3 ms·

Its not a no-true-Scotsman type argument in a world where the existence of Scotland itself is purely hypothetical, and the arguments for the possibility of its

Its not a no-true-Scotsman type argument in a world where the existence of Scotland itself is purely hypothetical, and the arguments for the possibility of its existence in the form of a working bagpipe demonstrator are also an illustration that you don't need to be Scottish to play bagpipes. The impossibility of testing whether the brain is adequately simulated (since a pretty basic LLM that makes no attempt to simulate the functions of a human mind yields human-like text i/o) is a point in favour of it being unlikely that we could design a fully functioning simulation of a human mind out of arbitrary material(1), since the inadequacy of testing is an impediment to actually building it. (1) it's apparently possible for us to create human minds out of bits of humans and a process called pregnancy

akoboldfrying 3y ago
I had to apply some serious analogy-algebra, but I think your first paragraph is equating Scotland to intelligence -- rather than to the human brain specifically, which is the argument GP and I are having. The human brain is not hypothetical, and despite it being outside the realms of today's technology, it's likely that one day it will be possible to simulate one. At that time it will be possible to gauge whether today's LLMs are accurate approximations.
- notahacker 3y ago
  No, my first paragraph sidesteps messy debate about what intelligence is and focuses on the simple fact a human brain simulation exists purely in the realms of the hypothetical. Its not the no true Scotsman fallacy unless the Scotsman actually exists.
  - akoboldfrying 3y ago
    What is the "working bagpipe demonstrator" in your analogy? And what is the meaning of "you don't need to be Scottish"?
    - notahacker 3y ago
      An LLM. Not a brain simulation, but mimics the text outputs of brain activity quite well just by parsing text. Turns out that like getting an Englishman to play bagpipes, you can get an LLM to write as if it's angry or drunk or horny (A corollary of a sufficiently large text learning model generating convincingly angry outputs based on pure word association is that you can't trust an attempt to build a long running process with adrenaline and cortisol analogues has adequately simulated emotional state just because the communications module writes convincingly angry responses) So it's literally the inverse of "no true Scotsman". We don't have Scotsmen not doing things that all "true Scotsmen" are supposed to do, we have "definitely not Scotsmen" passing benchmarks for Scottishness (in a world in which Scotland itself is only an aspiration)

akoboldfrying 3y ago

I had to apply some serious analogy-algebra, but I think your first paragraph is equating Scotland to intelligence -- rather than to the human brain specifically, which is the argument GP and I are having. The human brain is not hypothetical, and despite it being outside the realms of today's technology, it's likely that one day it will be possible to simulate one. At that time it will be possible to gauge whether today's LLMs are accurate approximations.

notahacker 3y ago
No, my first paragraph sidesteps messy debate about what intelligence is and focuses on the simple fact a human brain simulation exists purely in the realms of the hypothetical. Its not the no true Scotsman fallacy unless the Scotsman actually exists.
- akoboldfrying 3y ago
  What is the "working bagpipe demonstrator" in your analogy? And what is the meaning of "you don't need to be Scottish"?
  - notahacker 3y ago
    An LLM. Not a brain simulation, but mimics the text outputs of brain activity quite well just by parsing text. Turns out that like getting an Englishman to play bagpipes, you can get an LLM to write as if it's angry or drunk or horny (A corollary of a sufficiently large text learning model generating convincingly angry outputs based on pure word association is that you can't trust an attempt to build a long running process with adrenaline and cortisol analogues has adequately simulated emotional state just because the communications module writes convincingly angry responses) So it's literally the inverse of "no true Scotsman". We don't have Scotsmen not doing things that all "true Scotsmen" are supposed to do, we have "definitely not Scotsmen" passing benchmarks for Scottishness (in a world in which Scotland itself is only an aspiration)