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Do they know what a hot shower feels like? They can describe it. But do they actually know? Have they experienced it? This is my point. Nerds keep dismissing

Do they know what a hot shower feels like? They can describe it. But do they actually know? Have they experienced it? This is my point. Nerds keep dismissing physicality and experience. If your argument is a brain in a jar will be generally intelligent, I think that's pretty clearly wrong.

HDThoreaun 2y ago
See the responses section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument This idea certainly has been long considered but I personally reject it.
- cynicalpeace 2y ago
  While interesting, this is a separate thought experiment with its own quirks. Sort of a strawman, since my argument is formulated differently and simply argues that AIs need to be more than brains in jars for them to be considered generally intelligent. And that the only reason we think AIs can just be brains in jars is because many of the people developing them consider themselves as simply brains in jars.
  - HDThoreaun 2y ago
    Not really. The point of it is considering whether physical experience creates knowledge that is impossible to get otherwise. Thats the argument you are making no? If Mary learns nothing new when seeing red for the first time an AI would also learn nothing new when seeing red for the first time. > Do they know what a hot shower feels like? They can describe it. But do they actually know? Have they experienced it Is directly a knowledge argument
    - cynicalpeace 2y ago
      Mary in that thought experiment is not an LLM that has learned via text. She's acquired "all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes". This does not actually describe modern LLMs. It actually better describes a robot that has transcribed the location, temperature, and velocity of water drops from a hot shower to its memory. Again, this thought experiment has its own quirks. Also, it is an argument against physicalism, which I have no interest in debating. While it's tangentially related, my point is not for/against physicalism. My argument is about modern AI and it's ability to learn. If we put touch sensors, eyes, nose, a mechanism to collect physical data (legs) and even sex organs on an AI system, then it is more generally intelligent than before. It will have learned in a better fashion what a hot shower feels like and will be smarter for it.
      - HDThoreaun 2y ago
        > While it's tangentially related, my point is not for/against physicalism. I really disagree. Your entire point is about physicalism. If physicalism is true than an AI does not necessarily learn in a better fashion what a hot shower feels like by being embodied. In a physicalist world it is conceivable to experience that synthetically.
        cynicalpeace 2y ago
        I love hearing someone else tell me I'm not saying what I'm saying.
Dilettante_ 2y ago
So are you saying people who have CIPA are less intelligent for never having experienced a hot shower? By that same logic, does its ability to experience more colors increase the intelligence of a mantis shrimp? Perhaps your own internal definition of intelligence simply deviates significantly from the common, "median" definition.
- cynicalpeace 2y ago
  It's the totality of experiences that make an individual. Most humans that I'm aware of have a greater totality of experiences that make them far smarter than any modern AI system.
  - skinner_ 2y ago
    Greater totality of experiences than having read the whole internet? Obviously they are very different kind of experiences, but a greater totality? I'm not so sure. Here is what we know: The Pile web scrape is 800GB. 20 years of human experience at 1kB/sec is 600GB. Maybe 1kB/sec is bad estimate. Maybe sensory input is more valuable than written text. You can convince me. But next challenge, some 10^15 seconds of currently existing youtube video, that's 2 million years of audiovisual experience, or 10^9GB at the same 1kB/sec.
    - whiskiss 2y ago
      I feel the jump from "reading the internet" to experience has a gap in reasoning. I'm not experienced in philosophy or* logic enough(no matter how much I read, heh) to articulate it, but seems to get at the person's idea of lacking street smarts, common sense. An adult with basic common sense could probably filter out false information quicker since I can get Claude to tell me false info regularly(I still like em, pretty entertaining) which has not only factual but contradictory flaws any person wouldn't make. Like recently I had two pieces of data, then when comparing them it was blatently incorrectly(they were very close, but claude said one was 8x bigger for... idk why.) Another commenter also mentioned sensory input when talking about the brown rat. As someone who is constantly fascinated at the brains ability to reason/process stuff before I'm even conscious of it, I feel this Stat is Underrated. I'm taking in and monitoring like 15 sensations of touch at all time. Something entering my visual field coming towards me can be deflected in half a second all while still understanding the rest of my surroundings, and where it might be safe to deflect an object. The brain is constantly calculating depth perception and stereo location on every image and sound we hear - also with the ability to screen out the junk or alter our perception accurately(knowing the correct color of items regardless of diff in color temp). I do concede that's a heck of a lot of video data. It does have similar issues to what I said(lacks touch, often no real stereo location, good greenscreen might convince an AI of something a person intuitively knows is impossible) but the scale alone certainly adds a lot. That could potentially make up for what I see as a hugely overlooked thing as far as stimulus. I am monitoring and adjusting like, hundreds of parameters a second subconsciously. Like everything in my visual field. I don't think it can be quantified accurately how many things we consciously and subconsciously process, but I have the feeling it's a staggering amount.
tomrod 2y ago
The proof that 1+1=2 is nontrivial despite it being clear and obvious. It does not rely on physicality nor experience to prove. There are areas of utility here. Things need not be able to do all actions to be useful.
- cynicalpeace 2y ago
  There's no way you get to 1+1=2 without experience. There would be no one to even make that statement.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    See the work I posted in sibling comment in this chain.
    - cynicalpeace 2y ago
      The subject has been debated ad nauseam by everyone like Descartes, Hume, Kant, and so on. If there were no one around to state 1 + 1 = 2, there would be no such statement. Hence, it does rely on at least 1 person's experience. Yours in fact, since everyone else could be an illusion.
- momentoftop 2y ago
  There isn't a serious proof that 1+1=2, because it's near enough axiomatic. In the last 150 years or so, we've been trying to find very general logical systems in which we can encode "1", "2" and "+" and for which 1+1=2 is a theorem, and the derivations are sometimes non-trivial, but they are ultimately mere sanity checks that the logical system can capture basic arithmetic.
  - tomrod 2y ago
    If this is new, then you're one of today's luck 10,000![2] Serious logical foundations take a lot of time and exposition to start from fundamentals. Dismissing them as non-serious because GP's argument failed to consider them is misguided, IMHO. [0] The classic reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica -- over 1,000 pages, Betrand Russell [1] https://cmartinez.web.wesleyan.edu/documents/FP.pdf https://cmartinez.web.wesleyan.edu/documents/FP.pdf -- a bit more modern, relying on other mathematics under the hood (like DRY reduces the base count), 11 pages [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ [3] Some reasonable review https://blog.plover.com/math/PM.html https://blog.plover.com/math/PM.html

HDThoreaun 2y ago

See the responses section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument This idea certainly has been long considered but I personally reject it.

cynicalpeace 2y ago
While interesting, this is a separate thought experiment with its own quirks. Sort of a strawman, since my argument is formulated differently and simply argues that AIs need to be more than brains in jars for them to be considered generally intelligent. And that the only reason we think AIs can just be brains in jars is because many of the people developing them consider themselves as simply brains in jars.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  Not really. The point of it is considering whether physical experience creates knowledge that is impossible to get otherwise. Thats the argument you are making no? If Mary learns nothing new when seeing red for the first time an AI would also learn nothing new when seeing red for the first time. > Do they know what a hot shower feels like? They can describe it. But do they actually know? Have they experienced it Is directly a knowledge argument
  - cynicalpeace 2y ago
    Mary in that thought experiment is not an LLM that has learned via text. She's acquired "all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes". This does not actually describe modern LLMs. It actually better describes a robot that has transcribed the location, temperature, and velocity of water drops from a hot shower to its memory. Again, this thought experiment has its own quirks. Also, it is an argument against physicalism, which I have no interest in debating. While it's tangentially related, my point is not for/against physicalism. My argument is about modern AI and it's ability to learn. If we put touch sensors, eyes, nose, a mechanism to collect physical data (legs) and even sex organs on an AI system, then it is more generally intelligent than before. It will have learned in a better fashion what a hot shower feels like and will be smarter for it.
    - HDThoreaun 2y ago
      > While it's tangentially related, my point is not for/against physicalism. I really disagree. Your entire point is about physicalism. If physicalism is true than an AI does not necessarily learn in a better fashion what a hot shower feels like by being embodied. In a physicalist world it is conceivable to experience that synthetically.
      - cynicalpeace 2y ago
        I love hearing someone else tell me I'm not saying what I'm saying.

Dilettante_ 2y ago

So are you saying people who have CIPA are less intelligent for never having experienced a hot shower? By that same logic, does its ability to experience more colors increase the intelligence of a mantis shrimp? Perhaps your own internal definition of intelligence simply deviates significantly from the common, "median" definition.

cynicalpeace 2y ago
It's the totality of experiences that make an individual. Most humans that I'm aware of have a greater totality of experiences that make them far smarter than any modern AI system.
- skinner_ 2y ago
  Greater totality of experiences than having read the whole internet? Obviously they are very different kind of experiences, but a greater totality? I'm not so sure. Here is what we know: The Pile web scrape is 800GB. 20 years of human experience at 1kB/sec is 600GB. Maybe 1kB/sec is bad estimate. Maybe sensory input is more valuable than written text. You can convince me. But next challenge, some 10^15 seconds of currently existing youtube video, that's 2 million years of audiovisual experience, or 10^9GB at the same 1kB/sec.
  - whiskiss 2y ago
    I feel the jump from "reading the internet" to experience has a gap in reasoning. I'm not experienced in philosophy or* logic enough(no matter how much I read, heh) to articulate it, but seems to get at the person's idea of lacking street smarts, common sense. An adult with basic common sense could probably filter out false information quicker since I can get Claude to tell me false info regularly(I still like em, pretty entertaining) which has not only factual but contradictory flaws any person wouldn't make. Like recently I had two pieces of data, then when comparing them it was blatently incorrectly(they were very close, but claude said one was 8x bigger for... idk why.) Another commenter also mentioned sensory input when talking about the brown rat. As someone who is constantly fascinated at the brains ability to reason/process stuff before I'm even conscious of it, I feel this Stat is Underrated. I'm taking in and monitoring like 15 sensations of touch at all time. Something entering my visual field coming towards me can be deflected in half a second all while still understanding the rest of my surroundings, and where it might be safe to deflect an object. The brain is constantly calculating depth perception and stereo location on every image and sound we hear - also with the ability to screen out the junk or alter our perception accurately(knowing the correct color of items regardless of diff in color temp). I do concede that's a heck of a lot of video data. It does have similar issues to what I said(lacks touch, often no real stereo location, good greenscreen might convince an AI of something a person intuitively knows is impossible) but the scale alone certainly adds a lot. That could potentially make up for what I see as a hugely overlooked thing as far as stimulus. I am monitoring and adjusting like, hundreds of parameters a second subconsciously. Like everything in my visual field. I don't think it can be quantified accurately how many things we consciously and subconsciously process, but I have the feeling it's a staggering amount.

tomrod 2y ago

The proof that 1+1=2 is nontrivial despite it being clear and obvious. It does not rely on physicality nor experience to prove. There are areas of utility here. Things need not be able to do all actions to be useful.

cynicalpeace 2y ago
There's no way you get to 1+1=2 without experience. There would be no one to even make that statement.
- tomrod 2y ago
  See the work I posted in sibling comment in this chain.
  - cynicalpeace 2y ago
    The subject has been debated ad nauseam by everyone like Descartes, Hume, Kant, and so on. If there were no one around to state 1 + 1 = 2, there would be no such statement. Hence, it does rely on at least 1 person's experience. Yours in fact, since everyone else could be an illusion.
momentoftop 2y ago
There isn't a serious proof that 1+1=2, because it's near enough axiomatic. In the last 150 years or so, we've been trying to find very general logical systems in which we can encode "1", "2" and "+" and for which 1+1=2 is a theorem, and the derivations are sometimes non-trivial, but they are ultimately mere sanity checks that the logical system can capture basic arithmetic.
- tomrod 2y ago
  If this is new, then you're one of today's luck 10,000![2] Serious logical foundations take a lot of time and exposition to start from fundamentals. Dismissing them as non-serious because GP's argument failed to consider them is misguided, IMHO. [0] The classic reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica -- over 1,000 pages, Betrand Russell [1] https://cmartinez.web.wesleyan.edu/documents/FP.pdf https://cmartinez.web.wesleyan.edu/documents/FP.pdf -- a bit more modern, relying on other mathematics under the hood (like DRY reduces the base count), 11 pages [2] https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ [3] Some reasonable review https://blog.plover.com/math/PM.html https://blog.plover.com/math/PM.html