5 ms·

Thanks for this - Looking forward to reading the full paper. That said, the most obvious objection that comes to mind about the title is that … well, I feel th

• rusk 1y ago
  Not the person asked, but in time honoured tradition I will venture forth that the key difference is billions of years of evolution. Innumerable blooms and culls. And a system that is vertically integrated to its core and self sustaining.
  • ben_w 1y ago
    AI can be, and often are, trained by simulated evolution.
    • rusk 1y ago
      Simulated.
      • ben_w 1y ago
        You have to say why you think that matters. It still culls the unfit.
        • rusk 1y ago
          I don’t. You have boiled a process of billions of years down to a single sentence. You should ponder your absurdity.
          • ben_w 1y ago
            That's the point of language, to abstract a complex thing to what is often as little as a single word or sentence. It's not like the idea represented by the words "simulated evolution" is itself as simple as those two words anyway. That it takes nature "billions of years" for natural evolution isn't even important here, because it's not like simulations have to run in real-time. If you run simulated evolution with mechanical parts and the reward function of things that function like clocks, you get the (design of) a thing that functions like a clock, and if you run the physics simulation of the design, you can tell the time with it. Do it with electronics and things that act like a radio, you get a radio. Do it with a CAD design and the goal of strength for minimum mass, you end up with something that looks bone-like. We also do it with AI, why should we expect it not to produce things in the general category of "minds"? Not necessarily human minds, even the biggest by parameter count are much smaller structures than our brains, but the general category.
• ICBTheory 1y ago
  Sure I can (and thanks for writing) Well, given the specific way you asked that question I confirm your self assertion - and am quite certain that your level of Artificiality converges to zero, which would make you a GI without A... - You stated to "feel" generally intelligent (A's don't feel and don't have an "I" that can feel) - Your nuanced, subtly ironic and self referential way of formulating clearly suggests that you are not a purely algorithmic entity A "précis" as you wished: Artificial — in the sense used here (apart from the usual "planfully built/programmed system" etc.) — algorithmic, formal, symbol-bound. Humans as "cognitive system" have some similar traits of course - but obviously, there seems to be more than that.
  • kevin42 1y ago
    >but obviously, there seems to be more than that. I don't see how that's obvious. I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but it seems like these arguments always come down to a qualia, or the insistence that humans have some sort of 'spark' that machines don't have, therefore: AGI is not possible since machines don't have it. I also don't understand the argument that "Your nuanced, subtly ironic and self referential way of formulating clearly suggests that you are not a purely algorithmic entity". How does that follow? What scientific evidence is there that we are anything other than a biochemical machine? And if we are a biochemical machine, how is that inherently capable of more than a silicon based machine is capable of?
    • ICBTheory 1y ago
      Oh no, I am not at all trying to find an explanation of why this is (qualia etc.). There is simply no necessity for that. It is interesting, but not part of the scientific problem that i tried to find an answer to. The proof (all three of them) holds without any explanatory effort concerning causalities around human frame-jumping etc. For this paper, It is absolutely sufficient to prove that a) this cannot be reached algorithmically and that b) evidence clearly shows that humans can (somehow) do this , as they have already done this (quite often).
      • fc417fc802 1y ago
• jemmyw 1y ago
  I would argue that you are not a general intelligence. Humans have quite a specific intelligence. It might be the broadest, most general, among animal species, but it is not general. That manifests in that we each need to spend a significant amount of time training ourselves for specific areas of capability. You can't then switch instantly to another area without further training, even though all the context materials are available to you.
  • Tadpole9181 1y ago
    This seems like a meaningless distinction in context. When people say AGI, they clearly mean "effectively human intelligence". Not an infallible, completely deterministic, omniscient god-machine.
    • jemmyw 1y ago
      There's a great deal of space between effectively human and god machine. Effectively human meaning it takes 20 years to train it and then it's good at one thing and ok at some other things, if you're lucky. We expect more from LLMs right now, like being able to have very broad knowledge and be able to ingest vastly more context than a human can every time they're used. So we probably don't just think of or want a human intelligence.. or we want an instant specific one, and the process of being about to generate an instant specific one would surely be further down the line to your god like machine anyway.
      • const_cast 1y ago
        The measure of human intelligence is never what humans are good at, but rather the capabilities of humans to figure out stuff they haven't before. Meaning, we can create and build new pathways inside our brains to perform and optimize tasks we have not done before. Practicing, then, reinforces these pathways. In a sense we do what we wish LLMs could - we use our intelligence to train ourselves. It's a long (ish) process, but it's this process that actually composes human intelligence. I could take a random human right now and drop them somewhere they've never been before, and they will figure it out. For example, you may be shocked to know that the human brain has no pathways for reading, as opposed to spoken language. We have to manually make those. We are, literally, modifying our brains when we learn new skills.
• catoc 1y ago
  That about ‘cogito ergo sums it up’ doesn’t it? Intelligence is clearly possible. My gut feeling is our brain solves this by removing complexity. It certainly does so, continuously filtering out (ignoring) large parts of input, and generously interpolating over gaps (making stuff up). Whether this evolved to overcome this theorem I am not intelligent enough to conclude.
  • giardini 1y ago
    catoc states, amongst other things, that: >"Intelligence is clearly possible."< Perhaps not a citation but a proof is required here!
    • catoc 1y ago
      Clearly possible in humans - the statement in the parent I was replying to. I would indeed definitely like to see proof - mathematical or applied - of in silico intelligence
      • eru 1y ago
        Do you expect silicon to be less capable of the necessary computation than cells?
        • giardini 1y ago
          At best, I'm asking for a clear scientific definition of intelligence. At worst I'm questioning its very existence.
          • filoeleven 1y ago
            If you haven't yet encountered it, check out Michael Levin's lab and work. Among other things, they are trying to figure out what "basal cognition" is; the idea being that even if we can't point to some dividing line in the end, we'll have a better understanding of what cognition is and where it shows up. And it shows up surprisingly far down! The definition of "intelligence" that he works with comes from William James: the ability to achieve the same goal by different means. It's a useful definition, given the remarkable stuff coming out of his lab.