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The argument that deep network algorithms are just matrix operations is not compelling to me as a reason we aren’t getting there… I believe two things: -1. th

• _bruh 4y ago
• williamtrask 4y ago
  Assumption: determinism Counterexample: quantum mechanics
  • feet 4y ago
    What, exactly, in quantum mechanics is nondeterministic and how does that translate to nondeterministicness in the macroscopic/biochemical world?
    • dekhn 4y ago
      wavefunction collapse is nondeterministic (at least, that's my simple understanding). There is no known relationship between wavefunction collapse macroscopic biological systems. There are examples of quantum coherence, though.
      • virgildotcodes 4y ago
        It's my understanding that the many worlds interpretation puts us back on track for a fully deterministic universe, no?
        • dekhn 4y ago
          I do not think the many worlds interpretation provides any value. I only care about what is experimentally determinable.
          • feet 4y ago
            100% agree. Theory is nice but meaningless until we have evidence
            • barneygale 4y ago
              Like all interpretations of quantum mechanics, then.
      • feet 4y ago
        My understanding was that we don't have the ability to predict collapse, but that doesn't make it nondeterministic. I could be wrong about this, physics is not my field If there is no connection between wave function collapse and macroscopic biological systems, then that would mean that it doesn't matter. The macroscopic/biochemical world is still deterministic
        • esarbe 4y ago
          There's more than enough evidence that macroscopic biological entities use processes that depend on qm effects. See for example photosynthesis or enzymatic reactions. As I understand it, the wave collapse is wholly probabilistic and there's no "hidden data" (hidden variable[0]) that we could now to predict the outcome. At least not if we want keep expecting locality. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden-variable_theory
  • armitron 4y ago
    Assumption: consciousness depends on quantum effects in the brain Counterexample: quantum effects are rare in non-atomic scale, no data whatsoever that indicates they are involved in high level brain functions, rather a lot of data pointing towards the opposite, given rapid progress in modeling said functions.
    • tuckerman 4y ago
      It might not depend on indeterminacy, but a number of “large” effects are themselves the result of an underlying quantum process, e.g. the black body radiation spectrum.
  • stale2002 4y ago
    Quantum mechanics isn't a blocker here. Even if you think quantum mechanics are a necessary part of consciousness, we could use quantum mechanics to simulate quantum mechanics.
  • katmannthree 4y ago
    Counter-counterexample: Superdeterminism.
  • swid 4y ago
    It may not be needed for consciousness, but even if it is, we can simulate quantum mechanics on traditional hardware, just slowly compared to real life. This is why I brought up possible optimizations to the real world. If it takes us 100 years to simulate 1 second of consciousness with quantum effects, the consciousness will just experience time differently than we do. Personally, I think we don’t need to take quantum effects into account to achieve consciousness.
• gonehome 4y ago
  The double negatives in your first sentence are hard to parse. I think I agree with what you’re arguing though. Basically the scaling hypothesis.
• shkkmo 4y ago
  There are plenty of behaviors of complex systems that we still struggle to model accurately. While we may be able to build conscious, sapient entities, I think that accurate modeling of human cognition, especially and individual human's cognition, may well be much, much further off, if at all possible. While quantum effects may or may not be directly involved in human cognition, the fundemental difficulties getting an accurate measure of brain state may prevent us from doing any more that making a rough copy.
  • swid 4y ago
    I agree with that - maybe the only practical way to get a human brain map of sufficient detail to fully simulate is to grow it virtually, and maybe this would take too long compared to a human life. I think it’s just a useful starting point to make the argument it is possible given infinite time and perfect data. Then, we can ask how much can be optimized and how to get the structure needed digitized.
• joak 4y ago
  Regarding consciousness: we don't know how consciousness is implemented in the brain, that's true, but we might be able to implement it quite easily in a computer. I'm not sure if there is definition of consciousness everyone agree on, but let's try something: consciousness is the ability to perceive our own thoughts. Consciousness matters a lot because it allows reflexiveness. Sometimes we use it as scientific definition of "soul" as in sentences like: "upload your consciousness" (from believers of Singularity) Decartes' "I think therefore I am" should be rephrase as "I perceive I think therefore I am" The perception of own thoughts is not something difficult for a computer. Just check the activity monitor or run the ps command. We might a attribute too much importance to consciousness because without it we don't know we think.
  • joak 4y ago
    We can run profilers and debuggers on themselves. We can imagine a model taking as input its own internal data. Doesn't seem a big deal...
  • HKH2 4y ago
    > I'm not sure if there is definition of consciousness everyone agree on, but let's try something: consciousness is the ability to perceive our own thoughts. Since you seem to be treating 'thought' metaphorically, how about we say that consciousness is the ability to perceive our own feelings? Are there beings that are conscious that do not have any feelings at all?
    • joak 4y ago
      By thought I meant "process happening the brain". It is not metaphorical, it's a very concrete physical process. A perception is a particular thought originated directly from a physical phenomenon (eg. pressure on the skin, light on the retina, ...). So when we are conscious we can perceive our perceptions, our "feelings", and any kind of thoughts. We can for sure perceive our own consciousness, we are conscious of being conscious. In the same way the current ps process is in the list of active processes obtained running ps. Btw: what is a feeling? A particular kind of thought? A emotion maybe? It seems to me that it's a thought which origin is mysterious, unknown, unconscious, ie not conscious.
• hooande 4y ago
  Consciousness is the result of billions of years of random chance in the form of evolution. We can simulate a nuclear reaction, but our minds can't even conceive of the time scale of a billion years or any of the associated concepts. "We can do one complicated thing, therefore we can do anything" is a shaky basis for beliefs. It's possible that multiplying matrices can replicate a couple of billion years worth of dice rolls. but I doubt it
  • swid 4y ago
    I meant something else. If you can perfectly simulate a rock, as it exists in reality, you can also simulate a brain. The universe doesn’t care that the brain produces thoughts. Thoughts are an emergent property of the network, there is no rule in the universe to treat the brain different. So if we think we can simulate matter, with sufficiently close behavior to reality, than that is already sufficient to produce AGI, and none of the code will look like it provides thinking… it will just look like math/physics.
    • ineedasername 4y ago
      But we can't perfectly simulate a rock, or a nuclear reaction. Perfect is an extremely high bar here. It would probably be difficult to simulate a rock sufficiently well to fool someone with the combined skills of a geologist & 3D graphic designer.
      • swid 4y ago
        I'm not suggesting we can do this today (no universal theory), and I'm not suggesting it is practical in the sense that we can simulate that much amount of matter in a certain amount of time. But I think it's theoretically possible. There is also the question about how much simulation would be necessary to get approximately real life results that includes consciousness -There was a very detailed simulation of a cell[1], I think that used a library of known chemical interactions. This is not the way the universe works, but such an approach might still simulate life, including people, with enough running time. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a-cell-probes-lifes-hidden-rules-20220224/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a...
• zxwx 4y ago
  > 1… If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness Why do you think this? What other simulations are the same thing as what they’re simulating? Based on observation of lots of these discussions, I also think people who don’t have much experience writing simulations miss the nuances involved. What is it to “simulate nuclear reactions”? It’s entirely context dependent on the problem you’re trying to answer. If you’re trying to predict statistical behavior of a system, doable; if you’re trying to actually predict when a particular atom splits and which way the neutrons fly… no. > 2… [Consciousness rests on] some kind of interconnected network like neural networks. When is a computerized neural network aka a collection of tensors in RAM a network? When you’re not processing a tensor actively, there is no network. When the CPU suspends your hypothetically conscious neural network to move processing between cores and GPU, where does the consciousness go? Where does the network go?
  • swid 4y ago
    1) I used nuclear reactions just as a fill in to say it should be possible to simulate matter with close enough approximation to facilitate thought. This was posited in "A New Kind of Math" which suggests there is a thing as "computation equivalence", which is a theory I mostly subscribe to. If we wanted to simulate a human naively, we would probably only care about biochemical reactions at earth like temps, not nuclear or quantum physics. 2) I’m not sure matrix math is sufficient, but let’s ignore that because I feel some kind of math is sufficient, and any computer program will have the same question apply. I also feel the universe might be the most efficient computer in time and space, which means we aren’t living in a simulation, because the computer would be bigger and run time slower than the reality it simulates. - I don’t think it matters where the network is in reality. Virtual is fine. In a mostly perfect simulation of reality (let say enough to accurately model biochemical processes), there will be some state of the program, and for something living in the simulation, they will feel alive if they are complex enough. They will experience time differently than we do, but they will arrive at their own conclusions as part of the simulation.
    • closedloop129 4y ago
      > I used nuclear reactions just as a fill in to say it should be possible to simulate matter with close enough approximation to facilitate thought. If we can use Quantum Computers to hugely accelerate some calculations, then you can't use regular computers to accurately simulate nuclear reactions in a reasonable time frame.
• ineedasername 4y ago
  >If we can simulate nuclear reactions, we can simulate consciousness, and that will result in real consciousness. Nuclear -> consciousness doesn't really follow, especially when any simulations of nuclear reactions are founded in an extremely more comprehensive understanding of nuclear physics than we have of consciousness. Next, the implication of simulation -> creation, when applied consistently to you example, is that simulating a nuclear reaction sufficiently well could produce an actual nuclear reaction, but I doubt anyone is going to fat-finger the next Chernobyl by screwing up a simulation. It may be entirely possible that the tools needed to create a consciousness are as different from those needed to simulate one as are the tools needed to simulate a nuclear reaction from those needed make one.
  • samhw 4y ago
    I don’t quite get this simulation/execution distinction. Consciousness is a function, not an entity. To simulate a function is precisely to execute it. There’s no meaningful distinction whatever. (It’s the second-order distinction between simulating/executing an x86 processor in the abstract, vs simulating/executing a specific identified Intel chip product, if you like.)
    • ineedasername 4y ago
      I think the issue is that the word "simulation", when applied to a nuclear reaction, means something very different than when applied to consciousness, and that creates confusion. If we simulate consciousness then, well, it's really not quite a simulation, it's the thing itself. A better term might be "artificial". The simulation, as with x86, is of the hardware or conditions that allow the function to be executed and not the function itself. In this sense of things, a nuclear reaction isn't a function in the same way that consciousness is a function.
  • blafunke 4y ago
    Simpsons did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n23oapBEao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n23oapBEao
• accountofme 4y ago
  you know what...i am amazed that noone picks up that we have a planet scale network that could be exactly that (conscious)! The internet! we all send packets of information to various systems that then amplify thst data to other neurons... (us humans and our computers are the neurons in this situation)... Edit: spelling grammar
  • WitCanStain 4y ago
    With humans, the activity in the network results in coherent macro-level actions. With the internet, there is no such coherence. If the internet is conscious it is probably having a full-brain, 24/7 epilepsy seizure.
• deltaonefour 4y ago
  >the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules It does not. The rules are very complex. Schrodinger's equation is incredibly hard to solve. And we don't even know all the rules or if our current model of the rules is correct.
  • swid 4y ago
    Simple is an ambiguous term. A simple cell is still very complex by other measures. No matter how simple or complex, is it possible to implement the rules of simulated universe on a computer? Can biology be simulated (however slowly) on a computer?
    • deltaonefour 4y ago
      I'm going by your definition and example of simulation. The answer to your question is that it takes a super computer to simulate 5 atoms interacting with each other. And the simulation won't be real time either. So reality is not "simple" enough to be simulated accurately. The simulations that do exist are gross simplifications called models and in no way accurate to what's really going on. Those models are usually application specific and are only relatively accurate within that scope. You can make an argument that human intelligence can be simulated by a application specific model, however your statement of the universe being axiomatically premised in simple rules is categorically wrong.
      • swid 4y ago
        Simple is ambiguous as I said, people can and do claim anything is simple. So it can’t be categorically wrong. If it’s possible to simulate five atoms, why not more? I’m not placing time or memory bounds on the process. I linked to a simulation of an artificial cell [1] in a different comment, I’ll toss the link here too. As I said there, this is not the way the universe works, but I think this approach to simulation may support real thought (ignoring time and memory requirements). It supports cell division. [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a-cell-probes-lifes-hidden-rules-20220224/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/most-complete-simulation-of-a...