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> I'm in awe of what the latest neural networks can produce, but I'm wary to call it “reasoning” or “deciding”. I think humans find it quite difficult to talk

> I'm in awe of what the latest neural networks can produce, but I'm wary to call it “reasoning” or “deciding”. I think humans find it quite difficult to talk about the behaviour of complex entities without using language that projects human-like agency onto those entities. I suspect its the way that our brains work.

Banana699 4y ago
Indeed, I'm an atheist who absolutely loves biology. I adore all the millions upon millions of tiny and huge complex machines that Evolution just spits left and right merely by being a very old, very brutal, and very stupid simulation running for 4 billion years straight on a massive, inefficiently-powered distributed processor. And I can never shake the unconscious feeling that all this is purposeful, the idea that all this came by literally throwing shit at a wall and only allowing what sticks to reproduce warps my mind into unnatural contortions. The sheer amount of order that life is, the sheer regularity and unity of purpose it represents amidst the soup of dead that is the universe. It's... unsettling? Which is why I personally think the typical "Science^TM" way of argument against traditional religions misguided. Typical religons already make the task of refuting them a thousand time easier by assuming a benevolent creator, which a universe like ours, with a big fat Problem Of Evil slapped on its forehead, automatically refutes for you. But the deeper question is whether there is/are Creator(s) at all: ordered, possibly-intellignet (but most definitely not moral by _any_ human standards) entities, which spewed this universe in some manner that can be approximated as purposeful (or even, perhaps, as a by-product of doing a completely unrelated activity, like they created our universe on accident while,or as a result of, doing another activity useful to them, like accidental pregnancies to us humans). This is a far more muddled and interesting question and "Science" emites much more mixed signals than straight answers.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
Start with a system that is only good for representing people having motivations (desired world states) and beliefs (local version of the world state) and things that they said about what they want/believe/heard. Everyone applies force on the world state in their desired direction by saying / doing things and this force is applied in accordance with the world state ultimately affecting what people believe about the world state. For anything in the world state, you can always ask "why" to go to a motivation that caused it and "how" to go from a motivation to a preceding path in the world state. From this system of reasoning about other entities that are reasoning in similar ways, and where there is no absolute truth only belief, you can hack it into a system of general purpose reasoning by personification. You attribute a fictitious consciousness to whatever physical property who's motivations are coincident with whatever physical laws. "The particle wants to be in the ground state". "The Pythagorean tells us what you are trying to do is impossible". "Be nice to your car and it will be nice to you". From a situation where there's only beliefs and statements, we can define truth by inventing a fictitious entity who's belief is by definition always correct. Statements we make are a nested scope, {a world within a world}, and we are contained within the root scope of his statements. In other words if you organize information in a hierarchy, its useful to invent a root user even if its just a useful fiction. God, root, whats the diff?

Banana699 4y ago

Indeed, I'm an atheist who absolutely loves biology. I adore all the millions upon millions of tiny and huge complex machines that Evolution just spits left and right merely by being a very old, very brutal, and very stupid simulation running for 4 billion years straight on a massive, inefficiently-powered distributed processor. And I can never shake the unconscious feeling that all this is purposeful, the idea that all this came by literally throwing shit at a wall and only allowing what sticks to reproduce warps my mind into unnatural contortions. The sheer amount of order that life is, the sheer regularity and unity of purpose it represents amidst the soup of dead that is the universe. It's... unsettling? Which is why I personally think the typical "Science^TM" way of argument against traditional religions misguided. Typical religons already make the task of refuting them a thousand time easier by assuming a benevolent creator, which a universe like ours, with a big fat Problem Of Evil slapped on its forehead, automatically refutes for you. But the deeper question is whether there is/are Creator(s) at all: ordered, possibly-intellignet (but most definitely not moral by _any_ human standards) entities, which spewed this universe in some manner that can be approximated as purposeful (or even, perhaps, as a by-product of doing a completely unrelated activity, like they created our universe on accident while,or as a result of, doing another activity useful to them, like accidental pregnancies to us humans). This is a far more muddled and interesting question and "Science" emites much more mixed signals than straight answers.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

Start with a system that is only good for representing people having motivations (desired world states) and beliefs (local version of the world state) and things that they said about what they want/believe/heard. Everyone applies force on the world state in their desired direction by saying / doing things and this force is applied in accordance with the world state ultimately affecting what people believe about the world state. For anything in the world state, you can always ask "why" to go to a motivation that caused it and "how" to go from a motivation to a preceding path in the world state. From this system of reasoning about other entities that are reasoning in similar ways, and where there is no absolute truth only belief, you can hack it into a system of general purpose reasoning by personification. You attribute a fictitious consciousness to whatever physical property who's motivations are coincident with whatever physical laws. "The particle wants to be in the ground state". "The Pythagorean tells us what you are trying to do is impossible". "Be nice to your car and it will be nice to you". From a situation where there's only beliefs and statements, we can define truth by inventing a fictitious entity who's belief is by definition always correct. Statements we make are a nested scope, {a world within a world}, and we are contained within the root scope of his statements. In other words if you organize information in a hierarchy, its useful to invent a root user even if its just a useful fiction. God, root, whats the diff?