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What is more special about how human intelligence works? In the end we are all particles and it all could be trillions of data points very simplistically intera

What is more special about how human intelligence works? In the end we are all particles and it all could be trillions of data points very simplistically interacting with each other resulting in emergent behaviour and complex, intelligent results. We know how common molecules can interact with each other. Does this mean that anything built on top of them is not intelligent? Everything in life could just be "statistics".

couchand 3y ago
> In the end we are all particles citation needed
- ducttapecrown 3y ago
  Citation: particle physics
- WhitneyLand 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics
  - couchand 3y ago
    Where in that article does it say that the self, that human consciousness, that a soul arises purely from the arrangement of particles in our bodies?
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      In the part where it says that all that there is in the universe that is perceivable at human levels of energy and scales is made out of particles in the standard model (dark matter doesn't interact in a way where it could influence us, and dark energy only has effects on extraordinarily large scales). All measurements and all experiments ever done with matter and fields confirm that it behaves according to the laws of quantum mechanics. Those laws leave absolutely no room for a self that is not an emergent phenomenon of some kind. They also don't leave room for something like a free will that allows "you" to control "your body" by your "will", which is what I assume you might mean by a soul. That is, they clearly show that me writing this reply could have been (in principle) foretold, or at least had a calculated probability.
    - staticman2 3y ago
      I'm sure you weren't asking for a citation in good faith but instead making a rhetorical point, but here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism.
mjburgess 3y ago
Particles interacting (causally) though a physical mechanism that gives rise to say "wholes" with novel causal properties is not a statistical process. So your premise contradicts your conclusion. Statistics is an analysis of association, not of causation. The frequency of (Q, A) pairs follows a distribution that is not constrained, or caused by, or explained by, how Q and A are actually related. For example, recently there was some scandal at microsoft that if you used "pro choice" in prompts you got "demonic cartoons". Why? Presumably because "pro choice" are symbols that accompany such political cartoons in the data set. So does Q = "pro choice", and A = "cartoons of hell" occur at notable frequency because hell has caused anything? Or because there's a unique semantic mechanism where by "pro choice" means "hell" and so on. NO. It is absolutely insane to suggest that we have rigged all our text output so as to align one set of symbols (Q) alongside another (A) such that, Q is the necessary explanation of A. I doubt this is even possible, since most Qs dont have unique As -- so there is actually *no function* to approximate. In any case, your whole comment is an argument from ignorance as I complained in mine. What you don't know about life, about machines, about intelligence justifies no conclusions at all (esp., "everything in life could be"). And let's be clear. Lots of people do know the answers to your questions, they arent hard to answer. It's just not in any ad companies interest to lead their description of these systems by presenting good-faith research. Everything printed in the media today is just a game of stock manipulation using the "prognosticator loopwhole" whereby the CEO of nvidia can "prophesy the future" in which his hardware is "of course" essential -- without being held to account for his statements. So when that stock hits its ATH and crashes, no one can sue. I think we should change this; remove this loophole and suddenly tech boards and propagandists will be much much more reserved.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  What could be "statistics" is our intelligence learning from past events, either by natural selection in the scope of generations or our brains during our lifetime. If certain A outcome has occured enough times for Q input, it has resulted in such a structure that is best given the resources available to reach that.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
jofla_net 3y ago
No argument with the particles/neurons/matter approach to the subject. It is sound and if you look at us compositionally there is nothing magic about whats going on. There is, though, something about intuition or instinctual behavior which can constantly recombine/reapply itself to a task at hand. I know many will balk at intuition, and maybe its only at the very best a heuristic, but i think we need to at least unravel what it is and how it operates before we can understand what makes something classify as human-like intelligence. Is it merely executing a process which we can put our minds into with practice, or is it demonstrating something more general, higher-level.
- fouc 3y ago
  intuition is a form of pattern matching without reasoning, so kinda like LLM
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Well look, compared to the electrified bits of sand in my laptop i'd strongly defend pregnancy as something vastly more "magical" if those are the terms we must use. People who thing organic adaption, sensory-motor adaption, somatosensory representation building... ie.., all those things which ooze-and-grow so that a paino player can play, or we can here type... are these magic? Well I think it's exactly the opposite. It's a very anti-intellectual nihilism that all that need be known about the world is the electromagnetic properties of silicon-based transitors. Those who use the word "magic" in this debate are really like atheists about the moon. It all sounds very smart to deny the moon exists, but in the end, it's actually just a lack of knowledge dressed up as enlightened cynicism. There are more things to discover in a single cell of our body that we have ever known; and may ever know. All the theories of science needed to explain its operation would exhaust every page we have ever printed. We know a fraction of what we need to know. And each bit of that fraction reveals an entire universe of "magical" processes unreplicated by copper wires or silicon switches.
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    You make good points. I think it's a typical trait of the way computer scientists and programmers tend to think. Computer science has made great strides over the decades through abstraction, as well as distillation of complex systems into simpler properties that can easily be computed. As a result of the combination of this method of thinking and the Dunning-Kruger effect, people in our field tend to apply this to the entire world, even where it doesn't fit very well, like biology, geopolitics, sociology, psychology, etc. You see a lot of this on HN. People who seem to think they've figured out some very deep truth about another field that can be explained in one hand-waving paragraph, when really there are lots of important details they're ignoring that make their ideas trivially wrong. Economists have a similar thing going on, I feel. Though I'm not an economist.
sweeter 3y ago
Its wild how this alwayyysss is the argument. Its just "oh so you think humans are special!" >:| and a gigantic "what-if" its a purely emotional provocation and a universe sized leap, not an argument for LLM's having intelligence or sentience. Anything could be anything, wowww! This goes back to what the other person was saying, "I cannot reason about what is going on behind the curtain, therefore..."
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Not arguing LLMs have sentience, but more so whether something that could be considered as "simplistic" as "statistics" could yield in a more complex result. Whether LLMs have intelligence depends on your definition of intelligence. Could connections of artificial neurons arranged in certain way as a result of training on data yield in human level intelligence?
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    Always remember that ML is starting from training data, ie., from a very very very large number of (Prompt,Answer) pairs. Remember also, that companies like OpenAI are tracking what prompts fail and adding it to their datasets. So their initial data is ever-more just a record of questions-and-answers. Given this, we should expect that the vast majority of questions we have, of ChatGPT will be answered very very well. What has this to do with intelligence? Nothing at all. Intelligence is not answering questions correctly. It's what you use when you dont have the answers and arent even clear on the question.
    - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
      This is not how ML works generally nor LLMs like ChatGPT specifically. What you're describing sounds like RLHF, which changes the style of responses and impacts things like refusals but does not add to a model's intelligence (in fact it reduces model intelligence). An LLM's intelligence comes from pretraining in which there are no prompts, or answers, only corpus and perplexity.

couchand 3y ago

> In the end we are all particles citation needed

ducttapecrown 3y ago
Citation: particle physics
WhitneyLand 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics
- couchand 3y ago
  Where in that article does it say that the self, that human consciousness, that a soul arises purely from the arrangement of particles in our bodies?
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    In the part where it says that all that there is in the universe that is perceivable at human levels of energy and scales is made out of particles in the standard model (dark matter doesn't interact in a way where it could influence us, and dark energy only has effects on extraordinarily large scales). All measurements and all experiments ever done with matter and fields confirm that it behaves according to the laws of quantum mechanics. Those laws leave absolutely no room for a self that is not an emergent phenomenon of some kind. They also don't leave room for something like a free will that allows "you" to control "your body" by your "will", which is what I assume you might mean by a soul. That is, they clearly show that me writing this reply could have been (in principle) foretold, or at least had a calculated probability.
  - staticman2 3y ago
    I'm sure you weren't asking for a citation in good faith but instead making a rhetorical point, but here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism.

mjburgess 3y ago

Particles interacting (causally) though a physical mechanism that gives rise to say "wholes" with novel causal properties is not a statistical process. So your premise contradicts your conclusion. Statistics is an analysis of association, not of causation. The frequency of (Q, A) pairs follows a distribution that is not constrained, or caused by, or explained by, how Q and A are actually related. For example, recently there was some scandal at microsoft that if you used "pro choice" in prompts you got "demonic cartoons". Why? Presumably because "pro choice" are symbols that accompany such political cartoons in the data set. So does Q = "pro choice", and A = "cartoons of hell" occur at notable frequency because hell has caused anything? Or because there's a unique semantic mechanism where by "pro choice" means "hell" and so on. NO. It is absolutely insane to suggest that we have rigged all our text output so as to align one set of symbols (Q) alongside another (A) such that, Q is the necessary explanation of A. I doubt this is even possible, since most Qs dont have unique As -- so there is actually *no function* to approximate. In any case, your whole comment is an argument from ignorance as I complained in mine. What you don't know about life, about machines, about intelligence justifies no conclusions at all (esp., "everything in life could be"). And let's be clear. Lots of people do know the answers to your questions, they arent hard to answer. It's just not in any ad companies interest to lead their description of these systems by presenting good-faith research. Everything printed in the media today is just a game of stock manipulation using the "prognosticator loopwhole" whereby the CEO of nvidia can "prophesy the future" in which his hardware is "of course" essential -- without being held to account for his statements. So when that stock hits its ATH and crashes, no one can sue. I think we should change this; remove this loophole and suddenly tech boards and propagandists will be much much more reserved.

mewpmewp2 3y ago
What could be "statistics" is our intelligence learning from past events, either by natural selection in the scope of generations or our brains during our lifetime. If certain A outcome has occured enough times for Q input, it has resulted in such a structure that is best given the resources available to reach that.
- mjburgess 3y ago

jofla_net 3y ago

No argument with the particles/neurons/matter approach to the subject. It is sound and if you look at us compositionally there is nothing magic about whats going on. There is, though, something about intuition or instinctual behavior which can constantly recombine/reapply itself to a task at hand. I know many will balk at intuition, and maybe its only at the very best a heuristic, but i think we need to at least unravel what it is and how it operates before we can understand what makes something classify as human-like intelligence. Is it merely executing a process which we can put our minds into with practice, or is it demonstrating something more general, higher-level.

fouc 3y ago
intuition is a form of pattern matching without reasoning, so kinda like LLM
mjburgess 3y ago
Well look, compared to the electrified bits of sand in my laptop i'd strongly defend pregnancy as something vastly more "magical" if those are the terms we must use. People who thing organic adaption, sensory-motor adaption, somatosensory representation building... ie.., all those things which ooze-and-grow so that a paino player can play, or we can here type... are these magic? Well I think it's exactly the opposite. It's a very anti-intellectual nihilism that all that need be known about the world is the electromagnetic properties of silicon-based transitors. Those who use the word "magic" in this debate are really like atheists about the moon. It all sounds very smart to deny the moon exists, but in the end, it's actually just a lack of knowledge dressed up as enlightened cynicism. There are more things to discover in a single cell of our body that we have ever known; and may ever know. All the theories of science needed to explain its operation would exhaust every page we have ever printed. We know a fraction of what we need to know. And each bit of that fraction reveals an entire universe of "magical" processes unreplicated by copper wires or silicon switches.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
  You make good points. I think it's a typical trait of the way computer scientists and programmers tend to think. Computer science has made great strides over the decades through abstraction, as well as distillation of complex systems into simpler properties that can easily be computed. As a result of the combination of this method of thinking and the Dunning-Kruger effect, people in our field tend to apply this to the entire world, even where it doesn't fit very well, like biology, geopolitics, sociology, psychology, etc. You see a lot of this on HN. People who seem to think they've figured out some very deep truth about another field that can be explained in one hand-waving paragraph, when really there are lots of important details they're ignoring that make their ideas trivially wrong. Economists have a similar thing going on, I feel. Though I'm not an economist.

sweeter 3y ago

Its wild how this alwayyysss is the argument. Its just "oh so you think humans are special!" >:| and a gigantic "what-if" its a purely emotional provocation and a universe sized leap, not an argument for LLM's having intelligence or sentience. Anything could be anything, wowww! This goes back to what the other person was saying, "I cannot reason about what is going on behind the curtain, therefore..."

mewpmewp2 3y ago
Not arguing LLMs have sentience, but more so whether something that could be considered as "simplistic" as "statistics" could yield in a more complex result. Whether LLMs have intelligence depends on your definition of intelligence. Could connections of artificial neurons arranged in certain way as a result of training on data yield in human level intelligence?
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Always remember that ML is starting from training data, ie., from a very very very large number of (Prompt,Answer) pairs. Remember also, that companies like OpenAI are tracking what prompts fail and adding it to their datasets. So their initial data is ever-more just a record of questions-and-answers. Given this, we should expect that the vast majority of questions we have, of ChatGPT will be answered very very well. What has this to do with intelligence? Nothing at all. Intelligence is not answering questions correctly. It's what you use when you dont have the answers and arent even clear on the question.
  - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
    This is not how ML works generally nor LLMs like ChatGPT specifically. What you're describing sounds like RLHF, which changes the style of responses and impacts things like refusals but does not add to a model's intelligence (in fact it reduces model intelligence). An LLM's intelligence comes from pretraining in which there are no prompts, or answers, only corpus and perplexity.