3 ms·

Sci-Fi has a lot of 'brain in a box' stories - a personal consciousness is preserved in a computer, stasis box, etc etc. It feels like we're almost at the poin

by csours 3y ago

Sci-Fi has a lot of 'brain in a box' stories - a personal consciousness is preserved in a computer, stasis box, etc etc. It feels like we're almost at the point where we can simulate a brain in a box to an external observer, but without preserving consciousness. I wonder if you would want to be preserved this way? As a kind of zombie intelligence.

paxys 3y ago
Enough to fool an observer, sure, but it isn't really replicating the "brain", just predicting and mimicking someone's speech and writing patterns. We have no special insight into the original individual other than historical records. We don't know how their neurons were wired. We can't come even close to predicting how they would have behaved in real life scenarios that first came about thousands of years after their death.
- jerf 3y ago
  You can put enough meat on this observation that it can stand up even to radical "yeah but what is consciousness anyhow" skeptics. While I may not be able to put a solid minimum floor on the complexity of a human consciousness in terms of its information theoretic content, I think we can be quite confident that it exceeds the information-theoretic content of what history tells us about Marcus Aurelius, all several-hundred-kilobytes-tops we have. And that's honestly a generous assessment of the amount of info we have in a true information-theoretic sense. There is certainly no way to recover Marcus Aurelius just from his writing no matter how much fancy AI is thrown at it; it is simply mathematically impossible.
  - addaon 3y ago
    > There is certainly no way to recover Marcus Aurelius just from his writing no matter how much fancy AI is thrown at it; it is simply mathematically impossible. Without addressing whether I agree with your conclusion or not, I disagree that this is a rigorous argument. The question isn't how much complexity the text processing machine that was the Original Marcus has, it's how much of that complexity was unique to OM. We have a large amount of information about modern humans, and a good chunk about historical humans. You would need to believe not just that OM requires many times more information than the hundreds of kilobytes we have, but that the OM delta patch to standard human or period-adjusted human /also/ has more information that the hundreds of kilobytes we have. I'm not sure it's obvious that humans are that interesting or that different, even interesting humans.
    - jerf 3y ago
      Hundreds of kilobytes is not a lot of information. Even guessing gigabytes would be going very controversially low. Just the delta versus some "average" human genome would easily be into the hundreds kilobytes. Even just modeling a human as the sum total of their sensory input, itself a simplification transparently obviously insufficient, hundreds of kilobytes covers just a few seconds of their existence, or with compression, minutes or maybe hours, tops. Imagine trying to create a Marcus Aurelius that correctly output exactly the contents of his writing, while also being acceptably a human analog. If you think you can stick that into a few hundred kilobytes, there's a 500,000 Euro prize you should be starting forthwith as you're claiming many orders of magnitude improvement over the current best: http://prize.hutter1.net/ http://prize.hutter1.net/
      - addaon 3y ago
        > Hundreds of kilobytes is not a lot of information. Humans are very, very predictable. It's not clear that the deviation of one human from the mean has a lot of information. It's not clear that it /doesn't/, either -- but I'd sure as heck take the under on gigabytes for novelty of text output. Keep in mind that we're not trying to model the internal state of a human machine; instead, we're discussing how much additional information is needed to align the output of a generic human text generator with the output of a specific individual. A lifetime is about two billion seconds -- so a gigabyte is four bits of data /per second/, or maybe two bits of data /per word/ for someone who continuously speaks for 70 years. Derate to a reasonable percentage of a lifetime spent generating output (10%? 1%?) and you're talking many, many bits per word. That's enough to Huffman compress their entire lifetime output with the "base model" entirely a dictionary, no need to even have a generative model!
        jerf 3y ago
        "Keep in mind that we're not trying to model the internal state of a human machine" Yes, that is exactly what we are discussing in this thread: Modelling the internal state of the human machine. The discussion of generating the exact stream of words is otherwise pointless. Fire lz at the collected output and call it a day; it isn't optimal but it's close enough. The entire conversation is whether we could recover the human consciousness from just the historical record.
beambot 3y ago
I wonder how close you could emulate a person's consciousness by having a Kiraman Katibim -- a little "angel on your shoulder" that records everything you ever see, hear & say and feeds it into a generative model for each person... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiraman_Katibin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiraman_Katibin
kikokikokiko 3y ago
I wouldn't want to be preserved digitally at all, but at least as a "zombie brain" you wouldn't be subjected to the eternal purgatory a full working copy of your "consciousness" would be. This short story keeps coming back to me ever since I read it a year or so ago: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo No eternal digital life to me, thanks.
grantcas 3y ago
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by csours 3y ago

paxys 3y ago

Enough to fool an observer, sure, but it isn't really replicating the "brain", just predicting and mimicking someone's speech and writing patterns. We have no special insight into the original individual other than historical records. We don't know how their neurons were wired. We can't come even close to predicting how they would have behaved in real life scenarios that first came about thousands of years after their death.

jerf 3y ago
You can put enough meat on this observation that it can stand up even to radical "yeah but what is consciousness anyhow" skeptics. While I may not be able to put a solid minimum floor on the complexity of a human consciousness in terms of its information theoretic content, I think we can be quite confident that it exceeds the information-theoretic content of what history tells us about Marcus Aurelius, all several-hundred-kilobytes-tops we have. And that's honestly a generous assessment of the amount of info we have in a true information-theoretic sense. There is certainly no way to recover Marcus Aurelius just from his writing no matter how much fancy AI is thrown at it; it is simply mathematically impossible.
- addaon 3y ago
  > There is certainly no way to recover Marcus Aurelius just from his writing no matter how much fancy AI is thrown at it; it is simply mathematically impossible. Without addressing whether I agree with your conclusion or not, I disagree that this is a rigorous argument. The question isn't how much complexity the text processing machine that was the Original Marcus has, it's how much of that complexity was unique to OM. We have a large amount of information about modern humans, and a good chunk about historical humans. You would need to believe not just that OM requires many times more information than the hundreds of kilobytes we have, but that the OM delta patch to standard human or period-adjusted human /also/ has more information that the hundreds of kilobytes we have. I'm not sure it's obvious that humans are that interesting or that different, even interesting humans.
  - jerf 3y ago
    Hundreds of kilobytes is not a lot of information. Even guessing gigabytes would be going very controversially low. Just the delta versus some "average" human genome would easily be into the hundreds kilobytes. Even just modeling a human as the sum total of their sensory input, itself a simplification transparently obviously insufficient, hundreds of kilobytes covers just a few seconds of their existence, or with compression, minutes or maybe hours, tops. Imagine trying to create a Marcus Aurelius that correctly output exactly the contents of his writing, while also being acceptably a human analog. If you think you can stick that into a few hundred kilobytes, there's a 500,000 Euro prize you should be starting forthwith as you're claiming many orders of magnitude improvement over the current best: http://prize.hutter1.net/ http://prize.hutter1.net/
    - addaon 3y ago
      > Hundreds of kilobytes is not a lot of information. Humans are very, very predictable. It's not clear that the deviation of one human from the mean has a lot of information. It's not clear that it /doesn't/, either -- but I'd sure as heck take the under on gigabytes for novelty of text output. Keep in mind that we're not trying to model the internal state of a human machine; instead, we're discussing how much additional information is needed to align the output of a generic human text generator with the output of a specific individual. A lifetime is about two billion seconds -- so a gigabyte is four bits of data /per second/, or maybe two bits of data /per word/ for someone who continuously speaks for 70 years. Derate to a reasonable percentage of a lifetime spent generating output (10%? 1%?) and you're talking many, many bits per word. That's enough to Huffman compress their entire lifetime output with the "base model" entirely a dictionary, no need to even have a generative model!
      - jerf 3y ago
        "Keep in mind that we're not trying to model the internal state of a human machine" Yes, that is exactly what we are discussing in this thread: Modelling the internal state of the human machine. The discussion of generating the exact stream of words is otherwise pointless. Fire lz at the collected output and call it a day; it isn't optimal but it's close enough. The entire conversation is whether we could recover the human consciousness from just the historical record.

beambot 3y ago

I wonder how close you could emulate a person's consciousness by having a Kiraman Katibim -- a little "angel on your shoulder" that records everything you ever see, hear & say and feeds it into a generative model for each person... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiraman_Katibin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiraman_Katibin

kikokikokiko 3y ago

I wouldn't want to be preserved digitally at all, but at least as a "zombie brain" you wouldn't be subjected to the eternal purgatory a full working copy of your "consciousness" would be. This short story keeps coming back to me ever since I read it a year or so ago: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo No eternal digital life to me, thanks.

grantcas 3y ago

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