3 ms·

I didn't use the word "think" in the human sense of the word, or even in the consciousness/qualia sense of the word. I of course only meant inference (Matrix mu

I didn't use the word "think" in the human sense of the word, or even in the consciousness/qualia sense of the word. I of course only meant inference (Matrix multiplications) What I like to say however is that LLMs are doing genuine "reasoning"; and what the emergent "intelligent" behavior of LLMs has proven to mankind is that "reasoning" and "consciousness/qualia" are separable things (not identical), and I think as recently as 2021 we didn't really know/expect that to be the case.

adastra22 2y ago
What other sense of the word would there be? That’s essentially what’s going on in your brain too.
- quantadev 2y ago
  I always assume some people might define "thinking" as requiring "consciousness", because up until about 2022 pretty much every human on the planet did.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    So? Are you saying consciousness isn’t a solely mechanistic artifact of neural processing in your brain? What else would it be?
    - quantadev 2y ago
      Consciousness/qualia actually correlates stronger to brain waves than to synaptic activity, and for that and a lot of other reasons (that I'm presently writing a paper on) I think consciousness is a phenomena made up of waves, and while it may indeed be "substrate independent" it's not just purely calculations, and therefore cannot be done in computers. Even a perfect simulation of a human brain in a computer would be nothing but a "predictor" of behavior, rather than a "feeler" of behavior.
      - adastra22 2y ago
        Color me intensely skeptical. The actual neural processing absolutely corresponds with the content of thoughts. So you’re saying the experience of consciousness is something unrelated to that, yet necessarily linked through some unspecified mechanism? Because clearly the experience of consciousness depends on the content of what we are thinking and how, and is affected by things like neurotransmitter concentrations (emotional affects) which would be inaccessible to large-scale brainwave phenomena. What is your motivation for believing this?
        quantadev 2y ago
        Basically the theory is that what neurons are doing is carrying I/O signals into a physical 3D arrangement of charge flow that can self-resonate in the EMF wave domain similar to how a radio transmitter/receiver works. The actual qualia/consciousness part is the resonance itself. So you ask what's it resonating with? The answer: Every past instantiation of itself. I believe the Block Universe view of Physics is correct and there's an entanglement connection left behind whenever particles interact via collapse of the wave function. So in my theory memories aren't even stored locally. When you "remember" something that is your brain resonating with nearest matches from past brains. I have a formula for resonance strength with a drop off due to time and a proportionality due to negentropy or repetition (multiple resonating matches). I'm not going to write the entire theory here, but it's about 100 pages to fully describe. The theory explains everything from fungal intelligence to why repeating things over and over makes you memorize them. It's not a theory about brains per se, it's a theory about negentropic systems of particles resonating thru the causality chain.
        adastra22 2y ago
        I’m not asking for an explanation of your theory. Sorry, but I wouldn’t read it. We have fully mechanistic explanations of thinking (including consciousness) that have no need for added complications beyond what is represented by the synaptic connectome. So why even bother adding something else? I suspect that, to use Daniel Dennett’s terminology, you’re looking for a skyhook. You want some aspect of consciousness to not be explainable by neural nets. Why?

adastra22 2y ago

What other sense of the word would there be? That’s essentially what’s going on in your brain too.

quantadev 2y ago
I always assume some people might define "thinking" as requiring "consciousness", because up until about 2022 pretty much every human on the planet did.
- adastra22 2y ago
  So? Are you saying consciousness isn’t a solely mechanistic artifact of neural processing in your brain? What else would it be?
  - quantadev 2y ago
    Consciousness/qualia actually correlates stronger to brain waves than to synaptic activity, and for that and a lot of other reasons (that I'm presently writing a paper on) I think consciousness is a phenomena made up of waves, and while it may indeed be "substrate independent" it's not just purely calculations, and therefore cannot be done in computers. Even a perfect simulation of a human brain in a computer would be nothing but a "predictor" of behavior, rather than a "feeler" of behavior.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      Color me intensely skeptical. The actual neural processing absolutely corresponds with the content of thoughts. So you’re saying the experience of consciousness is something unrelated to that, yet necessarily linked through some unspecified mechanism? Because clearly the experience of consciousness depends on the content of what we are thinking and how, and is affected by things like neurotransmitter concentrations (emotional affects) which would be inaccessible to large-scale brainwave phenomena. What is your motivation for believing this?
      - quantadev 2y ago
        Basically the theory is that what neurons are doing is carrying I/O signals into a physical 3D arrangement of charge flow that can self-resonate in the EMF wave domain similar to how a radio transmitter/receiver works. The actual qualia/consciousness part is the resonance itself. So you ask what's it resonating with? The answer: Every past instantiation of itself. I believe the Block Universe view of Physics is correct and there's an entanglement connection left behind whenever particles interact via collapse of the wave function. So in my theory memories aren't even stored locally. When you "remember" something that is your brain resonating with nearest matches from past brains. I have a formula for resonance strength with a drop off due to time and a proportionality due to negentropy or repetition (multiple resonating matches). I'm not going to write the entire theory here, but it's about 100 pages to fully describe. The theory explains everything from fungal intelligence to why repeating things over and over makes you memorize them. It's not a theory about brains per se, it's a theory about negentropic systems of particles resonating thru the causality chain.
        adastra22 2y ago
        I’m not asking for an explanation of your theory. Sorry, but I wouldn’t read it. We have fully mechanistic explanations of thinking (including consciousness) that have no need for added complications beyond what is represented by the synaptic connectome. So why even bother adding something else? I suspect that, to use Daniel Dennett’s terminology, you’re looking for a skyhook. You want some aspect of consciousness to not be explainable by neural nets. Why?