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This just fundamentally feels like a bad hill to die on. Compositionality feels like it is: A) Something AI is currently known to be bad at B) A matter of de

by bloaf 4y ago

This just fundamentally feels like a bad hill to die on. Compositionality feels like it is: A) Something AI is currently known to be bad at B) A matter of degree, not a categorical stumbling block C) Vague enough of a concept that AI skeptics will continue to complain about it even after the field has moved on Your example feels less like a description of "compositionality" and more a description of "qualia." It feels an awful lot like dualists trying to carve out a place for magic that no artificial process can reach.

goatlover 4y ago
Qualia isn't magic. It's a philosophical term for what it feels like. Colors, sounds, pains are what it feels like. It's dismissive to call it magic. How about instead come up with a good physical explanation of consciousness, showing how the hard problem is mistaken? Similarly, if compositionally isn't a categorical stumbling block, then show how that's the case. Making a future prediction about what you think computers will accomplish doesn't do that.
- bloaf 4y ago
  I was not implying qualia were magic, insofar as there can be monistic descriptions of qualia. My criticism was that the example appeared to be steering the conversation into a crash course with dualism by invoking qualia-like explanations of compositionality when it was unnecessary to do so. I believe the "hard problem" is far easier than the dualists' interface problem. It can be explained by viewing consciousness not as the driving force behind our thoughts/feelings, but rather an after-the-fact log the brain keeps for itself. Qualia are therefore distinct from the immediate physics of signals reaching the brain; they are instead the brain's own shorthand description of the impact those signals had on the brain. Compositionality isn't a categorical stumbling block because the machines are actually getting incrementally better at it. The Winoground paper the article references explicitly says that score on their compositionality benchmark does in fact scale with training dataset size, suggesting that while it is more difficult for AI to discover compositionality during training, there is no reason to think it is impossible

by bloaf 4y ago

goatlover 4y ago

Qualia isn't magic. It's a philosophical term for what it feels like. Colors, sounds, pains are what it feels like. It's dismissive to call it magic. How about instead come up with a good physical explanation of consciousness, showing how the hard problem is mistaken? Similarly, if compositionally isn't a categorical stumbling block, then show how that's the case. Making a future prediction about what you think computers will accomplish doesn't do that.

bloaf 4y ago
I was not implying qualia were magic, insofar as there can be monistic descriptions of qualia. My criticism was that the example appeared to be steering the conversation into a crash course with dualism by invoking qualia-like explanations of compositionality when it was unnecessary to do so. I believe the "hard problem" is far easier than the dualists' interface problem. It can be explained by viewing consciousness not as the driving force behind our thoughts/feelings, but rather an after-the-fact log the brain keeps for itself. Qualia are therefore distinct from the immediate physics of signals reaching the brain; they are instead the brain's own shorthand description of the impact those signals had on the brain. Compositionality isn't a categorical stumbling block because the machines are actually getting incrementally better at it. The Winoground paper the article references explicitly says that score on their compositionality benchmark does in fact scale with training dataset size, suggesting that while it is more difficult for AI to discover compositionality during training, there is no reason to think it is impossible