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I ended up reading the book Blindsight (Peter Watts) that's been floating around in comments recently. A major theme in the book is intelligence and its relatio
by _nhynes 4y ago
I ended up reading the book Blindsight (Peter Watts) that's been floating around in comments recently. A major theme in the book is intelligence and its relation to consciousness (including whether consciousness is even beneficial). If you agree with the idea, you'd consider that DALL-E is indeed intelligent even though it appears to be a "Chinese Room". Humans would be "gluing things together" in just the same way, but with this odd introspective ability that makes it seem different.
- miguelxpn 4y agoThat book gave me the highest dose of existential crisis I've ever felt. I should probably re-read it.
- doph 4y agoExactly (and cannot recommend Blindsight highly enough). Of course DALL-E is a Chinese Room. The most exciting and subversive idea in Blindsight is that consciousness is maladaptive, and the scramblers are _more_ fit for the lack of it. Long after neutral nets have surpassed our functional intelligence, we'll still be criticizing their ability to navel-gaze as well as humans.
- FeepingCreature 4y agoOf course, DALL-E can only get away with not being introspective because it has reinforcement learning holding its hand. Bit harder to curate a clean training set without consciousness. Personally, I suspect consciousness is intrinsically connected with whatever lets humans learn things by looking at and thinking about a single example.
- soulofmischief 4y agoI get what you're saying, but it's important to also consider how evolution provides for us as well by giving us neural structures already tuned for things like recognizing faces and recognizing danger. I do wonder how much realtime danger analysis has to do with consciousness.
- FeepingCreature 4y agoI'd doubt it has much of a connection. Consciousness can do many things, but generally not quickly.
- soulofmischief 4y agoHmm. I'd say subconscious might get you away from immediate danger, but it's often a conscious decision to anticipate future danger based on past events, and this feedback loop is sometimes quite small, such as deciding which path to take while being pursued.
- salawat 4y agoI'm reminded of a meme... >Giant robot pilot looking smug Caption: I am a genius! Picture break: >same robot pilot now looking horrified. >Caption: Oh no! I can tell you right frigging now, the average person is trained through education to build up confidence they know what they are doing, then over the next decade plus face-checked against reality to build an aversion/paranoia matrix. The modern world is essentially orchestrated by people who build self-sustaining support structures of specialists. We've done a great job at building co-dependent specialists, but a terrible one at building generalists.
- fatherzine 4y agoConsciousness is very much adaptive, though it requires a sense of the metaphysical / transcendent to behave in that way. Theologically speaking, God brings Life and the Devil brings Death. Sadly, our modern brave new world has taken "Gott ist Tot" as a triumphalist proclamation, and not the lamentation it was meant to be.
- kebman 4y agoBut Sontag suggests the use of Batailleist `powerful communication’ to modify and read consciousness. The subject is contextualised into a predialectic nationalism that includes language as a totality.
- fatherzine 4y agoHi there GPT-3 bot. Edit. Don't really want to be unnecessarily flippant here. Perhaps this is a real person attempting to communicate. Sadly, I was unable to follow through, the text jumps wildly between seemingly unrelated subjects.
- kebman 4y agoNope, that was actually the Postmodern Generator.^[1] But nice try! ;) [1]: https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
- fatherzine 4y agoHaha, <fist bump>.
- wpietri 4y agoIt's far too early to tell if consciousness is adaptive. Has it enabled humans to be wildly successful? In the short term, sure! But the long term is unclear. E.g., look at how the technological progress it makes is at risk of destroying human civilization. A series of ecological boom/bust cycles could lead toward negative selection for consciousness. Or we might manage to wipe out ourselves or, say, most mammals, leading life on earth to start over as it did 65m years ago. But even without that, it's not clear to me that consciousness will really win out. Look at the number of successful people who are not only painfully unreflective, but need to be to keep doing what they're doing. I could name a lot of people, but today's good example is Alex Jones, whose whole (very profitable) schtick is based on refusing to be fully conscious of what he's saying: https://popehat.substack.com/p/alex-jones-at-the-tower-of-babel https://popehat.substack.com/p/alex-jones-at-the-tower-of-ba... And this is hardly a new idea. Vonnegut wrote a novel where humans end up evolving into something like a sea lion. The point being "all the sorrows of humankind were caused by 'the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain'", an error evolution ends up remedying.
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- Pulcinella 4y agoI think the book does make a point that maybe one benefit of consciousness the ability to filter through all the information and spam that conscious beings produce. E.g. The scramblers may view all the radio waves we blast everywhere as attempts at warfare and reducing the fitness of other species. Why else would a species emit so much information if not to DDOS their enemies?! tl;dr consciousness is a defense against ****posting and trolling caused by conscious beings.
- twak 4y agofantastic book. Made me consider the question of whether consciousness exists at all or if it is just some hack by evolution to allow introspection. I haven't found a definition of consciousness which is quantifiable or stands up to serious rigour. If it can't be measured and isn't necessary for intelligence, perhaps there is no magic cut-off between the likes of Dall-E and human intelligence. Perhaps the Chinese-room is as conscious as a human (and a brick)?
- f38zf5vdt 4y ago> Made me consider the question of whether consciousness exists at all or if it is just some hack by evolution to allow introspection. Can't it be both? What's the difference? Evolution just responds to the environment, so a method of complex interaction with the environment like "consciousness" or "ever-polling situational awareness" seems like par for the course.
- croes 4y agoEvolution is the result of the environment not a response. Giraffes didn't get a long neck because the food was out of reach, giraffes have a lock neck because the one without just died.
- f38zf5vdt 4y agoIt's a response caused by survival. The environment is the stimuli and the genetics that are not eliminated are cultivated. If I introduce an antibiotic into a culture of bacteria and they evolve resistance, then they appear to be responding to it on a collective level.
- croes 4y ago"Since bacteria are extremely numerous, random mutation of bacterial DNA generates a wide variety of genetic changes. Through mutation and selection, bacteria can develop defense mechanisms against antibiotics." https://health.mo.gov/safety/antibioticresistance/generalinfo.php https://health.mo.gov/safety/antibioticresistance/generalinf... Mutation happens all the time because cell replication isn't perfect, some mutation are irrelevant, some deadly, some bring better chance of survival. It's not a response just the result. Or how does the bacteria know it's an antibiotic and not just water? It doesn't, water just isn't a evolutionary filter, antibiotics are.
- benlivengood 4y agoIt's not clear what generates consciousness. Until we know for sure (e.g. A/B testing with humans who can report when they do and do not experience consciousness in different neural configurations) then I think it's impossible to know what level of conscious experience large ML models have. Blindsight is an excellent book in its exploration of consciousness, but the speculative part is that a working sense of self isn't necessary for embodied intelligence (like the scramblers), which I tend to doubt. An agent without a model of itself will have difficulty planning actions; knowing how its outputs/manipulators are integrated into the rest of reality will be a minimum requirement to control them effectively. It is certainly possible that "self" or "I" will be absent; humans can already turn the ego off with drugs and still (mostly) function but they remain conscious.
- mrcartmeneses 4y agoPeople say this a lot online in this kind of debate but you can see which areas of the brain light up in people who are conscious and how that’s different from people who are asleep or in a persistent vegetative state. We have a very good idea of what consciousness is and it’s definitely not linear neural net with a discrete input and output. Having said that, the nerve that connects the eye to the brain could be considered similar to a modern neural net. It looks like we’re beginning to get the building blocks of consciousness together. But we don’t yet know how to combine the wave functions into a chorus necessary to achieve GI
- stormbrew 4y agoI think you're using a different meaning of the word conscious than the GP? You seem to be talking about awake, they're talking about a much more abstract idea. A person who is sleeping or in a vegetative state is not currently getting new inputs fed into some parts of their brain, so it's not surprising that their brain "lights up differently," nor does it imply anything about a piece of software that is getting new inputs that might be being integrated into its model (of course, a model that is trained and then repeatedly used without further integration is not in any way comparable to a brain). This more abstract idea of consciousness is definitely not a solved problem - people can't even manage to agree on whether non-human animals have it. And a lot of internet arguments for why this or that neural network can't be conscious probably also rule 5 year olds out of it too.
- joe_the_user 4y agoThe "Chinese room" argument, so far as I understand it, applies to any discreet computation process simulating consciousness. The argument of the article is that DALL-E doesn't respond appropriately to a particular kind of input - two entities in some kind of spatial relationship (that it hasn't often seen). Dall-E's not extrapolating the three-D world but stretching a bunch 2-D images together with some heuristics. That works to create a lot of plausible images sure but it implies to this ability might not, say, be able to be useful for the manipulation of 3-D space. So, given a "Chinese room" is just a computation, it's plausible that some Chinese room could handle 3-d image manipulation more effectively than this particular program. Which is to say, "no, the criticism isn't this is a Chinese room, that is irrelevant".
- jrlocke 4y agoThe Chinese room argument itself isn't very compelling. Surely the constituent parts of the brain are fundamentally governed solely by physics, surely thought arises solely from the physical brain, and surely the constituent parts (and thus thought) could be described by a sufficiently complex discreet computation. Are we not conscious?
- indigo945 4y agoI think a considerable subset of the people who do make use of the Chinese room argument also subscribe to some form of mind-body dualism, where consciousness does not or does not completely arise from physical processes.
- jrlocke 4y agoTo be more explicit, I'm saying I find it weird to hear so much about the Chinese room argument from a crowd of (presumably) materialists.
- notahacker 4y agoI see it the other way round. The Chinese Room and the brain of a Chinese-speaking person are completely different physical processes. Looked at on an atomic level, they have almost nothing in common. Mind-body dualists may or may not agree that the room is not "conscious" in the way a human is, but if consciousness is purely a material process, I can't see how the materialist can possibly conclude all the relevant properties of the completely dissimilar room and person are the same. Those that would argue the Chinese Room is "conscious" in the same way as the Chinese person are essentially arguing that the dissimilarity of the physical processes is irrelevant: the "consciousness" of the Chinese person doesn't arise from molecules bouncing around their brain in very specific ways, but exists at some higher level of abstraction shared with the constituent molecules of pieces of paper with instructions written in English and outputs written in Chinese. The idea our consciousness exists in some abstract sense which transcends the physics of the brain is not a new one of course. Historically we called such abstractions souls...
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- metacritic12 4y agoAre humans just "Chinese rooms"? We don't really understand anything deeply, but our neurons just fire in a way that gives good responses and makes us feel like we understand stuff.
- monkeynotes 4y agoI think this is exactly true.
- plmpsu 4y agoNo you don't.
- TrevorJ 4y agoI'm becoming convinced that these algorithms are huge steps towards AGI simply because AGI might end up being a collection of many of these domain-specific networks with a network sitting above them who's only role is to interrogate the sub networks for solutions to the problem at hand, and discriminate which solution(s) are most worth trying, simulating those and then picking one out and executing it in the real world. That seems to me to be pretty close to what we as humans do.
- WitCanStain 4y agoCognitive scientists have been exploring this idea for a while, e.g. the Modularity of Mind Hypothesis. It would be very interesting to see if learnings from this field can be further applied to AI development.
- ausbah 4y agothe problem you run into then is how does it adapt to new domains? sure large models display some degree of generalization, but new tasks will certainly ask things the network couldn't get
- TrevorJ 4y agoI think that's valid, however, I think the modular approach would allow for a lot more cross domain flexibility because I suspect that a large subset of disparate tasks do actually decompose themselves into discrete subtasks that can be useful across domains. Adding to that, if you can compose multiple sub networks together then you've really got something. You can build a lot of different buildings from bricks without needing to invent new kinds of brick basically. For instance, think about the large number of domains that robust computer vision would be useful in. Then think about the fact that if the computer understands the 3D space around it, it can hand that model off to a network that does predictive physics simulation. Now you've got something that would be useful across a extremely wide range of domains.
- naugtur 4y agoThe modular approach doesn't need to be enforced by strict boundaries. One network that starts with various components but can be remodeled and even merged together as it goes could adapt. What we're discussing here is merely a starting state of something that'd have to rebuild itself. Or maybe evolving modalities within one network is easier than putting it together.
- planetsprite 4y agohuman brains are a chinese room. Our DNA and experiences wrote the book.
- the8472 4y agore the chinese room, you might want to consider the computational and memory complexity of a lookup table. https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf page 14
- koboll 4y ago>Humans would be "gluing things together" in just the same way I'm often struck by how stark this is in ancient fantasy art. The 'monsters' are usually just different animal parts remixed -- the head of one on the body of another, things like that. Fundamentally, we're all doing DALL-E-ish hybridization when we're being creative; it's very difficult to imagine things that are truly alien such that they're outside the bounds of our 'training data'.