5 ms·

Eventually we may produce a collection of problems exhaustive enough that these tools can solve almost any problem that isn't novel in practice, but I doubt tha

Eventually we may produce a collection of problems exhaustive enough that these tools can solve almost any problem that isn't novel in practice, but I doubt that they will ever become general problem solvers capable of what we consider to be reasoning in humans. Historically, the claim that neural nets were actual models of the human brain and human thinking was always epistemically dubious. It still is. Even as the practical problems of producing better and better algorithms, architectures, and output have been solved, there is no reason to believe a connection between the mechanical model and what happens in organisms has been established. The most important point, in my view, is that all of the representation and interpretation still has to happen outside the computational units. Without human interpreters, none of the AI outputs have any meaning. Unless you believe in determinism and an overseeing god, the story for human beings is much different. AI will not be capable of reason until, like humans, it can develop socio-rational collectivities of meaning that are independent of the human being. Researchers seemed to have a decent grasp on this in the 90s, but today, everyone seems all too ready to make the same ridiculous leaps as the original creators of neural nets. They did not show, as they claimed, that thinking is reducible to computation. All they showed was that a neural net can realize a boolean function—which is not even logic, since, again, the entire semantic interpretive side of the logic is ignored.

nmca 2y ago
Can you define what you mean by novel here?
red75prime 2y ago
> there is no reason to believe a connection between the mechanical model and what happens in organisms has been established The universal approximation theorem. And that's basically it. The rest is empirical. No matter which physical processes happen inside the human brain, a sufficiently large neural network can approximate them. Barring unknowns like super-Turing computational processes in the brain.
- lupire 2y ago
  That's not useful by itself, because "anything cam model anything else" doesn't put any upper bound on emulation cost, which for one small task could be larger than the total energy available in the entire Universem
  - pixl97 2y ago
    I mean, that is why they mention super-Turning processes like quantum based computing.
    - dinosaurdynasty 2y ago
      Quantum computing actually isn't super-Turing, it "just" computes some things faster. (Strictly speaking it's somewhere between a standard Turing machine and a nondeterministic Turing machine in speed, and the first can emulate the second.)
      - staunton 2y ago
        If we're nitpicking: quantum computing algorithms could (if implemented) compute certain things faster than the best classical algorithms we know. We don't know any quantum algorithms that are provably faster than all possible classical algorithms.
        dinosaurdynasty 2y ago
        Well yeah, we haven't even proved that P != NP yet.
  - red75prime 2y ago
    Either the brain violates the physical Church-Turing thesis or it's not. If it does, well, it will take more time to incorporate those physical mechanisms into computers to get them on par with the brain. I leave the possibility that it's "magic"[1] aside. It's just impossible to predict, because it will violate everything we know about our physical world. [1] One example of "magic": we live in a simulation and the brain is not fully simulated by the physics engine, but creators of the simulation for some reason gave it access to computational resources that are impossible to harness using the standard physics of the simulated world. Another example: interactionistic soul.
tananan 2y ago
> Unless you believe in determinism and an overseeing god Or perhaps, determinism and mechanistic materialism - which in STEM-adjacent circles has a relatively prevalent adherence. Worldviews which strip a human being of agency in the sense you invoke crop up quite a lot today in such spaces. If you start of adopting a view like this, you have a deflationary sword which can cut down most any notion that's not mechanistic in terms of mechanistic parts. "Meaning? Well that's just an emergent phenomenon of the influence of such and such causal factors in the unrolling of a deterministic physical system." Similar for reasoning, etc. Now obviously large swathes of people don't really subscribe to this - but it is prevalent and ties in well with utopian progress stories. If something is amenable to mechanistic dissection, possibly it's amenable to mechanistic control. And that's what our education is really good at teaching us. So such stories end up having intoxicating "hype" effects and drive fundraising, and so we get where we are. For one, I wish people were just excited about making computers do things they couldn't do before, without needing to dress it up as something more than it is. "This model can prove a set of theorems in this format with such and such limits and efficiency"
- exprofmaddy 2y ago
  Agreed. If someone believes the world is purely mechanistic, then it follows that a sufficiently large computing machine can model the world---like Leibniz's Ratiocinator. The intoxication may stem from the potential for predictability and control. The irony is: why would someone want control if they don't have true choice? Unfortunately, such a question rarely pierces the intoxicated mind when this mind is preoccupied with pass the class, get an A, get a job, buy a house, raise funds, sell the product, win clients, gain status, eat right, exercise, check insta, watch the game, binge the show, post on Reddit, etc.
  - Quekid5 2y ago
    > If someone believes the world is purely mechanistic, then it follows that a sufficiently large computing machine can model the world Is this controversial in some way? The problem is that to simulate a universe you need a bigger universe -- which doesn't exist (or is certainly out of reach due to information theoretical limits) > ---like Leibniz's Ratiocinator. The intoxication may stem from the potential for predictability and control. I really don't understand the 'control' angle here. It seems pretty obvious that even in a purely mechanistic view of the universe, information theory forbids using the universe to simulate itself. Limited simulations, sure... but that leaves lots of gaps wherein you lose determinism (and control, whatever that means).
gmadsen 2y ago
I hear these arguments a lot from law and philosophy students, never from those trained in mathematics. It seems to me, "literary" people will still be discussing these theoretical hypotheticals as technology passes them by building it.
- voidhorse 2y ago
  I straddle both worlds. Consider that using the lens of mathematical reasoning to understand everything is a bit like trying to use a single mathematical theory (eg that of groups) to comprehend mathematics as a whole. You will almost always benefit and enrich your own understanding by daring to incorporate outside perspectives. Consider also that even as digital technology and the ratiomathimatical understanding of the world has advanced it is still rife with dynamics and problems that require a humanistic approach. In particular, a mathematical conception cannot resolve teleological problems which require the establishment of consensus and the actual determination of what we, as a species, want the world to look like. Climate change and general economic imbalance are already evidence of the kind of disasters that mount when you limit yourself to a reductionistic, overly mathematical and technological understanding of life and existence. Being is not a solely technical problem.
  - gmadsen 2y ago
    I don't disagree, I just don't think it is done well or at least as seriously as it used to. In modern philosophy, there are many mathematically specious arguments, that just make clear how large the mathematical gap has become e.g. improper application of Godel's incompleteness theorems. Yet Godel was a philosopher himself, who would disagree with its current hand-wavy usage. 19th/20th was a golden era of philosophy with a coherent and rigorous mathematical lens to apply with other lenses. Russel, Turing, Godel, etc. However this just doesn't exist anymore
    - voidhorse 2y ago
      While I agree that these are titans of 20th c. philosophy, particularly of the philosophy of mathematics and logic, the overarching school they belonged to (logical positivism) has been thoroughly and rightly criticized, and it is informative to read these criticisms to understand why a view of life that is overly mathematical is in many ways inadequate. Your comment still argues from a very limited perspective. There is no reason that correct application of Gödel s theorem should be any indication of the richness of someone's philosophical views unless you are already a staunchly committed reductionist who values mathematical arguments above all else (why? can maths help you explain and understand the phenomena of love in a way that will actually help you experience love? this is just one example domain where it does not make much sense), or unless they are specifically attempting a philosophy of mathematics. The question of whether or not we can effectively model cognition and human mental function using mathematical models is not a question of mathematical philosophy, but rather one of epistemology. If you really want to head a spurious argument, read McCulloch and Pitts. They essentially present an argument of two premises, the brain is finite, and we can create a machine of formal "neurons" (which are not even complete models of real neurons) that computes a boolean function, they then conclude that they must have a model of cognition, that cognition must be nothing more than computation, and that the brain must basically be a Turing machine. The relevance of mathematics to the cognitive problem must be decided outside of mathematics. As another poster said, even if you buy the theorems, it is still an empirical question as to whether or not they really model what they claim to model, and whether or not that model is of a fidelity that we find acceptable for a definition of general intelligence. Often, people reach claims of adequacy today not by producing really fantastic models but instead by lowering the bar enormously. They claim that these models approximate humans by severely reducing the idea of what it means to be an intelligent human to the specific talents their tech happens to excel at (e.g. apparently being a language parrot is all that intelligence is, ignoring all the very nuanced views and definitions of intelligence we have come up with over the course of history. A machine that is not embodied ina skeletal structure and cannot even experience, let alone solve, the vast number of physical, anatomical problems we contend with on a daily basis is, in my view, still very far from anything I would call general intelligence).
exprofmaddy 2y ago
I'm with you. Interpreting a problem as a problem requires a human (1) to recognize the problem and (2) to convince other humans that it's a problem worth solving. Both involve value, and value has no computational or mechanistic description (other than "given" or "illusion"). Once humans have identified a problem, they might employ a tool to find the solution. The tool has no sense that the problem is important or even hard; such values are imposed by the tool's users. It's worth considering why "everyone seems all too ready to make ... leaps ..." "Neural", "intelligence", "learning", and others are metaphors that have performed very well as marketing slogans. Behind the marketing slogans are deep-pocketed, platformed corporate and government (i.e. socio-rational collective) interests. Educational institutions (another socio-rational collective) and their leaders have on the whole postured as trainers and preparers for the "real world" (i.e. a job), which means they accept, support, and promote the corporate narratives about techno-utopia. Which institutions are left to check the narratives? Who has time to ask questions given the need to learn all the technobabble (by paying hundreds of thousands for 120 university credits) to become a competitive job candidate? I've found there are many voices speaking against the hype---indeed, even (rightly) questioning the epistemic underpinnings of AI. But they're ignored and out-shouted by tech marketing, fundraising politicians, and engagement-driven media.
ikrenji 2y ago
so the interpretation happens inside the soul? otherwise it matters very little if a specific computation happens in a silicone chip or a human neuron...

nmca 2y ago

Can you define what you mean by novel here?

red75prime 2y ago

> there is no reason to believe a connection between the mechanical model and what happens in organisms has been established The universal approximation theorem. And that's basically it. The rest is empirical. No matter which physical processes happen inside the human brain, a sufficiently large neural network can approximate them. Barring unknowns like super-Turing computational processes in the brain.

lupire 2y ago
That's not useful by itself, because "anything cam model anything else" doesn't put any upper bound on emulation cost, which for one small task could be larger than the total energy available in the entire Universem
- pixl97 2y ago
  I mean, that is why they mention super-Turning processes like quantum based computing.
  - dinosaurdynasty 2y ago
    Quantum computing actually isn't super-Turing, it "just" computes some things faster. (Strictly speaking it's somewhere between a standard Turing machine and a nondeterministic Turing machine in speed, and the first can emulate the second.)
    - staunton 2y ago
      If we're nitpicking: quantum computing algorithms could (if implemented) compute certain things faster than the best classical algorithms we know. We don't know any quantum algorithms that are provably faster than all possible classical algorithms.
      - dinosaurdynasty 2y ago
        Well yeah, we haven't even proved that P != NP yet.
- red75prime 2y ago
  Either the brain violates the physical Church-Turing thesis or it's not. If it does, well, it will take more time to incorporate those physical mechanisms into computers to get them on par with the brain. I leave the possibility that it's "magic"[1] aside. It's just impossible to predict, because it will violate everything we know about our physical world. [1] One example of "magic": we live in a simulation and the brain is not fully simulated by the physics engine, but creators of the simulation for some reason gave it access to computational resources that are impossible to harness using the standard physics of the simulated world. Another example: interactionistic soul.

tananan 2y ago

> Unless you believe in determinism and an overseeing god Or perhaps, determinism and mechanistic materialism - which in STEM-adjacent circles has a relatively prevalent adherence. Worldviews which strip a human being of agency in the sense you invoke crop up quite a lot today in such spaces. If you start of adopting a view like this, you have a deflationary sword which can cut down most any notion that's not mechanistic in terms of mechanistic parts. "Meaning? Well that's just an emergent phenomenon of the influence of such and such causal factors in the unrolling of a deterministic physical system." Similar for reasoning, etc. Now obviously large swathes of people don't really subscribe to this - but it is prevalent and ties in well with utopian progress stories. If something is amenable to mechanistic dissection, possibly it's amenable to mechanistic control. And that's what our education is really good at teaching us. So such stories end up having intoxicating "hype" effects and drive fundraising, and so we get where we are. For one, I wish people were just excited about making computers do things they couldn't do before, without needing to dress it up as something more than it is. "This model can prove a set of theorems in this format with such and such limits and efficiency"

exprofmaddy 2y ago
Agreed. If someone believes the world is purely mechanistic, then it follows that a sufficiently large computing machine can model the world---like Leibniz's Ratiocinator. The intoxication may stem from the potential for predictability and control. The irony is: why would someone want control if they don't have true choice? Unfortunately, such a question rarely pierces the intoxicated mind when this mind is preoccupied with pass the class, get an A, get a job, buy a house, raise funds, sell the product, win clients, gain status, eat right, exercise, check insta, watch the game, binge the show, post on Reddit, etc.
- Quekid5 2y ago
  > If someone believes the world is purely mechanistic, then it follows that a sufficiently large computing machine can model the world Is this controversial in some way? The problem is that to simulate a universe you need a bigger universe -- which doesn't exist (or is certainly out of reach due to information theoretical limits) > ---like Leibniz's Ratiocinator. The intoxication may stem from the potential for predictability and control. I really don't understand the 'control' angle here. It seems pretty obvious that even in a purely mechanistic view of the universe, information theory forbids using the universe to simulate itself. Limited simulations, sure... but that leaves lots of gaps wherein you lose determinism (and control, whatever that means).

gmadsen 2y ago

I hear these arguments a lot from law and philosophy students, never from those trained in mathematics. It seems to me, "literary" people will still be discussing these theoretical hypotheticals as technology passes them by building it.

voidhorse 2y ago
I straddle both worlds. Consider that using the lens of mathematical reasoning to understand everything is a bit like trying to use a single mathematical theory (eg that of groups) to comprehend mathematics as a whole. You will almost always benefit and enrich your own understanding by daring to incorporate outside perspectives. Consider also that even as digital technology and the ratiomathimatical understanding of the world has advanced it is still rife with dynamics and problems that require a humanistic approach. In particular, a mathematical conception cannot resolve teleological problems which require the establishment of consensus and the actual determination of what we, as a species, want the world to look like. Climate change and general economic imbalance are already evidence of the kind of disasters that mount when you limit yourself to a reductionistic, overly mathematical and technological understanding of life and existence. Being is not a solely technical problem.
- gmadsen 2y ago
  I don't disagree, I just don't think it is done well or at least as seriously as it used to. In modern philosophy, there are many mathematically specious arguments, that just make clear how large the mathematical gap has become e.g. improper application of Godel's incompleteness theorems. Yet Godel was a philosopher himself, who would disagree with its current hand-wavy usage. 19th/20th was a golden era of philosophy with a coherent and rigorous mathematical lens to apply with other lenses. Russel, Turing, Godel, etc. However this just doesn't exist anymore
  - voidhorse 2y ago
    While I agree that these are titans of 20th c. philosophy, particularly of the philosophy of mathematics and logic, the overarching school they belonged to (logical positivism) has been thoroughly and rightly criticized, and it is informative to read these criticisms to understand why a view of life that is overly mathematical is in many ways inadequate. Your comment still argues from a very limited perspective. There is no reason that correct application of Gödel s theorem should be any indication of the richness of someone's philosophical views unless you are already a staunchly committed reductionist who values mathematical arguments above all else (why? can maths help you explain and understand the phenomena of love in a way that will actually help you experience love? this is just one example domain where it does not make much sense), or unless they are specifically attempting a philosophy of mathematics. The question of whether or not we can effectively model cognition and human mental function using mathematical models is not a question of mathematical philosophy, but rather one of epistemology. If you really want to head a spurious argument, read McCulloch and Pitts. They essentially present an argument of two premises, the brain is finite, and we can create a machine of formal "neurons" (which are not even complete models of real neurons) that computes a boolean function, they then conclude that they must have a model of cognition, that cognition must be nothing more than computation, and that the brain must basically be a Turing machine. The relevance of mathematics to the cognitive problem must be decided outside of mathematics. As another poster said, even if you buy the theorems, it is still an empirical question as to whether or not they really model what they claim to model, and whether or not that model is of a fidelity that we find acceptable for a definition of general intelligence. Often, people reach claims of adequacy today not by producing really fantastic models but instead by lowering the bar enormously. They claim that these models approximate humans by severely reducing the idea of what it means to be an intelligent human to the specific talents their tech happens to excel at (e.g. apparently being a language parrot is all that intelligence is, ignoring all the very nuanced views and definitions of intelligence we have come up with over the course of history. A machine that is not embodied ina skeletal structure and cannot even experience, let alone solve, the vast number of physical, anatomical problems we contend with on a daily basis is, in my view, still very far from anything I would call general intelligence).

exprofmaddy 2y ago

I'm with you. Interpreting a problem as a problem requires a human (1) to recognize the problem and (2) to convince other humans that it's a problem worth solving. Both involve value, and value has no computational or mechanistic description (other than "given" or "illusion"). Once humans have identified a problem, they might employ a tool to find the solution. The tool has no sense that the problem is important or even hard; such values are imposed by the tool's users. It's worth considering why "everyone seems all too ready to make ... leaps ..." "Neural", "intelligence", "learning", and others are metaphors that have performed very well as marketing slogans. Behind the marketing slogans are deep-pocketed, platformed corporate and government (i.e. socio-rational collective) interests. Educational institutions (another socio-rational collective) and their leaders have on the whole postured as trainers and preparers for the "real world" (i.e. a job), which means they accept, support, and promote the corporate narratives about techno-utopia. Which institutions are left to check the narratives? Who has time to ask questions given the need to learn all the technobabble (by paying hundreds of thousands for 120 university credits) to become a competitive job candidate? I've found there are many voices speaking against the hype---indeed, even (rightly) questioning the epistemic underpinnings of AI. But they're ignored and out-shouted by tech marketing, fundraising politicians, and engagement-driven media.

ikrenji 2y ago

so the interpretation happens inside the soul? otherwise it matters very little if a specific computation happens in a silicone chip or a human neuron...