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Their argument that Turing machines cannot be free from immediacy doesn't make sense to me. They say that "there are no actions that emanate from the historici

Their argument that Turing machines cannot be free from immediacy doesn't make sense to me. They say that "there are no actions that emanate from the historicity of internal organization". I have no idea what that means. Is this an argument about free will? If so, what would be the magic ingredient that saves human brains from immediacy? It can't be memory, because Turing machines have memory as well. From the article: > it is generally assumed that input-output processing is performed by some sort of algorithm that can be implemented on a universal Turing machine. The problem is that such algorithmic systems have no freedom from immediacy, since all their outputs are determined entirely—even though often in intricate and probabilistic ways—by the inputs of the system. There are no actions that emanate from the historicity of internal organization. There is, therefore, no agency at all in an AI “agent.”

logicchains 4y ago
>If so, what would be the magic ingredient that saves human brains from immediacy? It can't be memory, because Turing machines have memory as well. The universe is not deterministic. There is one brain state at time T, but at time T+1 there are many possible brain states, all with different possibilities. What determines which state at time T+1 the consciousness at time T perceives itself as progressing to? If we define this as a function, which associates states at time T with states at times T+1, then this function loosely fits the definition of "free will". We can't actually construct this function or say anything about it, but we can say it can't not exist (as consciousness perceives itself as progressing to a single future state), which by the law of the excluded middle implies it must exist. The definition doesn't however prevent it from essentially being completely random.
- davidmanheim 4y ago
  "The universe is not deterministic." Maybe not. I think that's a big claim, and it's being made, not proved. But let's say it's right, ignoring the massive burden of proof. We can hook up a quantum random number generator to GPT-3, and suddenly it can be conscious? If that's the whole argument, it seems like a useless point anyways.
- naasking 4y ago
  > The universe is not deterministic. There is one brain state at time T, but at time T+1 there are many possible brain states, all with different possibilities. There is no proof of this. There are deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, for instance. Also, there is little reason to think our brains depend on quantum indeterminacy, even if it exists. After all, a brain that behaves erratically/non-deterministically is the exact opposite of useful. Once you learn how to walk, you want to be able to rely on that ability. Once you learn what food is, you don't want to erratically start eating rocks or twigs. Non-determinism in the brain would be selected against, not selected for. Flexibility would be selected for, but flexibility can be deterministic.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Non-deterministic Turing machines are still computationally equivalent to Turing machines. That is, there is no problem that a Non-deterministic Turing machine can solve for which there doesn't exist a deterministic Turing machine that solves it as well, and vice versa. Non-deterministic Turing machines are exponentially faster as far as we know (P ≠ NP seems to be true) but they are no more powerful. And note that Non-deterministic algorithms are far more powerful than anyone imagines human brains could be - as they can perform an infinite number of operations in parallel (equivalently, they have an oracle that gives them the best possible choice at any step). Even worse for your argument, probabilistic Turing machines and algorithms (classical bounded-error probabilistic machines) don't even seem to be faster than fully deterministic ones (P = BEP).
bgilroy26 4y ago
That might be like a chat with itself, it seems trivial to me, implementation wise and it seems nigh impossible ethics wise If I were Timnit Gebru and I saw that Google was trying to implement reflection in an AI when i felt the ethics engineering hadn’t caught up to the software engineering, I might quit
nb3423 4y ago
let's talk about real stuff, a live running model right now. chatGPT is currently storing chats with it, if somehow openAI got to re-feed - even taking offline and redeploying the model after that - those previous chats into the tokens, wualá, you've got an AI fred from immediacy. Practical stuff like "store memories", "replace human senses", "AIs can't walk the world as humans", etc. are feasible to be solved with current commodity technology, even without hypothetical future highly capable robots. I'll divert a little from the exact answer to the comment.. I've said it in another comment, it looks like Tiktok could be exactly this kind of "eyes and ears", it could be the - one of the - perfect continuously information collection systems "looking into the world" for an strong AI (yeah, right now), but most certainly is just an incredible business model turned into an almost free giant datasets generator. I cannot get to think that someone could have created tiktok to "see into the world" for AIs / create datasets, from the scratch, but it is possible too.

logicchains 4y ago

>If so, what would be the magic ingredient that saves human brains from immediacy? It can't be memory, because Turing machines have memory as well. The universe is not deterministic. There is one brain state at time T, but at time T+1 there are many possible brain states, all with different possibilities. What determines which state at time T+1 the consciousness at time T perceives itself as progressing to? If we define this as a function, which associates states at time T with states at times T+1, then this function loosely fits the definition of "free will". We can't actually construct this function or say anything about it, but we can say it can't not exist (as consciousness perceives itself as progressing to a single future state), which by the law of the excluded middle implies it must exist. The definition doesn't however prevent it from essentially being completely random.

davidmanheim 4y ago
"The universe is not deterministic." Maybe not. I think that's a big claim, and it's being made, not proved. But let's say it's right, ignoring the massive burden of proof. We can hook up a quantum random number generator to GPT-3, and suddenly it can be conscious? If that's the whole argument, it seems like a useless point anyways.
naasking 4y ago
> The universe is not deterministic. There is one brain state at time T, but at time T+1 there are many possible brain states, all with different possibilities. There is no proof of this. There are deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, for instance. Also, there is little reason to think our brains depend on quantum indeterminacy, even if it exists. After all, a brain that behaves erratically/non-deterministically is the exact opposite of useful. Once you learn how to walk, you want to be able to rely on that ability. Once you learn what food is, you don't want to erratically start eating rocks or twigs. Non-determinism in the brain would be selected against, not selected for. Flexibility would be selected for, but flexibility can be deterministic.
tsimionescu 4y ago
Non-deterministic Turing machines are still computationally equivalent to Turing machines. That is, there is no problem that a Non-deterministic Turing machine can solve for which there doesn't exist a deterministic Turing machine that solves it as well, and vice versa. Non-deterministic Turing machines are exponentially faster as far as we know (P ≠ NP seems to be true) but they are no more powerful. And note that Non-deterministic algorithms are far more powerful than anyone imagines human brains could be - as they can perform an infinite number of operations in parallel (equivalently, they have an oracle that gives them the best possible choice at any step). Even worse for your argument, probabilistic Turing machines and algorithms (classical bounded-error probabilistic machines) don't even seem to be faster than fully deterministic ones (P = BEP).

bgilroy26 4y ago

That might be like a chat with itself, it seems trivial to me, implementation wise and it seems nigh impossible ethics wise If I were Timnit Gebru and I saw that Google was trying to implement reflection in an AI when i felt the ethics engineering hadn’t caught up to the software engineering, I might quit

nb3423 4y ago

let's talk about real stuff, a live running model right now. chatGPT is currently storing chats with it, if somehow openAI got to re-feed - even taking offline and redeploying the model after that - those previous chats into the tokens, wualá, you've got an AI fred from immediacy. Practical stuff like "store memories", "replace human senses", "AIs can't walk the world as humans", etc. are feasible to be solved with current commodity technology, even without hypothetical future highly capable robots. I'll divert a little from the exact answer to the comment.. I've said it in another comment, it looks like Tiktok could be exactly this kind of "eyes and ears", it could be the - one of the - perfect continuously information collection systems "looking into the world" for an strong AI (yeah, right now), but most certainly is just an incredible business model turned into an almost free giant datasets generator. I cannot get to think that someone could have created tiktok to "see into the world" for AIs / create datasets, from the scratch, but it is possible too.