5 ms·

The authors concede that what they call algorithmic AI could, in principle, mimic organic intelligence arbitrarily closely. To maintain that this is not intelli

The authors concede that what they call algorithmic AI could, in principle, mimic organic intelligence arbitrarily closely. To maintain that this is not intelligence without begging the question, they need to have some relevant difference between the two which is not simply saying that Turing machines and living organisms are different categories. From the discussion (and especially section 7) it is clear that all their attempts to defend their position will fall back on one thing: Turing machines are deterministic. The simplest response to that is that as soon as a machine (including a digital computer) is interacting with the real world, it is tapping into a source of entropy and its behavior is no longer determined fully by its programming. Alternatively, if one holds that the universe is deterministic, then living organisms are, which also defeats the author's last stand.

joshspankit 4y ago
It’s funny to me to see this juxtaposed with the arguments from the other side: Society had long argued that animals were not intelligent, and that instincts were deterministic.
- pnf 4y ago
  Instincts in animals (including humans) are deterministic insofar as they determine the behavior of the animal. A bird may choose one stick or another but it can't choose not to build a nest. A human can. This may be unique to humans. Heidegger refers to this as world-openness, meaning our world is not closed by our instincts. Unlike most animals, humans don't possess enough instincts to survive in nature. We are "insufficiently-determined". Hence, to survive, we augment our nature with our culture, which acts as a second nature within which we can act unthinkingly (as animals do). Without this second nature we shall surely die (hence the furious culture wars). Not incidentally, this is one of the anthropological arguments against state of nature political theories: there's no such thing and never has been in the history of the species. Animals may be more or less undetermined but a bee will make honey and an ant will gather food regardless of any individual instance of bee or ant intelligence. The problem with the above objection is that there is no account of "meaning" in what an AGI does. In other words, it's still a computer. To say that the entropy of the system will determine the entity's indeterminism is akin to arguments saying Schrodinger's cat is evidence for the possibility of human free will. It's a category error. Unless you want to argue that humans are also computers (which is the position of many strict materialists) then there is still a huge gap to account for in terms of meaning that can't be defined away satisfyingly. We all know what it's like to be an intelligence. At best, people say we can't know if an AGI also knows that because we can't inspect their "minds". This argument is justified by recourse to the principle of the multiple instantiability of intelligence. If we admit that non-carbon-based life forms could be intelligent (e.g., extraterrestrials) then we may admit that intelligence could be in silica as well. Without the ability to introspect other minds, we assume they are like ours and not simply "zombies". The above arguments (reducible to "Well, how do you KNOW anyone else has a mind?") are based in a kind of skeptical solipsism. The part about intelligence being demarcated by non-determinism and the way that argument fails is a side-step of the hard problem of consciousness.
  - nb3423 4y ago
    Humans actually take very little to non relevant decisions. The "free will" is mostly an illusion, you "choose" between equivalent options, not between actually different "life paths". You can "decide" you won't "build a nest", but you'll certainly look for refuge if it is raining, or it's very cold. In the end, the human behavior is actually fully deterministic. I'm sure FAANG already know this because they have the datapoints from billions of humans beings doing exactly the same stuff everyday for decades now. This is probably how LLM can extrapolate all the things they "know" from human generated text: their tokens reflect the human behavior determinism a its fullest expression (hence at more data for training, much better/closer their behavior ressemble the human behavior/ideas)
    - pnf 4y ago
      I can't agree with you although I can understand why you believe these things. Human instinct is, as I say, insufficiently-determined for survival. Is "free will" mostly an illusion? Or is it "fully deterministic"? If it is mostly then it is not "fully" determined. I'd be curious to hear how you think that can be and whether you make decisions in your own life or if you are resigned to your fate. In any case, I'm not saying individual humans make many reasoned out decisions. Quite the opposite. Human individuals adopt a cultural second nature bequeathed to them by their heritage to avoid the necessity of making decisions. The culture over time adopts certain default decisions that are advantageous to survival. These are inculcated into the individual via their cultural conditioning. A baby has no culture and very few instincts (hunger, pleasure, pain, disgust). If you think humans are operating at the lower levels of instinct then why do they pursue or avoid certain behaviors that change over time? One answer is that they are responding to acceptable norms of behavior. As those norms change, they adapt and adopt. They change with the times, as the saying goes. A tiger can be trained to behave a certain way using stimulus/reward training but it doesn't self-regulate according to new norms. One could argue that elephants do this, if properly conditioned with a large stake early in life. But you could also make the case that elephants (like dolphins) are, like humans, self-conscious to a degree. I don't know if this is true, but it is an interesting thought. A more cynical person might say the elephant is not choosing anything but has been trained just like the tiger to avoid pain. LLMs, or let us say AGI based on probabilistic models, can mimic behavior represented in its data and is very impressive at these language games and, with the right feedback, can correct some of its more glaring productions but it must ever be a parasite on human cultural production for it to gain what you call "knowledge". As a thought experiment, suppose we could set an LLM running on autopilot and send it into space with a feedback loop where it could add its productions to its source corpora. Is there any point in the future where it is generating new and coherent output? Or does it degenerate into raving madness?
api 4y ago
It wouldn’t be hard to inject nondeterminism into the neural network directly either.
zmgsabst 4y ago
Also, most AI (eg, chess AI) will pick randomly from a set of top moves — if there are several good options. How random that is we can argue; but how random is your biology really?
evrydayhustling 4y ago
I think the authors' (flawed) bulwark to this would be that their notion of "agency" requires a system with a well defined boundary -- in other words essential entropy cannot come from outside the system. Section 3 spends a lot of words on this concept of agency and closure. > The most central distinction to be made here is that the selection of a specific behavior is not purely reactive, not entirely determined by environmental conditions, but (at least partially) originates from and depends on the internal organization of the system making the selection.... [Agency] requires organizational closure .... Organisms, as autonomous agents, are Kantian wholes, i. e., organized beings with the property that the parts exist for and by means of the whole. What's funny is that I can't imagine how a serious modern biologist signed off on any claims of closure for biological systems. Our own behavior arises out of a mess of genetics, epigenetics, symbiotic relationships, and other external feedback loops which intermingle the "agency" of many self-preserving and self-replicating systems, from transposons hijacking our genetic strands to gut biomes regulating our hormonal balances. The history of biology is essentially one of humans drawing labels around supposed units, and nature making a mockery of those boundaries upon further research. Like other efforts before, this particular definition of closed agency is more a projection of our own psychology than an observation of the natural world.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  Indeed, and I think we can make a couple of specific responses to the passage you quote. The first thing is that if selection of a specific behavior is determined by environmental together with the internal organization of the system making the selection, how is that not reactive, why would it matter if it isn't, and why does that not apply to robots? The second point is that the internal organization of organisms is a result of evolution, so it too has been determined by the environment, and, furthermore, by a process that can be - and is - used to develop programs. There are heavy doses of ontological argumentation here ("this is an X and that is a Y"), but our categories are determined by what we know (or think we do.) As you say, nature can make a mockery of those boundaries.
- asplake 4y ago
  I am not a biologist, but I have read Maturana and Varela (originators of autopoesis), and they are not that naive. If there’s anything they do understand, it is the co-development of things over time in mutual relationship, ie structural coupling.
nb3423 4y ago
But organic intelligence is by its nature - genetics - almost full deterministic, very few - if any - behaviors are left without being pre-ordered by their genetic constrains and/or the cultural environment resulted from those same genetic constrains. Human for instance, are mostly "cognitive hamsters", running every day into their "cognitive wheels": incessantly - but for sleeping - looking for money, happiness, food, sex, etc. mostly a very short list of drives. No matter the year, the geolocation, the language they speak.
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
I can't say this is a strange argument, because it is not intuitive to many. Entropy is mostly boring noise. What's really interesting is Chaos (the mathematical concept). Things such as Turing machines, Cellular Automata (such as Conway's Game Of Life) and Actual Life are chaotic. While Chaotic systems can be highly unpredictable, they are -in fact- deterministic. For example -given the same seed- a Pseudo Random Number Generator will always give you the same sequence of pseudo-random numbers. But (for a good PRNG) if you give it some novel seed, you can't predict the sequence ahead of time; you have to actually run the PRNG to find out. In real life, for a chaotic system like say -the weather on earth- , you're also going to have a hard time working backwards to find the original seed(s). Given a hurricane in the Carribean, good luck finding the original proverbial butterfly out of all the butterflies in China. So in order to have an intelligent machine it actually needs to be highly deterministic. At the same time it will by necessity become rather unpredictable. This is not immediately intuitive. But that's basically what all the hullabaloo about Chaos Theory was actually about in a nutshell.

joshspankit 4y ago

It’s funny to me to see this juxtaposed with the arguments from the other side: Society had long argued that animals were not intelligent, and that instincts were deterministic.

pnf 4y ago
Instincts in animals (including humans) are deterministic insofar as they determine the behavior of the animal. A bird may choose one stick or another but it can't choose not to build a nest. A human can. This may be unique to humans. Heidegger refers to this as world-openness, meaning our world is not closed by our instincts. Unlike most animals, humans don't possess enough instincts to survive in nature. We are "insufficiently-determined". Hence, to survive, we augment our nature with our culture, which acts as a second nature within which we can act unthinkingly (as animals do). Without this second nature we shall surely die (hence the furious culture wars). Not incidentally, this is one of the anthropological arguments against state of nature political theories: there's no such thing and never has been in the history of the species. Animals may be more or less undetermined but a bee will make honey and an ant will gather food regardless of any individual instance of bee or ant intelligence. The problem with the above objection is that there is no account of "meaning" in what an AGI does. In other words, it's still a computer. To say that the entropy of the system will determine the entity's indeterminism is akin to arguments saying Schrodinger's cat is evidence for the possibility of human free will. It's a category error. Unless you want to argue that humans are also computers (which is the position of many strict materialists) then there is still a huge gap to account for in terms of meaning that can't be defined away satisfyingly. We all know what it's like to be an intelligence. At best, people say we can't know if an AGI also knows that because we can't inspect their "minds". This argument is justified by recourse to the principle of the multiple instantiability of intelligence. If we admit that non-carbon-based life forms could be intelligent (e.g., extraterrestrials) then we may admit that intelligence could be in silica as well. Without the ability to introspect other minds, we assume they are like ours and not simply "zombies". The above arguments (reducible to "Well, how do you KNOW anyone else has a mind?") are based in a kind of skeptical solipsism. The part about intelligence being demarcated by non-determinism and the way that argument fails is a side-step of the hard problem of consciousness.
- nb3423 4y ago
  Humans actually take very little to non relevant decisions. The "free will" is mostly an illusion, you "choose" between equivalent options, not between actually different "life paths". You can "decide" you won't "build a nest", but you'll certainly look for refuge if it is raining, or it's very cold. In the end, the human behavior is actually fully deterministic. I'm sure FAANG already know this because they have the datapoints from billions of humans beings doing exactly the same stuff everyday for decades now. This is probably how LLM can extrapolate all the things they "know" from human generated text: their tokens reflect the human behavior determinism a its fullest expression (hence at more data for training, much better/closer their behavior ressemble the human behavior/ideas)
  - pnf 4y ago
    I can't agree with you although I can understand why you believe these things. Human instinct is, as I say, insufficiently-determined for survival. Is "free will" mostly an illusion? Or is it "fully deterministic"? If it is mostly then it is not "fully" determined. I'd be curious to hear how you think that can be and whether you make decisions in your own life or if you are resigned to your fate. In any case, I'm not saying individual humans make many reasoned out decisions. Quite the opposite. Human individuals adopt a cultural second nature bequeathed to them by their heritage to avoid the necessity of making decisions. The culture over time adopts certain default decisions that are advantageous to survival. These are inculcated into the individual via their cultural conditioning. A baby has no culture and very few instincts (hunger, pleasure, pain, disgust). If you think humans are operating at the lower levels of instinct then why do they pursue or avoid certain behaviors that change over time? One answer is that they are responding to acceptable norms of behavior. As those norms change, they adapt and adopt. They change with the times, as the saying goes. A tiger can be trained to behave a certain way using stimulus/reward training but it doesn't self-regulate according to new norms. One could argue that elephants do this, if properly conditioned with a large stake early in life. But you could also make the case that elephants (like dolphins) are, like humans, self-conscious to a degree. I don't know if this is true, but it is an interesting thought. A more cynical person might say the elephant is not choosing anything but has been trained just like the tiger to avoid pain. LLMs, or let us say AGI based on probabilistic models, can mimic behavior represented in its data and is very impressive at these language games and, with the right feedback, can correct some of its more glaring productions but it must ever be a parasite on human cultural production for it to gain what you call "knowledge". As a thought experiment, suppose we could set an LLM running on autopilot and send it into space with a feedback loop where it could add its productions to its source corpora. Is there any point in the future where it is generating new and coherent output? Or does it degenerate into raving madness?

api 4y ago

It wouldn’t be hard to inject nondeterminism into the neural network directly either.

zmgsabst 4y ago

Also, most AI (eg, chess AI) will pick randomly from a set of top moves — if there are several good options. How random that is we can argue; but how random is your biology really?

evrydayhustling 4y ago

I think the authors' (flawed) bulwark to this would be that their notion of "agency" requires a system with a well defined boundary -- in other words essential entropy cannot come from outside the system. Section 3 spends a lot of words on this concept of agency and closure. > The most central distinction to be made here is that the selection of a specific behavior is not purely reactive, not entirely determined by environmental conditions, but (at least partially) originates from and depends on the internal organization of the system making the selection.... [Agency] requires organizational closure .... Organisms, as autonomous agents, are Kantian wholes, i. e., organized beings with the property that the parts exist for and by means of the whole. What's funny is that I can't imagine how a serious modern biologist signed off on any claims of closure for biological systems. Our own behavior arises out of a mess of genetics, epigenetics, symbiotic relationships, and other external feedback loops which intermingle the "agency" of many self-preserving and self-replicating systems, from transposons hijacking our genetic strands to gut biomes regulating our hormonal balances. The history of biology is essentially one of humans drawing labels around supposed units, and nature making a mockery of those boundaries upon further research. Like other efforts before, this particular definition of closed agency is more a projection of our own psychology than an observation of the natural world.

mannykannot 4y ago
Indeed, and I think we can make a couple of specific responses to the passage you quote. The first thing is that if selection of a specific behavior is determined by environmental together with the internal organization of the system making the selection, how is that not reactive, why would it matter if it isn't, and why does that not apply to robots? The second point is that the internal organization of organisms is a result of evolution, so it too has been determined by the environment, and, furthermore, by a process that can be - and is - used to develop programs. There are heavy doses of ontological argumentation here ("this is an X and that is a Y"), but our categories are determined by what we know (or think we do.) As you say, nature can make a mockery of those boundaries.
asplake 4y ago
I am not a biologist, but I have read Maturana and Varela (originators of autopoesis), and they are not that naive. If there’s anything they do understand, it is the co-development of things over time in mutual relationship, ie structural coupling.

nb3423 4y ago

But organic intelligence is by its nature - genetics - almost full deterministic, very few - if any - behaviors are left without being pre-ordered by their genetic constrains and/or the cultural environment resulted from those same genetic constrains. Human for instance, are mostly "cognitive hamsters", running every day into their "cognitive wheels": incessantly - but for sleeping - looking for money, happiness, food, sex, etc. mostly a very short list of drives. No matter the year, the geolocation, the language they speak.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

I can't say this is a strange argument, because it is not intuitive to many. Entropy is mostly boring noise. What's really interesting is Chaos (the mathematical concept). Things such as Turing machines, Cellular Automata (such as Conway's Game Of Life) and Actual Life are chaotic. While Chaotic systems can be highly unpredictable, they are -in fact- deterministic. For example -given the same seed- a Pseudo Random Number Generator will always give you the same sequence of pseudo-random numbers. But (for a good PRNG) if you give it some novel seed, you can't predict the sequence ahead of time; you have to actually run the PRNG to find out. In real life, for a chaotic system like say -the weather on earth- , you're also going to have a hard time working backwards to find the original seed(s). Given a hurricane in the Carribean, good luck finding the original proverbial butterfly out of all the butterflies in China. So in order to have an intelligent machine it actually needs to be highly deterministic. At the same time it will by necessity become rather unpredictable. This is not immediately intuitive. But that's basically what all the hullabaloo about Chaos Theory was actually about in a nutshell.