8 ms·

We'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

We'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 ago
Typing is just a medium, it is irrelevant. Seeing and all the other senses that you mentioned are input within a context window.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  uhuh.. 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 ago
I 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.
- imtringued 3y ago
  How do you lookup quantum mechanics? Please tell the physicists about your breakthroughs.
  - bubblyworld 3y ago
    No need, physicists already do this all the time - any computer simulation of quantum mechanical systems has to come to terms with the same problems (namely quantising the state space and representing the dynamics deterministically).
    - mjburgess 3y ago
      Physicists simulate on computers only what can be, which is almost nothing. Consider obtaining the dynamics of water by simulating all its parts: proton flow, hydrogen bonding etc. of 10^{PHYSICALLY UNCOMPUTABLE} interactions. The simulations which do exist fail to model vast amounts. This is why, say, climate change is given as a prediction on temperature -- because it can be obtained as a mean which ignores "basically everything". And it can be easily show that the assumptions of QM are false if Hilbert space is computable (QM becomes non-linear); and of classical mechanics (which becomes non-deterministic); and so on. ie., that the issue isnt merely 10^{PHYSICALLY UNCOMPUTABLE} but that non-computable functions are essential to the formulation. The assertion that the world is computable is just that: there are no research projects, no textbooks, no experiments, no formalism to replace physics or anything like it -- nothing. All the basic assumptions of physics would have to be false, and we would have to have good reasons for supposing so. This is just nonsense. The world is geometrical as described by physics. It is not computational as described by the discrete mathematician whose megalomania and platonism knows no bounds.
      - bubblyworld 3y ago
        To be honest, I don't really understand what you mean by Hilbert spaces being computable, and what that has to do with the linearity of QM, determinism of classical mechanics, universe being geometrical and not computational etc. I'm familiar with all of those concepts, but not sure how they tie together here. If you have resources you could share I would appreciate it (I had little success with google).
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
"I am not synthesising text" Then what are you doing? I think you are falling for the same arguments as 'mystics'. Somehow your inner thoughts are un-explainable. But nothing in your argument explains it, you are just taking your own inner experience itself as the mystical explanation. The old 'I think therefore I am' argument. And where did the 'thinking' come from?
- mjburgess 3y ago
  It's entirely explainable, I just explained it in the other comment, "Somatosenstory representations are built by the sensory-motor system." Do you really think the meat of my body is growing so as to record every symbol i've seen, or even an induction across them? I find this inability to think outside of the switching frequencies of a silicon chip as they model the patterns of text tokens on reddit, absolutely bizarre. You're an ape, have some appreciation for it. You're much more interesting than what openai can steal from amazon's ebook library.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    My view is opposite. "inability to think outside of the switching frequencies of a silicon chip" Why can't you "think outside", and conceptualize that this 'internal subjective experience' we are having, is not unique, and could be taking place inside a silicon based NN? It helps to meditate and observe your own thoughts, and how they arise. You can begin to realize that you don't 'think'. You don't think about what to think and thus think it. Thoughts just become un-bidden. Its back to the Schopenhauer quote "“A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.” Then, when you begin to notice the mechanistic nature of your own mind, you will have less resistance to how 'silicon' is also reacting. Silicon and Carbon both reacting to inputs, processing.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - mjburgess 3y ago
      Organisms are mechanistic, there's nothing "not mechanistic" about the mind. Its insane to suppose that somatosensory representation building, which requires organic neruoplasticity to be connected to the organically adaptive neuromotor system, etc. etc. etc. can just be instantiated in a bit of sand. This is deeply mystical, pseudoscience. You're credulously throwing away any kind of empirical analysis of the world in terms of it's properties and their mechanisms for the deeply mystical view that, unique in amongst all properties of the world, consciousness needs no empirical analysis of the properties of the systems which have it. Of gold we ask: what makes it shine; of fire: what makes it hot.. and so on for everything empirical in the world. But with the mind we must stop! No! No! do not do any science! please that might mean we can't be scammed by a VC out of our investment money; i cannot babble endlessly about scifi star treck episodes! no no! please do not rob me of my scifi religion! please please, do not ruin commander data for me! Well there is no commander data. And the properties of gold are not those of sand, nor those of animals. And just as no bit of silicon will be trasumted into gold by the running of an NN on its electric field; likewise, no bit of silicon will desire or wish or conceive of anything. We are biological organisms; we do not have souls, even if in your religion, the soul is "a pattern". Your consciousness will not be uploaded; commander data will never visit; and your local VC shyster is on a stock manipulation grift to bamboozle you out of money.

mewpmewp2 3y ago

Typing is just a medium, it is irrelevant. Seeing and all the other senses that you mentioned are input within a context window.

mjburgess 3y ago
uhuh.. 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 ago

I 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.

imtringued 3y ago
How do you lookup quantum mechanics? Please tell the physicists about your breakthroughs.
- bubblyworld 3y ago
  No need, physicists already do this all the time - any computer simulation of quantum mechanical systems has to come to terms with the same problems (namely quantising the state space and representing the dynamics deterministically).
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    Physicists simulate on computers only what can be, which is almost nothing. Consider obtaining the dynamics of water by simulating all its parts: proton flow, hydrogen bonding etc. of 10^{PHYSICALLY UNCOMPUTABLE} interactions. The simulations which do exist fail to model vast amounts. This is why, say, climate change is given as a prediction on temperature -- because it can be obtained as a mean which ignores "basically everything". And it can be easily show that the assumptions of QM are false if Hilbert space is computable (QM becomes non-linear); and of classical mechanics (which becomes non-deterministic); and so on. ie., that the issue isnt merely 10^{PHYSICALLY UNCOMPUTABLE} but that non-computable functions are essential to the formulation. The assertion that the world is computable is just that: there are no research projects, no textbooks, no experiments, no formalism to replace physics or anything like it -- nothing. All the basic assumptions of physics would have to be false, and we would have to have good reasons for supposing so. This is just nonsense. The world is geometrical as described by physics. It is not computational as described by the discrete mathematician whose megalomania and platonism knows no bounds.
    - bubblyworld 3y ago
      To be honest, I don't really understand what you mean by Hilbert spaces being computable, and what that has to do with the linearity of QM, determinism of classical mechanics, universe being geometrical and not computational etc. I'm familiar with all of those concepts, but not sure how they tie together here. If you have resources you could share I would appreciate it (I had little success with google).

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

"I am not synthesising text" Then what are you doing? I think you are falling for the same arguments as 'mystics'. Somehow your inner thoughts are un-explainable. But nothing in your argument explains it, you are just taking your own inner experience itself as the mystical explanation. The old 'I think therefore I am' argument. And where did the 'thinking' come from?

mjburgess 3y ago
It's entirely explainable, I just explained it in the other comment, "Somatosenstory representations are built by the sensory-motor system." Do you really think the meat of my body is growing so as to record every symbol i've seen, or even an induction across them? I find this inability to think outside of the switching frequencies of a silicon chip as they model the patterns of text tokens on reddit, absolutely bizarre. You're an ape, have some appreciation for it. You're much more interesting than what openai can steal from amazon's ebook library.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  My view is opposite. "inability to think outside of the switching frequencies of a silicon chip" Why can't you "think outside", and conceptualize that this 'internal subjective experience' we are having, is not unique, and could be taking place inside a silicon based NN? It helps to meditate and observe your own thoughts, and how they arise. You can begin to realize that you don't 'think'. You don't think about what to think and thus think it. Thoughts just become un-bidden. Its back to the Schopenhauer quote "“A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.” Then, when you begin to notice the mechanistic nature of your own mind, you will have less resistance to how 'silicon' is also reacting. Silicon and Carbon both reacting to inputs, processing.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    Organisms are mechanistic, there's nothing "not mechanistic" about the mind. Its insane to suppose that somatosensory representation building, which requires organic neruoplasticity to be connected to the organically adaptive neuromotor system, etc. etc. etc. can just be instantiated in a bit of sand. This is deeply mystical, pseudoscience. You're credulously throwing away any kind of empirical analysis of the world in terms of it's properties and their mechanisms for the deeply mystical view that, unique in amongst all properties of the world, consciousness needs no empirical analysis of the properties of the systems which have it. Of gold we ask: what makes it shine; of fire: what makes it hot.. and so on for everything empirical in the world. But with the mind we must stop! No! No! do not do any science! please that might mean we can't be scammed by a VC out of our investment money; i cannot babble endlessly about scifi star treck episodes! no no! please do not rob me of my scifi religion! please please, do not ruin commander data for me! Well there is no commander data. And the properties of gold are not those of sand, nor those of animals. And just as no bit of silicon will be trasumted into gold by the running of an NN on its electric field; likewise, no bit of silicon will desire or wish or conceive of anything. We are biological organisms; we do not have souls, even if in your religion, the soul is "a pattern". Your consciousness will not be uploaded; commander data will never visit; and your local VC shyster is on a stock manipulation grift to bamboozle you out of money.