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This is an old argument against determinism - I think a serious challenge is that: 1. Modern physics suggests you can implement such a lookup table for any sub
by bubblyworld 3y ago
This is an old argument against determinism - I think a serious challenge is that:
1. Modern physics suggests you can implement such a lookup table for any subset of our universe.
2. We are a subset of the universe.
3. Therefore we are representable by lookup tables too.
...so your argument appears to prove too much, namely that humans aren't thinking beings either. Which is fine, but personally I don't think that's a useful definition of "thinking".
- clooper 3y agoHow are people lookup tables? In the case of neural networks the representation of the table is obvious, it's just numbers. What would be the equivalent table for the liver? My argument isn't abstract. Neural networks really are just numerical functions which can be expanded into their equivalent graph representations.
- josh-stylo 3y agoNot sure what he's referring to in terms of modern physics saying we're just a lookup table but at the very least, you could say the same thing about the conversation that we're having now. You read words, those words map to meaning representation in our heads, we then generate a response.
- clooper 3y agoObviously if we are interacting over a digital medium then the responses will be encoded as numbers but there is no way to reduce an entire person to a lookup table. Measured output of human behavior can be expressed as lists of numbers but thinking is not the same as the list of numbers, unlike in the case of neural networks where the graph and the network are actually equivalent.
- mewpmewp2 3y agoYou could represent all the input on different levels as numbers, e.g. all EM waves hitting our eyes, then all the physical output from our body also as numbers, and everything that causes this output from input within is what you would consider to be a lookup table.
- clooper 3y agoWhat are the dimension of the input and output spaces involved in this idealization? In the case of a neural network there is no idealization. The network is software, it's a number. It's inputs and outputs are all bounded and can be expressed as a table of bounded tuples.
- ccozan 3y agoI think the OP is right. All the input to a human brain can be expressed as numbers, at any given time a specific radiation, vibration, or chemical reaction is hitting our "sensors" and by the law of physics this is just numbers ( in terms of differentiation, brain does not know absolute values ). Our output ( mechanical and vibrations ) is also fully quantifiable, thus numbers. One giant lookup table.
- clooper 3y agoProvide some concrete numbers for solar radiation then as a lookup table. You guys are confusing abstraction and idealization with what it means to be a thinking person. There is no such abstraction and idealization happening with software. The software is really just a number, there is no idealization or abstraction happening when I claim that GPT is a sequence of bits representing a numerical function.
- bubblyworld 3y agoAbstraction is a property of a description of a thing, not the thing itself. In reality, what we call "GPT" is the highly organised behaviour of many electrons, probably distributed across many computers, each with extremely complex hardware of various kinds, etc etc. Calling it a sequence of bits representing a numerical function is a choice of description - an abstraction, even! In this case it's a good description, because it correlates with the GPT in reality quite well. But they are not the same thing.
- bubblyworld 3y agoPeople really are just stacks of molecules that can be broken down into their causal properties - moreover, we know those causal properties to a high degree of accuracy these days. I'm suggesting that for any given human/environment pair, there is a lookup table that produces that person's actual behaviour in that situation. Modern physics lets us approximate this lookup table, and presumably better physics would give us a better lookup table. Since human behaviour can in principle be described with a lookup table, I see this as a bad reason to rule out a system as "thinking". Perhaps there is another way to describe neural nets, one that does not use the language of lookup tables, that makes it feel more like thinking and less like lookups. One such approach I've seen is looking for embedded world models in neural nets.
- mjburgess 3y agoWe're not a lookup table of the things we're, eg., saying, or doing etc. Nor are we looking up, in this sense, when we act. ie., when you compress text into an NN and use it to generate text, the generated text is just a synthesis of the compressed text. Whereas when I type, I am not synthesising text. Rather I have the skill of typing, I have an interior subjectivity of thoughts, I have memories which arent text, and so on. When my fingers move across the keyboard it isn't because they are looking up text. Our causal properties (experiencing, thinking, seeing, feeling, remembering, moving, speaking, growing, digesting ...) are not each, "index on the total history of prior experience", "index on the total history of prior seeing". The world directly causes, eg., us to see -- seeing isnt a lookup table of prior seeings. ( Also, the whole of physics is formulated in terms that cannot be made into a lookup table; and there is no evidence, only insistence, of the converse. )
- mewpmewp2 3y agoTyping is just a medium, it is irrelevant. Seeing and all the other senses that you mentioned are input within a context window.
- mjburgess 3y agouhuh.. and how do you form the inputs into that context window? Turns out you need to move (indeed, adapt) the body in order to form the very techinques which become concepts that can be given as inputs. The eye does not move on its own, it has to be directed to attend to reality as conceptualised -- where do these come from? Somatosenstory representations are built by the sensory-motor system. Or, simply: in order to first think, we move.
- bubblyworld 3y agoI strongly disagree with your last statement - physics explicitly _is_ formulated in terms that can be made into a lookup table (see phase spaces in classical mechanics, for instance). My point is that there's a finite light cone of possible causal influences over you at any moment in time, and in principle you can break those down into state variables finely enough to predict future states of a person. This is isomorphic to a lookup table, albeit one we aren't able to construct right now. Im not suggesting it's enough to consider just the person in this scenario - the causal factors are part of the lookup.