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What you are contemplating here is a question of English-language semantics and usage, not biology. It is commonplace for words previously used in one restricte
by mannykannot 3y ago
What you are contemplating here is a question of English-language semantics and usage, not biology. It is commonplace for words previously used in one restricted sense to be adopted to talk about other situations that are merely analogous in some sense. This is useful and probably inevitable, but it does not mean we can take these disparate uses to imply a sameness, where the expanded usage is merely the consequence of a similarity (and sometimes the similarity is quite abstract.)
In this case, neuronal information storage and retrieval, which is the biological basis of memory as the word is ordinarily used, is quite different and separable from the genetic storage and use of information.
- ggm 3y agoQuite right. I argue this point frequently in connection with AI. Undoubtedly artificial, no intelligence!
- mannykannot 3y agoThank you for another example of where arguments from language semantics and usage fails to address a complex issue! This example happens to contain all there is to Searle's "Chinese Room" argument.
- weard_beard 3y agoYou just lost, “The Game”.
- SpikyBlackHard 3y agoAnd I was on a real heater too. Why does this keep happening.
- cosmojg 3y agoIt's been a while since I lost the game.
- irrational 3y agoSame with the recent linguistic discussion of whether AI is lying, hallucinating, or confabulating (personally, I think confabulation has the closest linguistic meaning to what AI does). All of these are really terms that apply to agents with agency and don’t apply to LLMs, but we don’t currently have terms for them, yet.
- mannykannot 3y agoOf these, lying is most clearly (definitely, I would say) a term that applies to entities with agency, but I don't see hallucinating being so. Confabulation seems to me to fall somewhere between: insofar as it is not simply a synonym for lying, that seems to lie in it being a pathology, and one which tends to compromise the subject's ability to act with agency (a person fully aware that their confabulation is false is, if they hope their listeners will believe them, lying, and has apparently chosen to do so.) Personally, I feel that the last two are useful analogies while the first is not, but they are all of limited applicability because I doubt an LLM's use of language follows from, or is indicative of, an understanding that there is an external world.
- burnished 3y agoOoh good word choice. Lying and hallucinate have felt inadequate, I agree with you that confabulation best captures what is going on. Plus I think its kind of archaic now, so it has less baggage to contend with/be translated between folk
- stevenhuang 3y agoAI has a degree of intelligence. Preclude even that and you preclude some humans from the same.
- tremon 3y agoShow me your definition of intelligence and I will show you how people might reasonably disagree with it. (The simplest refutation would be that demonstrating intelligence requires first demonstrating motivation on the part of the subject. The current way we interact with "AI" is much more akin to prodding an organism with a stick, seeing it recoil in response to the stimulus, and then claiming that it therefore has intelligence. No, you haven't demonstrated intelligence, you have at most proven it has an autonomous sensory response -- anything beyond that is confusing the complexity of the response with complexity of the mechanism producing it).
- flangola7 3y agoMotivation has nothing to do with intelligence
- burnished 3y agoWhat? Can you give an example of a being that does (or could) be considered intelligent without the ability to engage in self directed actuons?
- int_19h 3y agoWe don't know intelligent beings that aren't mammals, either, but that doesn't imply that one is a prerequisite for the other. One could reasonably argue that self-directed agencies are an outcome of the evolutionary process, and predate evolution of intelligence, so the latter necessarily comes with those strings attached in nature. But we're past the "in nature" part by now. I know that in my mental model of what intelligence is, a completely passive entity that responds to my questions in a certain way would qualify.
- 3y ago