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Begin by dispensing wishful thinking, next, think clearly. We do not establish the nature of reality by survey, neither of human survey nor of machine. That re

Begin by dispensing wishful thinking, next, think clearly. We do not establish the nature of reality by survey, neither of human survey nor of machine. That responses are generated by any system is no grounds for assuming anything. We can establish mental properties through ordinary physical means. Give a chicken cocaine, give a boy Valium; give a bear a lobotomy, and so on. Whatever mental property you have can be biochemically moderated across all objects which share that property. That bugs bunny protests his own consciousness is no grounds whatsoever to suppose ink can think. Such nonesense is protoschizoprehnic.

jameshart 4y ago
I'm sorry, you lost me. Is your point that we can only demonstrate consciousness through pharmaceuticals or surgery?
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Whatever way we demonstrate it, it isnt via Q&A. This is the worst form of pseudoscientific psychology you can imagine. You're likewise neither high on cocaine just because you can type out an aggresive twitchy response. Questions and Answers dont form the basis of empirical tests for physical properties, being neither valid tests nor reliable ones. The whole of psychology stands as the unreporducible example of this. You can, in any case, replace any conversation with a dictionary from Q->A, turning each reply in turn into a hash table look-up. Hash tables dont think, hash tables model conversations, thef. being a model of a conversation is not grounds to suppose consciousness. QED
  - user5678 4y ago
  - dreamlessfate 4y ago
    It sounds like you're contradicting yourself. -- >Whatever way we demonstrate it, it isnt via Q&A. This is the worst form of pseudoscientific psychology you can imagine. ...versus... >Hash tables dont think, hash tables model conversations, thef. being a model of a conversation is not grounds to suppose consciousness. -- Before I dissect your contradiction and lay it out, I'll give you the chance to respond. Why do you feel that Q&A is "the worst form of pseudoscientific psychology you can imagine" ?
    - mjburgess 4y ago
      Because we're interested in the underlying properties of a physical system, eg., people, and this systems happens to be able to provide extremely poor models of itself (Q&A). We're not interested in people's extremely poor self-modelling which is pragmatically useful for managing their lives, we're interested in what they are trying to model: their properties. The same is esp. true of a machine's immitation of "self-reports". We're now two steps removed: at least with people they are actually engaged in self-modelling over time. ChatGPT here isnt updating its self-model in response to its behaviour, it has no self-model nor self-modelling system. To take the output of a text generation alg. as evidence of anything about its own internal state is so profoundly pseudoscientific it's kinda shocking. The whole of the history of science is an attack on this very superstition: that the properties of the world are simply "to be read from" the language we use about it. Every advancement in human knowledge is preconditioned on opposing this falsehood; why jump back into pre-scientific religion as soon as a machine is the thing generating the text? Experiments, measures, validity, reliability, testing, falasification, hypotheses, properties and their degrees.... This is required, it is non-negotiable. And what we have with people who'd print-off ChatGPT and believe it is the worst form of anti-science
      - mannykannot 4y ago
        > The whole of the history of science is an attack on this very superstition: that the properties of the world are simply "to be read from" the language we use about it. This is something where I agree with you. Interestingly, non-naturalistic analytical metaphysics supposes it can do just that. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233114810_What_is_Analytic_Metaphysics_For https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233114810_What_is_A...
        mjburgess 4y ago
        Philosophy is continuous with science in my view and hence in what words express That is, in the use of words. Not in words as objects nor words as mirrors --/ this is the road to non-realist spiritualism I don't have a problem with a person who maintains a non-scientific world view and with electrical AGI mumbojbo But of course, few do. They think that they're empiricists, scientists and in the side of some austere hard look at human beings This is just anti-human spiritualism , it isn't science what makes me vicious on this point is the sense of injury in what these ideas should be about. in my own mildly aristotleian materialist religion How awful to overcome one long veil of tears, only to drape another one on -- these people are capable of seeing past human folly, but fall right into another kind it's disappointing--- we're animals which are both far much more than electric switches and far less this new electic digital spiritualism is a PR grift which i'd prefer dead
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    > Hash tables don't think, hash tables model conversations... They don't think, and they don't get very far in modeling conversations, either. Even the current LLMs are strictly better at modeling conversations than any hash table.
    - jameshart 4y ago
      Actually since GPT is a function that takes a few thousand tokens as input and produces a deterministic probability distribution for ‘next token’, you could in theory just enumerate all possible input sequences, and precache all the corresponding results in a lookup hashtable. That hashtable would be ridiculously larger than the weighted model that constitutes GPT itself. But it at least theoretically could exist. GPT, for all its clever responses, could be replaced with that hashtable with no loss of fidelity. So it is not ‘better’ than a hashtable. It is much better than a hashtable of equivalent size.
      - mannykannot 4y ago
        You could, in principle, use a hash table to implement what an LLM has 'learned' about token occurrences, but LLMs do not return the same response to a given prompt, while hash tables do. Consequently, Mjburgess' attempt to dismiss LLMs as mere hash tables is a flawed argument by analogy. And even if it were a justifiable analogy for LLMs, it does not follow that it applies to Turing-equivalent devices in general. A hash table is unequivocally not a Turing-equivalent device, even though it can be implemented by one. In fact, the more one argues that LLMs are ordinary technology, the greater the challenge they present to the notion that things like conversational language use are beyond such technologies. The most interesting thing about these models, in my opinion, lies in figuring out what their conceptual simplicity says about us.
        jameshart 4y ago
        They return the same probability distribution.
        4y ago
sirsinsalot 4y ago
This patronising response makes up for in flowery imagery what it lacks in reasoning. AI are not a "bugs bunny" where we can observe the total process of creation, one which is is relatively deterministic. We are now engineering complex mechanics with emergent behaviour. There's no reason to assume any of the properties of human consciousness and reasoning is unique to us being made of atoms constructed in a certain way. There's no reason to assume the stored state of zeros and ones, mechanised statistically, can't emerge complexity that asks questions of the fact we are simply state being mechanised statistically too.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Consciousness is a physical property of matter, as any other. Just as liquidity is not a matter of 0s and 1s, nor likewise, can a CPU liquify itself by the osciliation of its electrical field, neither can it think. I don't know from where this new computational mysticism has come, but it is born of exactly the same superstitious impulse which in genesis was God's breath into man-as-clay. Ie., that impulse which says that we are fundamentally abstract and circumstantially spatio-temporal. This is nonsense. It's nonesense when phrased as spirit, and likewise as the structure of 0s and 1s. We are not abstract, we're biological organisms with spatio-temporal properties.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    We're sacks of amino acids dissolved in saltwater. It seems unlikely that we can think either. Nonetheless... some of us manage it.
  - sirsinsalot 4y ago
    No. All humans are is physical state with translation of that state based on stimuli. That produces consciousness as a side effect. There is nothing mystical about it and nothing about it that says it can't be reproduced in other, but comparable forms, in other media or types of machines. To think that our mode of reasoning or our experience is somehow not able to be reproduced is the nonsense. But yeah keep holding human biology on some kind of sacred pedestal. Seeing as neither of us will prove our negative, I guess I'll just tell you I think your thinking is broken anyway.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter 4y ago
> We can establish mental properties through ordinary physical means. The thing is that’s doesn’t get you to qualia, because qualia is ultimately a dualistic concept. Physically demonstrable processes are the “accidents”, qualia are the non-physical “essence” (cf., the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.) That’s why the role qualia play in the AI debate is as a rejection that observable behavior of any quality can demonstrate real understanding/consciousness, which are concepts tied, in the view of people advancing the argument, to qualia.
saghm 4y ago
> We can establish mental properties through ordinary physical means. Give a chicken cocaine, give a boy Valium; give a bear a lobotomy, and so on. Whatever mental property you have can be biochemically moderated across all objects which share that property. All three of those "ordinary physical means" are inherently biological in nature. If you define intelligence as requiring biology, than sure, by definition ChatGPT is not intelligent. If you don't, it's not at all obvious what the equivalent of getting an AI high or doing brain surgery on it would be. Either way, your comment comes across as fairly condescending, and while it might not be intentional, I think it would be reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt when they don't agree with you given that your points will not always come across as obviously correct.
mannykannot 4y ago
> That responses are generated by any system is no grounds for assuming anything. > Give a chicken cocaine, give a boy Valium; give a bear a lobotomy, and so on. What can you conclude from these experiments that does not depend on anything about the responses generated by the subjects?

jameshart 4y ago

I'm sorry, you lost me. Is your point that we can only demonstrate consciousness through pharmaceuticals or surgery?

mjburgess 4y ago
Whatever way we demonstrate it, it isnt via Q&A. This is the worst form of pseudoscientific psychology you can imagine. You're likewise neither high on cocaine just because you can type out an aggresive twitchy response. Questions and Answers dont form the basis of empirical tests for physical properties, being neither valid tests nor reliable ones. The whole of psychology stands as the unreporducible example of this. You can, in any case, replace any conversation with a dictionary from Q->A, turning each reply in turn into a hash table look-up. Hash tables dont think, hash tables model conversations, thef. being a model of a conversation is not grounds to suppose consciousness. QED
- user5678 4y ago
- dreamlessfate 4y ago
  It sounds like you're contradicting yourself. -- >Whatever way we demonstrate it, it isnt via Q&A. This is the worst form of pseudoscientific psychology you can imagine. ...versus... >Hash tables dont think, hash tables model conversations, thef. being a model of a conversation is not grounds to suppose consciousness. -- Before I dissect your contradiction and lay it out, I'll give you the chance to respond. Why do you feel that Q&A is "the worst form of pseudoscientific psychology you can imagine" ?
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Because we're interested in the underlying properties of a physical system, eg., people, and this systems happens to be able to provide extremely poor models of itself (Q&A). We're not interested in people's extremely poor self-modelling which is pragmatically useful for managing their lives, we're interested in what they are trying to model: their properties. The same is esp. true of a machine's immitation of "self-reports". We're now two steps removed: at least with people they are actually engaged in self-modelling over time. ChatGPT here isnt updating its self-model in response to its behaviour, it has no self-model nor self-modelling system. To take the output of a text generation alg. as evidence of anything about its own internal state is so profoundly pseudoscientific it's kinda shocking. The whole of the history of science is an attack on this very superstition: that the properties of the world are simply "to be read from" the language we use about it. Every advancement in human knowledge is preconditioned on opposing this falsehood; why jump back into pre-scientific religion as soon as a machine is the thing generating the text? Experiments, measures, validity, reliability, testing, falasification, hypotheses, properties and their degrees.... This is required, it is non-negotiable. And what we have with people who'd print-off ChatGPT and believe it is the worst form of anti-science
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      > The whole of the history of science is an attack on this very superstition: that the properties of the world are simply "to be read from" the language we use about it. This is something where I agree with you. Interestingly, non-naturalistic analytical metaphysics supposes it can do just that. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233114810_What_is_Analytic_Metaphysics_For https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233114810_What_is_A...
      - mjburgess 4y ago
        Philosophy is continuous with science in my view and hence in what words express That is, in the use of words. Not in words as objects nor words as mirrors --/ this is the road to non-realist spiritualism I don't have a problem with a person who maintains a non-scientific world view and with electrical AGI mumbojbo But of course, few do. They think that they're empiricists, scientists and in the side of some austere hard look at human beings This is just anti-human spiritualism , it isn't science what makes me vicious on this point is the sense of injury in what these ideas should be about. in my own mildly aristotleian materialist religion How awful to overcome one long veil of tears, only to drape another one on -- these people are capable of seeing past human folly, but fall right into another kind it's disappointing--- we're animals which are both far much more than electric switches and far less this new electic digital spiritualism is a PR grift which i'd prefer dead
- mannykannot 4y ago
  > Hash tables don't think, hash tables model conversations... They don't think, and they don't get very far in modeling conversations, either. Even the current LLMs are strictly better at modeling conversations than any hash table.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    Actually since GPT is a function that takes a few thousand tokens as input and produces a deterministic probability distribution for ‘next token’, you could in theory just enumerate all possible input sequences, and precache all the corresponding results in a lookup hashtable. That hashtable would be ridiculously larger than the weighted model that constitutes GPT itself. But it at least theoretically could exist. GPT, for all its clever responses, could be replaced with that hashtable with no loss of fidelity. So it is not ‘better’ than a hashtable. It is much better than a hashtable of equivalent size.
    - mannykannot 4y ago
      You could, in principle, use a hash table to implement what an LLM has 'learned' about token occurrences, but LLMs do not return the same response to a given prompt, while hash tables do. Consequently, Mjburgess' attempt to dismiss LLMs as mere hash tables is a flawed argument by analogy. And even if it were a justifiable analogy for LLMs, it does not follow that it applies to Turing-equivalent devices in general. A hash table is unequivocally not a Turing-equivalent device, even though it can be implemented by one. In fact, the more one argues that LLMs are ordinary technology, the greater the challenge they present to the notion that things like conversational language use are beyond such technologies. The most interesting thing about these models, in my opinion, lies in figuring out what their conceptual simplicity says about us.
      - jameshart 4y ago
        They return the same probability distribution.
        4y ago

sirsinsalot 4y ago

This patronising response makes up for in flowery imagery what it lacks in reasoning. AI are not a "bugs bunny" where we can observe the total process of creation, one which is is relatively deterministic. We are now engineering complex mechanics with emergent behaviour. There's no reason to assume any of the properties of human consciousness and reasoning is unique to us being made of atoms constructed in a certain way. There's no reason to assume the stored state of zeros and ones, mechanised statistically, can't emerge complexity that asks questions of the fact we are simply state being mechanised statistically too.

mjburgess 4y ago
Consciousness is a physical property of matter, as any other. Just as liquidity is not a matter of 0s and 1s, nor likewise, can a CPU liquify itself by the osciliation of its electrical field, neither can it think. I don't know from where this new computational mysticism has come, but it is born of exactly the same superstitious impulse which in genesis was God's breath into man-as-clay. Ie., that impulse which says that we are fundamentally abstract and circumstantially spatio-temporal. This is nonsense. It's nonesense when phrased as spirit, and likewise as the structure of 0s and 1s. We are not abstract, we're biological organisms with spatio-temporal properties.
- jameshart 4y ago
  We're sacks of amino acids dissolved in saltwater. It seems unlikely that we can think either. Nonetheless... some of us manage it.
- sirsinsalot 4y ago
  No. All humans are is physical state with translation of that state based on stimuli. That produces consciousness as a side effect. There is nothing mystical about it and nothing about it that says it can't be reproduced in other, but comparable forms, in other media or types of machines. To think that our mode of reasoning or our experience is somehow not able to be reproduced is the nonsense. But yeah keep holding human biology on some kind of sacred pedestal. Seeing as neither of us will prove our negative, I guess I'll just tell you I think your thinking is broken anyway.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dragonwriter 4y ago

> We can establish mental properties through ordinary physical means. The thing is that’s doesn’t get you to qualia, because qualia is ultimately a dualistic concept. Physically demonstrable processes are the “accidents”, qualia are the non-physical “essence” (cf., the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.) That’s why the role qualia play in the AI debate is as a rejection that observable behavior of any quality can demonstrate real understanding/consciousness, which are concepts tied, in the view of people advancing the argument, to qualia.

saghm 4y ago

> We can establish mental properties through ordinary physical means. Give a chicken cocaine, give a boy Valium; give a bear a lobotomy, and so on. Whatever mental property you have can be biochemically moderated across all objects which share that property. All three of those "ordinary physical means" are inherently biological in nature. If you define intelligence as requiring biology, than sure, by definition ChatGPT is not intelligent. If you don't, it's not at all obvious what the equivalent of getting an AI high or doing brain surgery on it would be. Either way, your comment comes across as fairly condescending, and while it might not be intentional, I think it would be reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt when they don't agree with you given that your points will not always come across as obviously correct.

mannykannot 4y ago

> That responses are generated by any system is no grounds for assuming anything. > Give a chicken cocaine, give a boy Valium; give a bear a lobotomy, and so on. What can you conclude from these experiments that does not depend on anything about the responses generated by the subjects?