4 ms·

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 ca

by 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?
  - nb3423 4y ago
    "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." haha just living life as usual, whatever internal stuff is feeding my main loop. I left the deep thoughts to threads like this one and/or people more qualified.

by pnf 4y ago

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?
- nb3423 4y ago
  "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." haha just living life as usual, whatever internal stuff is feeding my main loop. I left the deep thoughts to threads like this one and/or people more qualified.