguishable', the latter is far closer to 'is' imo.
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  The quote is about something seeming a certain way when we don't understand it, not about it actually being that way. It is not saying the thing itself is literally indistinguishable from magic. Anyone who understood the thing (eg an advanced alien race who created a technology far beyond our current capabilities) would not see it as magic, and would know that it isn't magic.

hnuser1234 9y ago

>The current industry approaches are great for extracting certain kinds of value out of large data sets, but in terms of producing a result that could even begin to be considered as interesting as life (i.e. AGI or "strong AI"), I believe we will have to rely on creating a system whose inner workings are too complex for us to understand. Speak for yourself.