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Of all the angles you could take, you go with the neo-cartesian dualist "a computer can't replicate the brain". At some level you have to reconcile that a compu

Of all the angles you could take, you go with the neo-cartesian dualist "a computer can't replicate the brain". At some level you have to reconcile that a computer can do a physics simulation to whatever precision, and therefore either it can replicate a brain if by nothing else than sheer simulation, or you have to invoke some magical thinking about brains not being in the domain of physical law. How can you engage with AI, engage in conversation about AI, and also be rejecting the very premise that AI is possible? Now there's the one thing that really does explode my mind. >Eh, no. Say you start writing some text in a text editor. Then I write a bit. Then you write a bit. Then I write a bit. That's not recursion. It's not even iteration. It's just... adding stuff on top of other stuff. Exquisite Corpse, really. It's not recursive. Hey buddy, quick favor. Just zoom out on the page for a moment. You see all the conversational threads here. See how they are organized, right in front of your eyes, in a tree like structure? I don't think I need to explain how trees are inherently recursive. The recursive nature of conversation is staring you right in the face! You have managed to completely miss what is actually happening. He's not "holding the bots hand" or "running it for it by hand". He's not doing any computation on behalf of the model. He is merely jerry-rigging a means for the bot prompt itself. >And I have a sneaking suspicion that the "recursion" in human language that you allude to is something very different than what we are talking about here, also. But I'm no expert in human languages, so I can't really say. Strange, you knew exquisite corpse yet not colorless dreams? Its all trees maaaan. From the level of conversation on down to the level of the sentence. We organize information in hierarchies, but sometimes, I am a strange loop and the tree has no root. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_fu...

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
>> Of all the angles you could take, you go with the neo-cartesian dualist "a computer can't replicate the brain" No, I said "computers aren't brains, and they don't do the things that brains do". I don't know if that's "neo-cartesian dualist", it's just how computers are, right now. Computers can do a physics simulation to "whatever precision"? Maybe, but for the time being that precision is very, very low. >> How can you engage with AI, engage in conversation about AI, and also be rejecting the very premise that AI is possible? Who ever said anything like that? But, for the record, time traval, stable wormholes, antimatter as fuel for interstellar travel... those are all things that are possible and we even have the maths to show it. Except they're possible, but not practical. And for AI, we don't even have the maths to show it's possible. So, maybe in principle AI is possible, maybe it's not. For the time being, we don't know how to do it. >> You have managed to completely miss what is actually happening. He's not "holding the bots hand" or "running it for it by hand". He's not doing any computation on behalf of the model. He is merely jerry-rigging a means for the bot prompt itself. He has to do that because the model can't do any computation itself, because it's a model and not a computational device. >> Its all trees maaaan. I see, you're just taking the piss. You should have said up front :P
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  >No, I said "computers aren't brains, and they don't do the things that brains do". >and also be rejecting the very premise that AI is possible? >>Who ever said anything like that? They certainly do a lot of the things brains do. Lest we forget, "calculator" was once a job title. My understanding of AI as field is that the point of it all is exactly to figure out how to do on the machine the stuff brains can do that still eludes us. The case you've been making, particularly "because a computer is not human, and it can't see the things that humans can see, it can only compute" is the anthesis of this premise. It implies that there is something about our conscious existence that cannot be understood and implemented as a computer algorithm (as we've done for prior things that were once strictly the domain of man). It implies that questions of emergent properties and the relevance of recursion and so on are futile. Maybe we just have superficial agreement. On the surface we are both "interested in AI", but dig into our reasons why and maybe there's a sea of difference. I don't think its terribly important that "the model can't do any computation itself, because it's a model and not a computational device." I'm not interested in...whatever that argues against. I am interested in if giving chatGPT the ability to prompt itself recursively results in any surprising emergent reasoning behaviors. With respect to that, it really doesn't matter the details of how it was piped back into itself.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    >> They certainly do a lot of the things brains do. Lest we forget, "calculator" was once a job title. My understanding of AI as field is that the point of it all is exactly to figure out how to do on the machine the stuff brains can do that still eludes us. There isn't really any one "point of it all" for AI. If you ask different people, they'll tell you different things. Some want to replicate human intelligence, which may mean replicating the function of the brain; or not, because maybe we can make a machine behave like a human without it functioning like a brain. Some just want to make computers not stupid. Others want to get computers to exhibit human-like behaviour on a computer in order to understand human-like behaviour in humans. For example, many of the pioneers of AI (Turing, Shannon, McCarthy, Michie, etc) were interested in chess and board game-playing AI because they thought that a computer playing chess like a human, would tell us something about how humans play chess. And that, in turn would tell us something about how humans think, because it's obvious that humans play chess by thinking about chess (and who knows what else). It turns out that it's not necessary to think like a human, or to think at all, to play a game or chess, or at least to calculate the best move given a board position. We now have systems that can do it, and that can beat any human in chess. Yet those systems are based on specialised algorithms for board-game playing, that work nothing like humans do with their minds when we play chess, because no human plays chess by "running" alpha-beta minimax and Monte Carlo Tree Search in their head. And so those systems still tell us nothing about how humans play chess, or how humans think (McCarthy was really pissed off about that and he wrote an article blasting the state of AI chess research when Deep Blue beat Kasparov). And that's because digital computers, and human brains, or human minds, are nothing like each other. So being able to do one thing with a computer tells us nothing about doing that thing with a human brain or mind, and vice-versa. Which btw also means that we can't really look at human behaviour, and predict from it computer behaviour, just because we see some behaviour in a computer that looks superficially like human behaviour. There is always the question of what the computer is really doing, and whether it is at all like what the human is doing, and the answer to that is, so far, a resounding: no. And because of all of the above, we learn nothing by simply trying to match ideas and concepts, and reuse terms, that we use to talk about computers, to talk about humans, and the other way around. In turn, when terminology is used in such a free-wheeling manner as in the article above, we learn nothing, because it means nothing. "Recursion" is a thing in computers. It's a different thing in humans. It's clear that the author is trying to do the computer-thing of recursion, but it's also clear they're not doing that, at all. And if they were trying to do "recursion" as in humans, then it's clear they're not doing that, either, because they're trying to do it like we do it in computers. So all the author's done is fudge some terminology, bodge together some code and call it "recursion", and achieve nothing but brief internet fame. But I suspect that was the only motivation. >> I don't think its terribly important that "the model can't do any computation itself, because it's a model and not a computational device." For me that's the whole point because the only model we have of what minds do is computational. And the only justification anyone can really give for AI, whatever they are trying to achieve with it, is that brains are like computers, minds are like programs, and a Universal Turing Machine can run any program that can be run on any other computing machine, so it should be possible to run the mind-program on a computer-brain. Which we still don't know how to do in practice. We might not have the right theory of computation. Or we may not have the right kind of computer. Or we may even not have the right kind of mind, or brain. We'll know when we know, if we ever do.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

>> Of all the angles you could take, you go with the neo-cartesian dualist "a computer can't replicate the brain" No, I said "computers aren't brains, and they don't do the things that brains do". I don't know if that's "neo-cartesian dualist", it's just how computers are, right now. Computers can do a physics simulation to "whatever precision"? Maybe, but for the time being that precision is very, very low. >> How can you engage with AI, engage in conversation about AI, and also be rejecting the very premise that AI is possible? Who ever said anything like that? But, for the record, time traval, stable wormholes, antimatter as fuel for interstellar travel... those are all things that are possible and we even have the maths to show it. Except they're possible, but not practical. And for AI, we don't even have the maths to show it's possible. So, maybe in principle AI is possible, maybe it's not. For the time being, we don't know how to do it. >> You have managed to completely miss what is actually happening. He's not "holding the bots hand" or "running it for it by hand". He's not doing any computation on behalf of the model. He is merely jerry-rigging a means for the bot prompt itself. He has to do that because the model can't do any computation itself, because it's a model and not a computational device. >> Its all trees maaaan. I see, you're just taking the piss. You should have said up front :P

IIAOPSW 4y ago
>No, I said "computers aren't brains, and they don't do the things that brains do". >and also be rejecting the very premise that AI is possible? >>Who ever said anything like that? They certainly do a lot of the things brains do. Lest we forget, "calculator" was once a job title. My understanding of AI as field is that the point of it all is exactly to figure out how to do on the machine the stuff brains can do that still eludes us. The case you've been making, particularly "because a computer is not human, and it can't see the things that humans can see, it can only compute" is the anthesis of this premise. It implies that there is something about our conscious existence that cannot be understood and implemented as a computer algorithm (as we've done for prior things that were once strictly the domain of man). It implies that questions of emergent properties and the relevance of recursion and so on are futile. Maybe we just have superficial agreement. On the surface we are both "interested in AI", but dig into our reasons why and maybe there's a sea of difference. I don't think its terribly important that "the model can't do any computation itself, because it's a model and not a computational device." I'm not interested in...whatever that argues against. I am interested in if giving chatGPT the ability to prompt itself recursively results in any surprising emergent reasoning behaviors. With respect to that, it really doesn't matter the details of how it was piped back into itself.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  >> They certainly do a lot of the things brains do. Lest we forget, "calculator" was once a job title. My understanding of AI as field is that the point of it all is exactly to figure out how to do on the machine the stuff brains can do that still eludes us. There isn't really any one "point of it all" for AI. If you ask different people, they'll tell you different things. Some want to replicate human intelligence, which may mean replicating the function of the brain; or not, because maybe we can make a machine behave like a human without it functioning like a brain. Some just want to make computers not stupid. Others want to get computers to exhibit human-like behaviour on a computer in order to understand human-like behaviour in humans. For example, many of the pioneers of AI (Turing, Shannon, McCarthy, Michie, etc) were interested in chess and board game-playing AI because they thought that a computer playing chess like a human, would tell us something about how humans play chess. And that, in turn would tell us something about how humans think, because it's obvious that humans play chess by thinking about chess (and who knows what else). It turns out that it's not necessary to think like a human, or to think at all, to play a game or chess, or at least to calculate the best move given a board position. We now have systems that can do it, and that can beat any human in chess. Yet those systems are based on specialised algorithms for board-game playing, that work nothing like humans do with their minds when we play chess, because no human plays chess by "running" alpha-beta minimax and Monte Carlo Tree Search in their head. And so those systems still tell us nothing about how humans play chess, or how humans think (McCarthy was really pissed off about that and he wrote an article blasting the state of AI chess research when Deep Blue beat Kasparov). And that's because digital computers, and human brains, or human minds, are nothing like each other. So being able to do one thing with a computer tells us nothing about doing that thing with a human brain or mind, and vice-versa. Which btw also means that we can't really look at human behaviour, and predict from it computer behaviour, just because we see some behaviour in a computer that looks superficially like human behaviour. There is always the question of what the computer is really doing, and whether it is at all like what the human is doing, and the answer to that is, so far, a resounding: no. And because of all of the above, we learn nothing by simply trying to match ideas and concepts, and reuse terms, that we use to talk about computers, to talk about humans, and the other way around. In turn, when terminology is used in such a free-wheeling manner as in the article above, we learn nothing, because it means nothing. "Recursion" is a thing in computers. It's a different thing in humans. It's clear that the author is trying to do the computer-thing of recursion, but it's also clear they're not doing that, at all. And if they were trying to do "recursion" as in humans, then it's clear they're not doing that, either, because they're trying to do it like we do it in computers. So all the author's done is fudge some terminology, bodge together some code and call it "recursion", and achieve nothing but brief internet fame. But I suspect that was the only motivation. >> I don't think its terribly important that "the model can't do any computation itself, because it's a model and not a computational device." For me that's the whole point because the only model we have of what minds do is computational. And the only justification anyone can really give for AI, whatever they are trying to achieve with it, is that brains are like computers, minds are like programs, and a Universal Turing Machine can run any program that can be run on any other computing machine, so it should be possible to run the mind-program on a computer-brain. Which we still don't know how to do in practice. We might not have the right theory of computation. Or we may not have the right kind of computer. Or we may even not have the right kind of mind, or brain. We'll know when we know, if we ever do.