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alright you mostly circled back to things I agree with. It sure was a circuitous garden path. >specialised algorithms for board-game playing, that work nothing

alright you mostly circled back to things I agree with. It sure was a circuitous garden path. >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 True, but lets not imply that we are true all-domain generalists. If I made a platformer with a quirky physics violating gimmick, you could probably fill in the blanks and figure out how to play it. Now if I handed you a platformer where I have shoved the screen through a 2d fourier transform and you have to play in frequency space, you probably can't do that. The point is we are specialized by evolution for this world with its Newtonian physics and euclidean dimensions and retinal data projected down from 3d to 2d. No one is showing us the games we would suck at. An uncomfortable possibility is that maybe an ad hoc hodge podge of specialised algorithms might actually be the right path. There is no general theory, its all just kludge and patch work. >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. Sure it does. It tells you exactly how its not done on the other! It can be a model that fails in interesting ways. ChatGPT forces you to put your finger on what exactly differentiates us from a statistical word generator. And, sometimes, we really do learn one off the other, gaining a biologically inspired algorithm or interpreting some brain scans as a known sort of classifier. Let's not undersell this here either. >We'll know when we know, if we ever do. Will we? Or will we rationalize refusing to accept it? From how most people talk, the latter.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
>> Sure it does. It tells you exactly how its not done on the other! I agree. We sure have learned a lot about how our mind doesn't work, with recent AI results. But that's a very long way to get to how it does work. Still, I do think it's interesting how every once in a while we figure out that it doesn't quite take a human mind to do X, but then we also learn that human minds do something else than X, after all. So we do learn something. I once commented to Ivan Bratko, great dean of Prolog programming for AI, that maybe humans are not that good at chess, after all, seeing how a dumb machine can beat us. He's done plenty of work on computer chess and is an inveterate chess player, so he really didn't like my comment. >> True, but lets not imply that we are true all-domain generalists (...) Yan Lecun has said something like that. I don't remember where I saw this, it might have been a Lex Fridman podcast. Anyway he pointed out hat if you could somehow take out someone's visual system, like all their neurons involved in vision, cut it up and stitched it back up in some random new way, there's no way that person would still be able to understand what they were looking at. I don't disagree, but then, we don't just look at the world with our vision, or our senses in general. One absolutely mad thing we do is that we come up with formal systems that abstract the model concepts we can't directly experience, like, say, multi-dimensional spaces. Or, really, all of maths. Those formal systems become interpretations that our mind can then access, and manipulate. So we are not restricted in generality to "this world with Newtonian physics". We may have an "ad hoc hodge podge of specialised algorithms", because that sounds useful and efficient; but it seems to me we have something else, beyond that, and that's what lets us hope we can one day rebuild our mind up from scratch, on a different substrate, in the first place. Because if a bunch of heuristics were all we really are, I don't think we could hope to ever create artificial-us. Because were would the heuristic for that come from? Not evolution, surely. >> alright you mostly circled back to things I agree with. It sure was a circuitous garden path. Yeah, like when the horse raced passed the barn fell. I sure do like to go on :P
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  >Because if a bunch of heuristics were all we really are, I don't think we could hope to ever create artificial-us. Because were would the heuristic for that come from? Not evolution, surely. Surely the same place as the impulse to keep on making non-artificial-us.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

>> Sure it does. It tells you exactly how its not done on the other! I agree. We sure have learned a lot about how our mind doesn't work, with recent AI results. But that's a very long way to get to how it does work. Still, I do think it's interesting how every once in a while we figure out that it doesn't quite take a human mind to do X, but then we also learn that human minds do something else than X, after all. So we do learn something. I once commented to Ivan Bratko, great dean of Prolog programming for AI, that maybe humans are not that good at chess, after all, seeing how a dumb machine can beat us. He's done plenty of work on computer chess and is an inveterate chess player, so he really didn't like my comment. >> True, but lets not imply that we are true all-domain generalists (...) Yan Lecun has said something like that. I don't remember where I saw this, it might have been a Lex Fridman podcast. Anyway he pointed out hat if you could somehow take out someone's visual system, like all their neurons involved in vision, cut it up and stitched it back up in some random new way, there's no way that person would still be able to understand what they were looking at. I don't disagree, but then, we don't just look at the world with our vision, or our senses in general. One absolutely mad thing we do is that we come up with formal systems that abstract the model concepts we can't directly experience, like, say, multi-dimensional spaces. Or, really, all of maths. Those formal systems become interpretations that our mind can then access, and manipulate. So we are not restricted in generality to "this world with Newtonian physics". We may have an "ad hoc hodge podge of specialised algorithms", because that sounds useful and efficient; but it seems to me we have something else, beyond that, and that's what lets us hope we can one day rebuild our mind up from scratch, on a different substrate, in the first place. Because if a bunch of heuristics were all we really are, I don't think we could hope to ever create artificial-us. Because were would the heuristic for that come from? Not evolution, surely. >> alright you mostly circled back to things I agree with. It sure was a circuitous garden path. Yeah, like when the horse raced passed the barn fell. I sure do like to go on :P

IIAOPSW 4y ago
>Because if a bunch of heuristics were all we really are, I don't think we could hope to ever create artificial-us. Because were would the heuristic for that come from? Not evolution, surely. Surely the same place as the impulse to keep on making non-artificial-us.