4 ms·

"Understanding" is just as difficult to define as "intelligence". Any outward sign of understanding can and will be shown by a sufficiently complex artificial s

"Understanding" is just as difficult to define as "intelligence". Any outward sign of understanding can and will be shown by a sufficiently complex artificial system sooner or later. The human mind is not qualitatively different than sufficiently complex software that imitates it perfectly. Unless, that is, we return to the idea of body/mind dualism which is 200 years out of date. People keep being disappointed by these results because magic tricks just aren't as impressive if you know how they work.

meroes 4y ago
“The human mind is not qualitatively different than sufficiently complex software”. Just no. Nothing AI researchers are building has subjective experience.
- KyleLewis 4y ago
  I could be wrong but I think they might have been talking about a hypothetical, arbitrarily complex software. As a limiting case, if software were simulating a mind down to the quarks, it becomes unclear what the difference would be. I agree with your point of course, what we have today is certainly not like a human mind
  - notahacker 4y ago
    The problem with the hypothetical arbitrarily complex software is that there is no particular reason to believe it could exist, never mind that it will (at least not for meaningful definitions of "software"). A computer so powerful and a programmer so smart that they can represent the behaviour of the constituent parts of a human brain at the subatomic level as a state machine programmable to achieve different thought processes is at least as much of an imaginary construct as the metaphysical dualist mind it's supposed to be a counter argument to. And you don't need to think that your brain is anything other than an immensely complex state machine to think that some of the core parts of what we consider to be self-awareness (emotions... or chemical responses to certain stimuli which have over billions of years helped the brain parts of biological organisms make more optimal eating and fighting and fucking decisions for the survival of the gene code) are an altogether different level of problem to train an AI on than solving maths problems or generating text. Not least because if you want AIs to write love letters to each other, you can get very pleasing results quickly with a Chinese room without the inconvenience of having to simulate all the intractable chemistry of desire.
hooande 4y ago
The human mind is likely infinitely more complex than software that imitates any aspect of it. Just like human thought process is orders of magnitude more complex than that of a parrot.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  You would be surprised at the complexities of parrots, though...
- drdeca 4y ago
  The Bekenstein bound seems to suggest that the human brain is only finitely more complex. (And, if the mind is more complex than the physical/material brain, then, unless whatever else the mind is has a non-material influence on the material brain, any additional complexity of the mind would not need to be modeled in order to imitate the outputs.)
mdp2021 4y ago
> "Understanding" is just as difficult to define as "intelligence" But in this field the latter is the generic term and the former an implementation detail. For clarity: there are disciplines about it. > Any outward sign of understanding can and will be shown by a sufficiently complex artificial system sooner or later And? That remains a mockery of understanding, instead of the thing itself. > People keep being disappointed by these results because magic tricks just aren't as impressive if you know how they work No. The issue here is that illusionism ("«magic tricks»") is not magic, and it sometimes pretends to be it on bewildering stances. Such as, if you want the engine to compose like Beethoven, make it understand and thus reconstruct the implicit references in rhythm melody and structure, or without that, you may implement further tests while keeping it a mockery machine, but you start looking like putting makeup on a puppet.

meroes 4y ago

“The human mind is not qualitatively different than sufficiently complex software”. Just no. Nothing AI researchers are building has subjective experience.

KyleLewis 4y ago
I could be wrong but I think they might have been talking about a hypothetical, arbitrarily complex software. As a limiting case, if software were simulating a mind down to the quarks, it becomes unclear what the difference would be. I agree with your point of course, what we have today is certainly not like a human mind
- notahacker 4y ago
  The problem with the hypothetical arbitrarily complex software is that there is no particular reason to believe it could exist, never mind that it will (at least not for meaningful definitions of "software"). A computer so powerful and a programmer so smart that they can represent the behaviour of the constituent parts of a human brain at the subatomic level as a state machine programmable to achieve different thought processes is at least as much of an imaginary construct as the metaphysical dualist mind it's supposed to be a counter argument to. And you don't need to think that your brain is anything other than an immensely complex state machine to think that some of the core parts of what we consider to be self-awareness (emotions... or chemical responses to certain stimuli which have over billions of years helped the brain parts of biological organisms make more optimal eating and fighting and fucking decisions for the survival of the gene code) are an altogether different level of problem to train an AI on than solving maths problems or generating text. Not least because if you want AIs to write love letters to each other, you can get very pleasing results quickly with a Chinese room without the inconvenience of having to simulate all the intractable chemistry of desire.

hooande 4y ago

The human mind is likely infinitely more complex than software that imitates any aspect of it. Just like human thought process is orders of magnitude more complex than that of a parrot.

sdenton4 4y ago
You would be surprised at the complexities of parrots, though...
drdeca 4y ago
The Bekenstein bound seems to suggest that the human brain is only finitely more complex. (And, if the mind is more complex than the physical/material brain, then, unless whatever else the mind is has a non-material influence on the material brain, any additional complexity of the mind would not need to be modeled in order to imitate the outputs.)

mdp2021 4y ago

> "Understanding" is just as difficult to define as "intelligence" But in this field the latter is the generic term and the former an implementation detail. For clarity: there are disciplines about it. > Any outward sign of understanding can and will be shown by a sufficiently complex artificial system sooner or later And? That remains a mockery of understanding, instead of the thing itself. > People keep being disappointed by these results because magic tricks just aren't as impressive if you know how they work No. The issue here is that illusionism ("«magic tricks»") is not magic, and it sometimes pretends to be it on bewildering stances. Such as, if you want the engine to compose like Beethoven, make it understand and thus reconstruct the implicit references in rhythm melody and structure, or without that, you may implement further tests while keeping it a mockery machine, but you start looking like putting makeup on a puppet.