5 ms·

Well, unless you believe in some spiritual, non-physical aspect of consciousness, we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a sli

by gf000 1y ago

Well, unless you believe in some spiritual, non-physical aspect of consciousness, we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it, including a computer. We can even randomly generate Turing machines, as they are just data. Now imagine we are extremely lucky and happen to end up with a super-intelligent program which through the mediums it can communicate (it could be simply text-based but a 2D video with audio is no different for my perspective) can't be differentiated from a human being. Would you consider it sentient? Now replace the random generation with, say, a back propagation algorithm. If it's sufficiently large, don't you think it's indifferent from the former case - that is, novel qualities could emerge? With that said, I don't think that current LLMs are anywhere close to this category, but I just don't think this your reasoning is sound.

myrmidon 1y ago
> Would you consider it sentient? Absolutely. If you simulated a human brain by the atom, would you think the resulting construct would NOT be? What would be missing? I think consciousness is simply an emergent property of our nervous system, but in order to express itself "language" is obviously needed and thus requires lots of complexity (more than what we typically see in animals or computer systems until recently).
- prmph 1y ago
  > If you simulated a human brain by the atom, That is what we don't know is possible. You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered. And from what we even know currently, atoms are too coarse to form the basis of such "cloning" And, my viewpoint is that, even if this were possible, just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If it is the arrangement of matter that gives rise to consciousness, then would that new consciousness be the same person or not? If you have a basis for answering that question, let's hear it.
  - gf000 1y ago
    Well, if you were to magically make an exact replica of a person, wouldn't it be conscious and at time 0 be the same person? But later on, he would get different experiences and become a different person no longer identical to the first. In extension, I would argue that magically "translating" a person to another medium (e.g. a chip) would still make for the same person, initially. Though the word "magic" does a lot of work here.
    - prmph 1y ago
      I'm not talking about "identical" consciousnesses. I mean the same consciousness. The same consciousness cannot split into two, can it? Either it is (and continues to be) the same consciousness, or it is not. If it were the same consciousness, then you would have a person who exists in two places at once.
      - gf000 1y ago
        Consciousness has no agreed upon definition to begin with, but I like to think of it as to what a whirlwind is to a bunch of air molecules (that is, an example of emergent behavior) So your question is, are two whirlwinds with identical properties (same speed, same direction, shape etc) the same in one box of air, vs another identical box?
        prmph 1y ago
        Exactly, I guess this starts to get into philosophical questions around identity real quick. To me, two such whirlwinds are identical but not the same. They are the same only if they are guaranteed to have the same value for every conceivable property, forever, and even this condition may not be enough.
      - tsimionescu 1y ago
        Well, "the same consciousness" it's not, as for example it occupies a different position in spacetime. It's an identical copy for a split second, and then they start diverging. Nothing so deep about any of this. When I copy a file from one disk to another, it's not the same file, they're identical copies for some time (usually, assuming no defects in the copying process), and will likely start diverging afterwards.
prmph 1y ago
There are many aspects to this that people like yourself miss, but I think we need satisfactory answers to them (or at least rigorous explorations of them) before we can make headway in these sorts of discussion. Imagine we assume that A.I. could be conscious. What would be the identity/scope of that consciousness. To understand what I'm driving at, let's make an analogy to humans. Our consciousness is scoped to our bodies. We see through sense organ, and our brain, which process these signals, is located in a specific point in space. But we still do not know how consciousness arises in the brain and is bound to the body. If you equate computation of sufficient complexity to consciousness, then the question arises: what exactly about computation would prodcuce consciousness? If we perform the same computation on a different substrate, would that then be the same consciousness, or a copy of the original? If it would not be the same consciousness, then just what give consciousness its identity? I believe you would find it ridiculous to say that just because we are performing the computation on this chip, therefore the identity of the resulting consciousness is scoped to this chip.
- gf000 1y ago
  > Imagine we assume that A.I. could be conscious. What would be the identity/scope of that consciousness Well, first I would ask whether this question makes sense in the first place. Does consciousness have a scope? Does consciousness even exist? Or is that more of a name attributed to some pattern we recognize in our own way of thinking (but may not be universal)? Also, would a person missing an arm, but having a robot arm they can control have their consciousness' "scope" extended to it? Given that people have phantom pains, does a physical body even needed to consider it your part?
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  This all sounds very irrelevant. Consciousness is clearly tied to specific parts of a substrate. My consciousness doesn't change when a hair falls off my head, nor when I cut my fingernails. But it does change in some way if you were to cut the tip of my finger, or if I take a hormone pill. Similarly, if we can compute consciousness on a chip, then the chip obviously contains that consciousness. You can experimentally determine to what extent this is true: for example, you can experimentally check if increasing the clock frequency of said chip alters the consciousness that it is computing. Or if changing the thermal paste that attaches it to its cooler does so. I don't know what the results of these experiments would be, but they would be quite clearly determined. Of course, there would certainly be some scale, and at some point it becomes semantics. The same is true with human consciousness: some aspects of the body are more tightly coupled to consciousness than others; if you cut my hand, my consciousness will change more than if you cut a small piece of my bowel, but less than if you cut out a large piece of my brain. At what point do you draw the line and say "consciousness exists in the brain but not the hands"? It's all arbitrary to some extent. Even worse, say I use a journal where I write down some of my most cherished thoughts, and say that I am quite forgetful and I often go through this journal to remind myself of various thoughts before taking a decision. Would it not then be fair to say that the journal itself contains a part of my consciousness? After all, if someone were to tamper with it in subtle enough ways, they would certainly be able to influence my thought process, more so than even cutting off one of my hands, wouldn't they?
almosthere 1y ago
We used to say "if you put a million monkeys on typewriters you would eventually get shakespear" and no one would ever say that anymore, because now we can literally write shakespear with an LLM. And the monkey strategy has been 100% dismissed as shit.. We know how to deploy monkeys on typewriters, but we don't know what they'll type. We know how to deploy transformers to train and inference a model, but we don't know what they'll type. We DON'T know how a thinking human (or animal) brain works.. Do you see the difference.
- procaryote 1y ago
  To be fair, we also trained the LLM on (among other things) shakespeare, and adjusted the weights so that generating shakespeare would be more likely after that training. We don't claim a JPEG can paint great art, even though certain jpegs do.
  - almosthere 1y ago
    So, more proof it's not thinking, right? It can only regurgitate a large if/else superstructure with some jumping around.
    - procaryote 1y ago
      Who truly knows if you can make an if-else + randomness structure big enough to become smart? But yes, we built a machine that generates text similar to what we built it from, and now we're looking at it generating text and are all impressed.
- nearbuy 1y ago
  The monkeys on typewriters saying is just a colorful way of saying that an infinite random sequence will contain all finite sequences somewhere within it. Which is true. But I don't see what infinite random sequences have to do with LLMs or human thinking. > Do you see the difference No? I'm not sure what you're getting at.
- KoolKat23 1y ago
DanHulton 1y ago
> we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). > So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it You're going off the rails IMMEDIATELY in your logic. Sure, one Turing-complete computer language can have its logic "emulated" by another, fine. But human intelligence is not a computer language -- you're mixing up the terms "Turing complete" and "Turing test". It's like mixing up the terms "Strawberry jam" and "traffic jam" and then going on to talk about how cars taste on toast. It's nonsensical.
- gf000 1y ago
  Game of life, PowerPoint, and a bunch of non-PL stuff are all Turing-complete. I don't mix up terms, I did use a slightly sloppy terminology but it is the correct concept - and my point is that we don't know of a computational model that can't be expressed by a Turing-machine, humans are a physical "machine", ergo we must also fall into that category. Give my comment another read, but it was quite understandable from context. (Also, you may want to give a read to the Turing paper because being executable by a person as well was an important concept within)
  - coopierez 1y ago
    But humans can do things Turing machines cannot. Such as eating a sandwich.
    - gf000 1y ago
      That's not a computation, it's a side effect. It just depends on what you wire your "computer" up to. A Turing machine in itself is just a (potentially non-returning) mathematical function, but you are free to map any input/output to it. Actually, the way LLMs are extended with tools is a pretty much the same (an LLM itself has no access to the internet, but if it returns some specific symbols, the external "glue" will do a search and then the LLM is free to use the results)
  - DanHulton 1y ago
    Again, you're going wildly off the rails in your logic. Sure, "executable by a human" is part of the definition for Turing machines, but that's only talking about Turing-specific capabilities. If you want to argue that a Turing machine can emulate the specific definition of Turing machine capabilities that humans can perform, that's fine. But you're saying that because humans can ACT LIKE Turing machines, they must BE Turing machines, and are therefore emulatable. This is the equivalent of saying "I have set up a complex mechanical computer powered by water that is Turing complete. Since any Turing complete system can emulate another one, it means that any other Turing complete system can also make things wet and irrigate farms. Human intelligence is not understood. It can be made to do Turing complete things, but you can't invert that and say that because you've read the paper on Turing completeness, you now understand human intelligence.

by gf000 1y ago

myrmidon 1y ago

> Would you consider it sentient? Absolutely. If you simulated a human brain by the atom, would you think the resulting construct would NOT be? What would be missing? I think consciousness is simply an emergent property of our nervous system, but in order to express itself "language" is obviously needed and thus requires lots of complexity (more than what we typically see in animals or computer systems until recently).

prmph 1y ago
> If you simulated a human brain by the atom, That is what we don't know is possible. You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered. And from what we even know currently, atoms are too coarse to form the basis of such "cloning" And, my viewpoint is that, even if this were possible, just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If it is the arrangement of matter that gives rise to consciousness, then would that new consciousness be the same person or not? If you have a basis for answering that question, let's hear it.
- gf000 1y ago
  Well, if you were to magically make an exact replica of a person, wouldn't it be conscious and at time 0 be the same person? But later on, he would get different experiences and become a different person no longer identical to the first. In extension, I would argue that magically "translating" a person to another medium (e.g. a chip) would still make for the same person, initially. Though the word "magic" does a lot of work here.
  - prmph 1y ago
    I'm not talking about "identical" consciousnesses. I mean the same consciousness. The same consciousness cannot split into two, can it? Either it is (and continues to be) the same consciousness, or it is not. If it were the same consciousness, then you would have a person who exists in two places at once.
    - gf000 1y ago
      Consciousness has no agreed upon definition to begin with, but I like to think of it as to what a whirlwind is to a bunch of air molecules (that is, an example of emergent behavior) So your question is, are two whirlwinds with identical properties (same speed, same direction, shape etc) the same in one box of air, vs another identical box?
      - prmph 1y ago
        Exactly, I guess this starts to get into philosophical questions around identity real quick. To me, two such whirlwinds are identical but not the same. They are the same only if they are guaranteed to have the same value for every conceivable property, forever, and even this condition may not be enough.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      Well, "the same consciousness" it's not, as for example it occupies a different position in spacetime. It's an identical copy for a split second, and then they start diverging. Nothing so deep about any of this. When I copy a file from one disk to another, it's not the same file, they're identical copies for some time (usually, assuming no defects in the copying process), and will likely start diverging afterwards.

prmph 1y ago

There are many aspects to this that people like yourself miss, but I think we need satisfactory answers to them (or at least rigorous explorations of them) before we can make headway in these sorts of discussion. Imagine we assume that A.I. could be conscious. What would be the identity/scope of that consciousness. To understand what I'm driving at, let's make an analogy to humans. Our consciousness is scoped to our bodies. We see through sense organ, and our brain, which process these signals, is located in a specific point in space. But we still do not know how consciousness arises in the brain and is bound to the body. If you equate computation of sufficient complexity to consciousness, then the question arises: what exactly about computation would prodcuce consciousness? If we perform the same computation on a different substrate, would that then be the same consciousness, or a copy of the original? If it would not be the same consciousness, then just what give consciousness its identity? I believe you would find it ridiculous to say that just because we are performing the computation on this chip, therefore the identity of the resulting consciousness is scoped to this chip.

gf000 1y ago
> Imagine we assume that A.I. could be conscious. What would be the identity/scope of that consciousness Well, first I would ask whether this question makes sense in the first place. Does consciousness have a scope? Does consciousness even exist? Or is that more of a name attributed to some pattern we recognize in our own way of thinking (but may not be universal)? Also, would a person missing an arm, but having a robot arm they can control have their consciousness' "scope" extended to it? Given that people have phantom pains, does a physical body even needed to consider it your part?
tsimionescu 1y ago
This all sounds very irrelevant. Consciousness is clearly tied to specific parts of a substrate. My consciousness doesn't change when a hair falls off my head, nor when I cut my fingernails. But it does change in some way if you were to cut the tip of my finger, or if I take a hormone pill. Similarly, if we can compute consciousness on a chip, then the chip obviously contains that consciousness. You can experimentally determine to what extent this is true: for example, you can experimentally check if increasing the clock frequency of said chip alters the consciousness that it is computing. Or if changing the thermal paste that attaches it to its cooler does so. I don't know what the results of these experiments would be, but they would be quite clearly determined. Of course, there would certainly be some scale, and at some point it becomes semantics. The same is true with human consciousness: some aspects of the body are more tightly coupled to consciousness than others; if you cut my hand, my consciousness will change more than if you cut a small piece of my bowel, but less than if you cut out a large piece of my brain. At what point do you draw the line and say "consciousness exists in the brain but not the hands"? It's all arbitrary to some extent. Even worse, say I use a journal where I write down some of my most cherished thoughts, and say that I am quite forgetful and I often go through this journal to remind myself of various thoughts before taking a decision. Would it not then be fair to say that the journal itself contains a part of my consciousness? After all, if someone were to tamper with it in subtle enough ways, they would certainly be able to influence my thought process, more so than even cutting off one of my hands, wouldn't they?

almosthere 1y ago

We used to say "if you put a million monkeys on typewriters you would eventually get shakespear" and no one would ever say that anymore, because now we can literally write shakespear with an LLM. And the monkey strategy has been 100% dismissed as shit.. We know how to deploy monkeys on typewriters, but we don't know what they'll type. We know how to deploy transformers to train and inference a model, but we don't know what they'll type. We DON'T know how a thinking human (or animal) brain works.. Do you see the difference.

procaryote 1y ago
To be fair, we also trained the LLM on (among other things) shakespeare, and adjusted the weights so that generating shakespeare would be more likely after that training. We don't claim a JPEG can paint great art, even though certain jpegs do.
- almosthere 1y ago
  So, more proof it's not thinking, right? It can only regurgitate a large if/else superstructure with some jumping around.
  - procaryote 1y ago
    Who truly knows if you can make an if-else + randomness structure big enough to become smart? But yes, we built a machine that generates text similar to what we built it from, and now we're looking at it generating text and are all impressed.
nearbuy 1y ago
The monkeys on typewriters saying is just a colorful way of saying that an infinite random sequence will contain all finite sequences somewhere within it. Which is true. But I don't see what infinite random sequences have to do with LLMs or human thinking. > Do you see the difference No? I'm not sure what you're getting at.
KoolKat23 1y ago

DanHulton 1y ago

> we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). > So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it You're going off the rails IMMEDIATELY in your logic. Sure, one Turing-complete computer language can have its logic "emulated" by another, fine. But human intelligence is not a computer language -- you're mixing up the terms "Turing complete" and "Turing test". It's like mixing up the terms "Strawberry jam" and "traffic jam" and then going on to talk about how cars taste on toast. It's nonsensical.

gf000 1y ago
Game of life, PowerPoint, and a bunch of non-PL stuff are all Turing-complete. I don't mix up terms, I did use a slightly sloppy terminology but it is the correct concept - and my point is that we don't know of a computational model that can't be expressed by a Turing-machine, humans are a physical "machine", ergo we must also fall into that category. Give my comment another read, but it was quite understandable from context. (Also, you may want to give a read to the Turing paper because being executable by a person as well was an important concept within)
- coopierez 1y ago
  But humans can do things Turing machines cannot. Such as eating a sandwich.
  - gf000 1y ago
    That's not a computation, it's a side effect. It just depends on what you wire your "computer" up to. A Turing machine in itself is just a (potentially non-returning) mathematical function, but you are free to map any input/output to it. Actually, the way LLMs are extended with tools is a pretty much the same (an LLM itself has no access to the internet, but if it returns some specific symbols, the external "glue" will do a search and then the LLM is free to use the results)
- DanHulton 1y ago
  Again, you're going wildly off the rails in your logic. Sure, "executable by a human" is part of the definition for Turing machines, but that's only talking about Turing-specific capabilities. If you want to argue that a Turing machine can emulate the specific definition of Turing machine capabilities that humans can perform, that's fine. But you're saying that because humans can ACT LIKE Turing machines, they must BE Turing machines, and are therefore emulatable. This is the equivalent of saying "I have set up a complex mechanical computer powered by water that is Turing complete. Since any Turing complete system can emulate another one, it means that any other Turing complete system can also make things wet and irrigate farms. Human intelligence is not understood. It can be made to do Turing complete things, but you can't invert that and say that because you've read the paper on Turing completeness, you now understand human intelligence.