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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

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
    > this cannot be reached algorithmically > humans can (somehow) do this Is this not contradictory? Alternatively, in order to not be contradictory doesn't it require the assumption that humans are not "algorithmic"? But does that not then presuppose (as the above commenter brought up) that we are not a biochemical machine? Is a machine not inherently algorithmic in nature? Or at minimum presupposes that humans are more than just a biochemical machine. But then the question comes up again, where is the scientific evidence for this? In my view it's perfectly acceptable if the answer is something to the effect of "we don't currently have evidence for that, but this hints that we ought to look for it". All that said, does "algorithmically" here perhaps exclude heuristics? Many times something can be shown to be unsolvable in the absolute sense yet readily solvable with extremely high success rate in practice using some heuristic.
    - stevenhuang 1y ago
      OP seems to have a very confused idea of what an algorithmic process means... they think the process of humans determining what is truthful "cannot possibly be something algorithmic". Which is certainly an opinion. > whatever it is: it cannot possibly be something algorithmic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349299 Maybe OP should have looked at a dictionary for what certain words actually mean before defining them to be something nonsensical.
      - eru 1y ago
        > Maybe OP should have looked at a dictionary for what certain words actually mean before defining them to be something nonsensical. Making non-standard definitions of words isn't necessarily bad, and can be useful in certain texts. But if you do so, you need to make these definitions front-and-centre instead of just casually assuming your readers will share your non-standard meaning. And where possible, I would still use the standard meanings and use newly made up terms to carry new concepts.
      - okokok0k 1y ago
        Maybe you need to update an outdated model? Nothing in physics requires us to use your prior experience as some special epoch. Meaning is mutable social relationship as language meaning is not immutable physics.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > 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 Iron and copper are both metals but only one can be hardened into steel There is no reason why we should assume a silicon machine must have the same capabilities as a carbon machine
  - dr_dshiv 1y ago
    Yeah, but bronze also makes great swords… what’s the point here?
  - vidarh 1y ago
    Unless you can show - even a single example would do - that we can compute a function that is outside the Turing computable set, then there is a very strong reason that we should assume a silicon machine has the same capabilities as a carbon machine to compute.
    - nyrikki 1y ago
      The problem is that your challenge is begging the question. Computability or algorithms are the problem. It is all the 'no effective algorithm exists for X' that is the problem. Spike train retiming and issues with riddled basins in existing computers and math is an example if you drop compute a function
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > There is no reason why we should assume a silicon machine must have the same capabilities as a carbon machine Then make your computer out of carbon. While the broader principle, that we don't know what we're doing and AI as it currently exists is a bit cargo-culty, this is a critique of the SOTA and is insufficient to be generalised: we can reasonably say "we probably have not", we can't say "we definitely cannot ever". Who knows, perhaps our brains do somehow manage to do whacky quantum stuff despite seeming to be far too warm and messy for that. But even that is just an implementation detail.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  Consciousness is an issue. If you write a program to add 2+2, you probably do not believe some entity poofs into existence, perceives itself as independently adding 2+2, and then poofs out of existence. Yet somehow, the idea of an emergent consciousness is that if you instead get it to do 100 basic operations, or perhaps 2^100 then suddenly this becomes true? The reason one might believe this is not because it's logical or reasonable - or even supported in any way, but because people assume their own conclusion. In particular if one takes a physicalist view of the universe then consciousness must be a physical process and so it simply must emerge at some sufficient degree of complexity. But if you don't simply assume physicalism then this logic falls flat. And the more we discover about the universe, the weirder things become. How insane would you sound not that long ago to suggest that time itself would move at different rates for different people at the same "time", just to maintain a perceived constancy of the speed of light? It's nonsense, but it's real. So I'm quite reluctant to assume my own conclusion on anything with regards to the nature of the universe. Even relatively 'simple' things like quantum entanglement are already posing very difficult issues for a physicalist view of the universe.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Boltzmann brains and A. J. Ayer's "There is a thought now". Ages ago, it occurred to me that the only thing that seemed to exist without needing a creator, was maths. That 2+2 was always 4, and it still would be even if there were not 4 things to count. Basically, I independently arrived at similar conclusion as Max Tegmark, only simpler and without his level of rigour: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/08/26-08.28.24.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/08/26-08.28.24.html (From the quotation's date stamp, 2007, I had only finished university 6 months earlier, so don't expect anything good). But as you'll see from my final paragraph, I no longer take this idea seriously, because anything that leads to most minds being free to believe untruths, is cognitively unstable by the same argument that applies to Boltzmann brains. MUH leads to Aleph-1 infinite number of brains*. I'd need a reason for the probability distribution over minds to be zero almost everywhere in order for it to avoid the cognitively instability argument. * if there is a bigger infinity, then more; but I have only basic knowledge of transfinites and am unclear if the "bigger" ones I've heard about are considered "real" or more along the lines of "if there was an infinite sequence of infinities, then…"
- ben_w 1y ago
  > 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? It doesn't follow. Trivially demonstrated by the early LLM that got Blake Lemonie to break his NDA also emitting words which suggested to Lemonie that the LLM had an inner life. Or, indeed, the output device y'all are using to read/listening to my words, which is also successfully emitting these words despite the output device very much only following an algorithm that simply recreates what it was told to recreate. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
stevenhuang 1y ago
These are.. very weak rebuttals.
- vessenes 1y ago
  Agreed. I thought my followup qs were fair. I'd like to understand the argument, but the first response makes me think it's not worth wading too deeply in.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
madaxe_again 1y ago
I think you’ve just successfully proven that general human intelligence indeed does not exist.
_0ffh 1y ago
It's simple: Either your proof holds for NGI as much as for AGI, or neither, or you can clearly define what differentiates them that makes it work for one and not the other.
vessenes 1y ago
So, in a word: a) there is no ghost in the machine when the machine is a formal symbol-bound machine. And b) to be “G” there must be a ghost in the machine. Is that a fair summary of your summary? If so do you spend time on both a and b in your papers? Both are statements that seem to generate vigorous emotional debate.
john-h-k 1y ago
> 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 This is completely unrelated to the proof in the link. You have to clearly explain what reasoning in your argument for “AGI is impossible” also implies human intelligence is possible. You can’t just jump to conclusions “you sound human therefore intelligence is possible”
nextaccountic 1y ago
> level of Artificiality How do you define that? And why is this important?

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
  > this cannot be reached algorithmically > humans can (somehow) do this Is this not contradictory? Alternatively, in order to not be contradictory doesn't it require the assumption that humans are not "algorithmic"? But does that not then presuppose (as the above commenter brought up) that we are not a biochemical machine? Is a machine not inherently algorithmic in nature? Or at minimum presupposes that humans are more than just a biochemical machine. But then the question comes up again, where is the scientific evidence for this? In my view it's perfectly acceptable if the answer is something to the effect of "we don't currently have evidence for that, but this hints that we ought to look for it". All that said, does "algorithmically" here perhaps exclude heuristics? Many times something can be shown to be unsolvable in the absolute sense yet readily solvable with extremely high success rate in practice using some heuristic.
  - stevenhuang 1y ago
    OP seems to have a very confused idea of what an algorithmic process means... they think the process of humans determining what is truthful "cannot possibly be something algorithmic". Which is certainly an opinion. > whatever it is: it cannot possibly be something algorithmic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349299 Maybe OP should have looked at a dictionary for what certain words actually mean before defining them to be something nonsensical.
    - eru 1y ago
      > Maybe OP should have looked at a dictionary for what certain words actually mean before defining them to be something nonsensical. Making non-standard definitions of words isn't necessarily bad, and can be useful in certain texts. But if you do so, you need to make these definitions front-and-centre instead of just casually assuming your readers will share your non-standard meaning. And where possible, I would still use the standard meanings and use newly made up terms to carry new concepts.
    - okokok0k 1y ago
      Maybe you need to update an outdated model? Nothing in physics requires us to use your prior experience as some special epoch. Meaning is mutable social relationship as language meaning is not immutable physics.
bluefirebrand 1y ago
> 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 Iron and copper are both metals but only one can be hardened into steel There is no reason why we should assume a silicon machine must have the same capabilities as a carbon machine
- dr_dshiv 1y ago
  Yeah, but bronze also makes great swords… what’s the point here?
- vidarh 1y ago
  Unless you can show - even a single example would do - that we can compute a function that is outside the Turing computable set, then there is a very strong reason that we should assume a silicon machine has the same capabilities as a carbon machine to compute.
  - nyrikki 1y ago
    The problem is that your challenge is begging the question. Computability or algorithms are the problem. It is all the 'no effective algorithm exists for X' that is the problem. Spike train retiming and issues with riddled basins in existing computers and math is an example if you drop compute a function
- ben_w 1y ago
  > There is no reason why we should assume a silicon machine must have the same capabilities as a carbon machine Then make your computer out of carbon. While the broader principle, that we don't know what we're doing and AI as it currently exists is a bit cargo-culty, this is a critique of the SOTA and is insufficient to be generalised: we can reasonably say "we probably have not", we can't say "we definitely cannot ever". Who knows, perhaps our brains do somehow manage to do whacky quantum stuff despite seeming to be far too warm and messy for that. But even that is just an implementation detail.
somenameforme 1y ago
Consciousness is an issue. If you write a program to add 2+2, you probably do not believe some entity poofs into existence, perceives itself as independently adding 2+2, and then poofs out of existence. Yet somehow, the idea of an emergent consciousness is that if you instead get it to do 100 basic operations, or perhaps 2^100 then suddenly this becomes true? The reason one might believe this is not because it's logical or reasonable - or even supported in any way, but because people assume their own conclusion. In particular if one takes a physicalist view of the universe then consciousness must be a physical process and so it simply must emerge at some sufficient degree of complexity. But if you don't simply assume physicalism then this logic falls flat. And the more we discover about the universe, the weirder things become. How insane would you sound not that long ago to suggest that time itself would move at different rates for different people at the same "time", just to maintain a perceived constancy of the speed of light? It's nonsense, but it's real. So I'm quite reluctant to assume my own conclusion on anything with regards to the nature of the universe. Even relatively 'simple' things like quantum entanglement are already posing very difficult issues for a physicalist view of the universe.
- ben_w 1y ago
  Boltzmann brains and A. J. Ayer's "There is a thought now". Ages ago, it occurred to me that the only thing that seemed to exist without needing a creator, was maths. That 2+2 was always 4, and it still would be even if there were not 4 things to count. Basically, I independently arrived at similar conclusion as Max Tegmark, only simpler and without his level of rigour: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/08/26-08.28.24.html https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2018/08/26-08.28.24.html (From the quotation's date stamp, 2007, I had only finished university 6 months earlier, so don't expect anything good). But as you'll see from my final paragraph, I no longer take this idea seriously, because anything that leads to most minds being free to believe untruths, is cognitively unstable by the same argument that applies to Boltzmann brains. MUH leads to Aleph-1 infinite number of brains*. I'd need a reason for the probability distribution over minds to be zero almost everywhere in order for it to avoid the cognitively instability argument. * if there is a bigger infinity, then more; but I have only basic knowledge of transfinites and am unclear if the "bigger" ones I've heard about are considered "real" or more along the lines of "if there was an infinite sequence of infinities, then…"
ben_w 1y ago
> 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? It doesn't follow. Trivially demonstrated by the early LLM that got Blake Lemonie to break his NDA also emitting words which suggested to Lemonie that the LLM had an inner life. Or, indeed, the output device y'all are using to read/listening to my words, which is also successfully emitting these words despite the output device very much only following an algorithm that simply recreates what it was told to recreate. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe", etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

stevenhuang 1y ago

These are.. very weak rebuttals.

vessenes 1y ago
Agreed. I thought my followup qs were fair. I'd like to understand the argument, but the first response makes me think it's not worth wading too deeply in.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

madaxe_again 1y ago

I think you’ve just successfully proven that general human intelligence indeed does not exist.

_0ffh 1y ago

It's simple: Either your proof holds for NGI as much as for AGI, or neither, or you can clearly define what differentiates them that makes it work for one and not the other.

vessenes 1y ago

So, in a word: a) there is no ghost in the machine when the machine is a formal symbol-bound machine. And b) to be “G” there must be a ghost in the machine. Is that a fair summary of your summary? If so do you spend time on both a and b in your papers? Both are statements that seem to generate vigorous emotional debate.

john-h-k 1y ago

> 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 This is completely unrelated to the proof in the link. You have to clearly explain what reasoning in your argument for “AGI is impossible” also implies human intelligence is possible. You can’t just jump to conclusions “you sound human therefore intelligence is possible”

nextaccountic 1y ago

> level of Artificiality How do you define that? And why is this important?