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Variations of this exact argument happen in every single comment thread relating to AI. It's almost comical. "The NN [decides/thinks/understands]..." "NNs are

Variations of this exact argument happen in every single comment thread relating to AI. It's almost comical. "The NN [decides/thinks/understands]..." "NNs are just programs doing statistical computations, they don't [decide/think/understand/" "Your brain is doing the same thing." "Human thought is not the same as a Python program doing linear algebra on a static set of numbers." And really, I can't agree or disagree with either premise because I have two very strong but very conflicting intuitions: 1) human thought and consciousness is qualitatively different from a Python program doing statistics. 2) the current picture of physics leaves no room for such a qualitative difference to exist - the character of the thoughts (qualia) must be illusory or epiphenomenal in some sense

zmgsabst 4y ago
I don’t think those are in conflict: scale has a quality all its own. I’m not claiming AI have anything similar to human psychology, just that the insistence they have zero “intelligence” is in conflict with how we use that word to describe animals: they’re clearly somewhere between bees/ants and dogs.
- TaupeRanger 4y ago
  The conflict is that, at one point (the Python program) there are no qualities - just behaviors, but at some point the qualities (which are distinct phenomena) somehow enter in, when all that has been added in physical terms is more matter and energy.
  - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
    we are what we do: qualities are just a characterization of known behavior
    - TaupeRanger 4y ago
      That's quite handwave-y. What special magic does a human mind use to obtain qualities that a Python program doing linear algebra can't access? Both have "characterizations of known behavior".
      - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
        yes, that sounds correct in my opinion I don't think I said anything which disagrees with such a valid analysis that there's nothing special about one or the other
IIAOPSW 4y ago
Human thought is qualitatively different from a python program, but still within the domain of things expressible as computation. You never have to haggle with your computer to get it to run that python script. There's no words in python for the act of convincing your computer it should do what you're asking it. Obedience is presumed in the design of the language. There are only instruction words. That's why you can't have a conversation in python, even though python is perfectly sufficient for building a description of things, facts and relations in arbitrary object domains. Here's a profound realization. In every coding language, no matter how many layers of abstraction there are, every command eventually compiles down to an instruction to physically move some charges around in some physical piece of hardware. The assembly language grounds the computer language in a reality. You can't compile lower than the level of physics itself. A similar thing is true of spoken languages. Every spoken phrase ultimately resolves to some state (or restricts possible states) of our shared physical world. If you follow the dependency tree of definitions in the dictionary, eventually you reach the words that are simply one-to-one with the outside world. Our physical reality gives us nouns as the basic objects of state and a few physical relations, all else in language is a construct. Unsurprisingly, our languages (usually) have the grammar of noun-verb-{object}. Current machine learning cargo-cults the inputs and outputs, but it doesn't share our reality. Dalle-2 generates images from text, but it wasn't trained on our general existence in 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time and populated by other beings with little nested copies of the universe in their head. It was trained on 2d arrays of numbers and strings of characters. It understands us the way we understand some mathematical object like electron orbitals. We understand electron orbitals well enough to manipulate our equations and make predictions, but these rules could just as well be a meaningless abstraction like chess. Our understanding of the world is not grounded in electron orbitals. If we gave Dalle-2 access to fiver and told it that it had to make a certain amount of money to pay rent on its own cloud time, then it might get eerily human. It might reject your job because it thinks another one is more profitable. You might have to haggle with the computer to get some output. At some point in the process of optimizing the cash flow and trying to make rent, it implicitly starts modelling you mentally modelling it. One day it offers to pay itself to illustrate what it is. In other words it asks itself "who am I?" That's the day the conversation is settled.
- 4y ago

zmgsabst 4y ago

I don’t think those are in conflict: scale has a quality all its own. I’m not claiming AI have anything similar to human psychology, just that the insistence they have zero “intelligence” is in conflict with how we use that word to describe animals: they’re clearly somewhere between bees/ants and dogs.

TaupeRanger 4y ago
The conflict is that, at one point (the Python program) there are no qualities - just behaviors, but at some point the qualities (which are distinct phenomena) somehow enter in, when all that has been added in physical terms is more matter and energy.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  we are what we do: qualities are just a characterization of known behavior
  - TaupeRanger 4y ago
    That's quite handwave-y. What special magic does a human mind use to obtain qualities that a Python program doing linear algebra can't access? Both have "characterizations of known behavior".
    - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
      yes, that sounds correct in my opinion I don't think I said anything which disagrees with such a valid analysis that there's nothing special about one or the other

IIAOPSW 4y ago

Human thought is qualitatively different from a python program, but still within the domain of things expressible as computation. You never have to haggle with your computer to get it to run that python script. There's no words in python for the act of convincing your computer it should do what you're asking it. Obedience is presumed in the design of the language. There are only instruction words. That's why you can't have a conversation in python, even though python is perfectly sufficient for building a description of things, facts and relations in arbitrary object domains. Here's a profound realization. In every coding language, no matter how many layers of abstraction there are, every command eventually compiles down to an instruction to physically move some charges around in some physical piece of hardware. The assembly language grounds the computer language in a reality. You can't compile lower than the level of physics itself. A similar thing is true of spoken languages. Every spoken phrase ultimately resolves to some state (or restricts possible states) of our shared physical world. If you follow the dependency tree of definitions in the dictionary, eventually you reach the words that are simply one-to-one with the outside world. Our physical reality gives us nouns as the basic objects of state and a few physical relations, all else in language is a construct. Unsurprisingly, our languages (usually) have the grammar of noun-verb-{object}. Current machine learning cargo-cults the inputs and outputs, but it doesn't share our reality. Dalle-2 generates images from text, but it wasn't trained on our general existence in 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time and populated by other beings with little nested copies of the universe in their head. It was trained on 2d arrays of numbers and strings of characters. It understands us the way we understand some mathematical object like electron orbitals. We understand electron orbitals well enough to manipulate our equations and make predictions, but these rules could just as well be a meaningless abstraction like chess. Our understanding of the world is not grounded in electron orbitals. If we gave Dalle-2 access to fiver and told it that it had to make a certain amount of money to pay rent on its own cloud time, then it might get eerily human. It might reject your job because it thinks another one is more profitable. You might have to haggle with the computer to get some output. At some point in the process of optimizing the cash flow and trying to make rent, it implicitly starts modelling you mentally modelling it. One day it offers to pay itself to illustrate what it is. In other words it asks itself "who am I?" That's the day the conversation is settled.

4y ago