3 ms·

You should check out the YouTube of the cat that was trained to use buttons to speak. It sometimes says things that are surprising which it wasn't trained to sa

You should check out the YouTube of the cat that was trained to use buttons to speak. It sometimes says things that are surprising which it wasn't trained to say directly - like complaining that its owners music is bad. I realize that this isn't contradicting your thesis of language models not being conscious - but I just generally think people should check out things like that cat. So I'm not trying to disagree with you here. I just think the cat is cool. I'm also a fan of ants. They have agriculture. They farm in their underground cities! They keep livestock too; insect livestock, but still! They give them medicines when they get sick, specially cultivated fungus for example. They are so cool.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
I already have, and I'm considering trying it out with my own cat at some point. Cats are way more intelligent than people give them credit for, I agree. But I think you can get very far without the ability to turn the mind's eye inward, and I don't think it's controversial to state that cats don't have a great deal of self-awareness and metacognitive ability. Neosocial insects like ants are amazing indeed. I often wonder what kind of "mind" an anthill has. Hurts just to think about it. And, to quote Oliver Sachs: "I'm not sure about octopuses..."
- mongol 4y ago
  > And, to quote Oliver Sachs: "I'm not sure about octopuses..." I thought this quote was about the octopus that correctly predicted the outcome of games in a FIFA world cup. But seems it was something else?
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    ...predicted? Or CAUSED??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu
    - mongol 4y ago
      It was Paul the Octopus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    Oliver said this during a roundtable discussion on metaphysics with Daniel Dennet, Steve Gould, Rupert Sheldrake, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Toulmin from 1993. It's a fascinating discussion with a lot of my favourite mid-late 20th century thinkers. It's up on youtube, lookup any of the names involved with "roundtable discussion". It's over 3 hours long though. Anyway, Oliver was talking about what kind of mind he imagined various animals having. And that was most of what he had to say on octopuses. It's a bit of a sad watch too because all the participants except Dennet and Sheldrake are dead now.
- JoshCole 4y ago
  A way to make it stop hurting to think about, replaced instead by transcendental beauty, is to abstract pheromones to outcome utility backward induction and the following of pheromones to a single worker being a monte carlo tree search rollout with the pheromones as a guide: they play a mixed strategy proportional to the pheromones. The fading of pheromones becomes something like a weighted moving average. Strong parallels with game theory and reinforcement learning algorithms start to emerge. This model is wrong, but the Earth is also not a perfect sphere. I find it very fun to think about and have been called wierd for taking about ants before with childlike excitement. The AntsCanada channel is fun for watching ecosystems interact with each other. So fascinating. :)

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

I already have, and I'm considering trying it out with my own cat at some point. Cats are way more intelligent than people give them credit for, I agree. But I think you can get very far without the ability to turn the mind's eye inward, and I don't think it's controversial to state that cats don't have a great deal of self-awareness and metacognitive ability. Neosocial insects like ants are amazing indeed. I often wonder what kind of "mind" an anthill has. Hurts just to think about it. And, to quote Oliver Sachs: "I'm not sure about octopuses..."

mongol 4y ago
> And, to quote Oliver Sachs: "I'm not sure about octopuses..." I thought this quote was about the octopus that correctly predicted the outcome of games in a FIFA world cup. But seems it was something else?
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  ...predicted? Or CAUSED??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu
  - mongol 4y ago
    It was Paul the Octopus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Oliver said this during a roundtable discussion on metaphysics with Daniel Dennet, Steve Gould, Rupert Sheldrake, Freeman Dyson, and Stephen Toulmin from 1993. It's a fascinating discussion with a lot of my favourite mid-late 20th century thinkers. It's up on youtube, lookup any of the names involved with "roundtable discussion". It's over 3 hours long though. Anyway, Oliver was talking about what kind of mind he imagined various animals having. And that was most of what he had to say on octopuses. It's a bit of a sad watch too because all the participants except Dennet and Sheldrake are dead now.
JoshCole 4y ago
A way to make it stop hurting to think about, replaced instead by transcendental beauty, is to abstract pheromones to outcome utility backward induction and the following of pheromones to a single worker being a monte carlo tree search rollout with the pheromones as a guide: they play a mixed strategy proportional to the pheromones. The fading of pheromones becomes something like a weighted moving average. Strong parallels with game theory and reinforcement learning algorithms start to emerge. This model is wrong, but the Earth is also not a perfect sphere. I find it very fun to think about and have been called wierd for taking about ants before with childlike excitement. The AntsCanada channel is fun for watching ecosystems interact with each other. So fascinating. :)