3 ms·

In 2015, I shared lodgings with a student of cognitive sciences. This week, conversations that I had with him and his friends kept haunting me. My friend would

by dsign 4y ago

In 2015, I shared lodgings with a student of cognitive sciences. This week, conversations that I had with him and his friends kept haunting me. My friend would talk about how we didn't (don't) know so much about the brain. He was sure that the magic going in there is probably outside of what anybody can understand, and that it would take one thousand years to make any significant progress in said understanding. I have had or heard similar arguments regarding cancer and biological systems in general. There is no God hiding in there. Nature is not magic, but just evolution and selection, with a high degree of randomness. If Nature's random process can create intelligence, so can we, by the same more or less fortuitous means. And now we have ChatGPT. It's not human level intelligence (yet). But to me, it is proof that intelligence is --as everybody said without quite really believing it--an emerging phenomenon: add enough computing units and a mechanism to coordinate them towards achieving a goal, and you get something "intelligent". We, the human beings, don't need to understand how the trillions of parameters work together. All we need to do is to find a process that finds those parameters. We will discover that untreatable diseases like ageing (and cancer, its corollary) can be worked out in exactly the same way: we don't need to understand how our biology "computes" our fate. We just need to engineer the equivalent of backpropagation for biological tuning, and I have a hunch this too will be a matter of sheer computing power. And we will get there by surprise, earlier than what most people expect. But only if our first act as newly ascended gods is not to create new creatures that take away our role of top species in our world.

swader999 4y ago
ChatGPT is really good at goal seeking. It has no idea what should be the goal, that takes wisdom.
- nebulousthree 4y ago
  Or..luck and enough tries at it? Maybe there's survivorship bias in goal setting
leobg 4y ago
Neural nets got started precisely as an attempt to understand the brain. ChatGPT is the very fruit of trying to do what your roommate talked about. Also, who says that aging and dying are not nature’s high level backpropagation? You’re one neuron, and it’s time to be > 0 is finite. Besides, aren’t cancer cells trying to do the same thing you want to do? Live forever, with no regard for their place in the whole?
Balgair 4y ago
One interesting thing I've tried to understand is emotions. They are deeply personal and deeply physical. It's hard to talk of strong emotions in ways that don't reference the body's reactions along with those emotions. Emotions are tied to our physical bodies, chemistry, etc. We also know that animals have emotions. That they are mostly guided by emotion. But try to imagine emotions that, say, a sperm whale has, but that humans do not have. We know that the sperm whale has emotions outside of our own. They hunt at tremendous depth where the partial pressures of sodium and potassium change the chemistry of nerve conduction. We can try to think about the emotions that a hunting and hungry whale has in the abyssal darkness miles away from air. All attempts at it are just shoehorning our own emotions onto theirs though. Try feeling it, try having empathy with it. Who has any idea of the extra emotions that mammals with such radically different lives have, or what emotions they may lack. I may be a special case, but I just can't even imagine what a diving sperm whale is feeling. Emotions in other animals are something that we know must exist, do exist. But that we can have no real insight into. A forbidden box, outside of logic and our great minds, sleeping in a dog on the floor beside me.

by dsign 4y ago

swader999 4y ago

ChatGPT is really good at goal seeking. It has no idea what should be the goal, that takes wisdom.

nebulousthree 4y ago
Or..luck and enough tries at it? Maybe there's survivorship bias in goal setting

leobg 4y ago

Neural nets got started precisely as an attempt to understand the brain. ChatGPT is the very fruit of trying to do what your roommate talked about. Also, who says that aging and dying are not nature’s high level backpropagation? You’re one neuron, and it’s time to be > 0 is finite. Besides, aren’t cancer cells trying to do the same thing you want to do? Live forever, with no regard for their place in the whole?

Balgair 4y ago

One interesting thing I've tried to understand is emotions. They are deeply personal and deeply physical. It's hard to talk of strong emotions in ways that don't reference the body's reactions along with those emotions. Emotions are tied to our physical bodies, chemistry, etc. We also know that animals have emotions. That they are mostly guided by emotion. But try to imagine emotions that, say, a sperm whale has, but that humans do not have. We know that the sperm whale has emotions outside of our own. They hunt at tremendous depth where the partial pressures of sodium and potassium change the chemistry of nerve conduction. We can try to think about the emotions that a hunting and hungry whale has in the abyssal darkness miles away from air. All attempts at it are just shoehorning our own emotions onto theirs though. Try feeling it, try having empathy with it. Who has any idea of the extra emotions that mammals with such radically different lives have, or what emotions they may lack. I may be a special case, but I just can't even imagine what a diving sperm whale is feeling. Emotions in other animals are something that we know must exist, do exist. But that we can have no real insight into. A forbidden box, outside of logic and our great minds, sleeping in a dog on the floor beside me.