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Quoting from the Permutation City by Greg Egan: "Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no
by kaangiray26 1mo ago
Quoting from the Permutation City by Greg Egan:
"Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?"
- operatingthetan 1mo agoWe've been so primed by popular media to think that we will invent AI and it will be conscious and we will essentially enslave it. I'm open to the idea that we could invent conscious AI eventually, but the word salad generators we have now are definitely not it.
- Animats 1mo ago> and we will essentially enslave it. That part might not work out. Yesterday's article about the automated CEO system indicates that AIs may soon be in charge as a routine result of capitalism. AIs are getting better rapidly, and humans aren't.
- GPerson 1mo agoIt doesn’t take massive intelligence to sit on all the capital and charge rents. The owning class isn’t going to just give up control because the AI could run things better than them.
- operatingthetan 1mo ago"The ownership class is so smart" is just ownership class propaganda. Wielding power is brutish, not smart. They keep selling us innovation as some transcendent tech that will free the masses (Arab Spring anyone?) yet every time the tech ends up shifting power up. AI will be the same.
- crostlybostly 1mo agoThat’s a naive take. Generating above market returns on capital is probably the most competitive arena ever. Why do you think CEOs make so much money? They typically are not the ones that own the capital. They are the people the capital owners pay extremely well to maximize their returns. If it didn’t matter who they picked they would just pick someone and pay them a few 100k and keep the rest.
- GPerson 1mo agoNo sir your take is the naive one. You’ve affirmed my position by pretending to deny it.
- operatingthetan 1mo agoThe human model of tribalistic leadership (the biggest, loudest, most confident patriarch is chosen to lead) is definitely outdated by 10,000 years or more. AI could disrupt that but I'm not sure how much better it will be, given it's a text generator.
- exe34 1mo agoI think the difference is that thought itself might not be a real "thing", but just another computation. You can motivate this line of thought with the ship of Theseus approach: replace one neuron with a computer that takes the original inputs and produces the original outputs. There's no evidence yet that organic chemistry is necessary for thought.
- mcmcmc 1mo agoThere’s also no evidence that current AI can think or have thoughts.
- dpark 1mo agoWhat is the evidence for human thought?
- phantompeace 1mo agoListen to yourself.
- exe34 1mo agoSay that to an anendophasiac...
- exe34 1mo agoIt can produce better thought out arguments than a lot of people though.
- mannykannot 1mo agoYet when you model an Enigma machine, it does encrypt and decrypt messages.
- ratelimitsteve 1mo agoI'd argue that if it encrypts and decrypts, then you've built an enigma machine, not modeled it.
- mannykannot 1mo agoThen, presumably, you will also hold that when you have digitally modeled a brain such that the model responds to its inputs as a brain does, then you have built a brain. Tendentiously redefining the word "simulation" in an attempt to avoid the awkward cases is not going to save an argument that was dead on arrival.
- edgyquant 1mo agoAre brains responsible for consciousness? Or are brains a tool that our consciousness uses to understand the world?
- Dylan16807 1mo agoThey seem to be. But that argument doesn't matter much because you can simulate the whole body. (If you want to argue consciousness is outside the body, I could get into the physics argument but instead I'll just claim that consciousness will attach to the computer too and if you have a reason it wouldn't it's your burden to say why.)
- edgyquant 1mo agoI don’t know where consciousness is but I think if we accept that you can simulate a brain exactly that doesn’t prove consciousness of a model as consciousness is a metaphysical concept really
- dist-epoch 1mo agoSo I see you solved the Simulation Hypothesis - water is wet, so we can't be in a simulation, because in a simulation nobody gets wet.
- shagie 1mo agoMy unhappy dwarves would beg to differ. https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/zljs63/one_of_my_dwarves_was_angry_turns_out_he_was/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/zljs63/one_o...
- slopinthebag 1mo agoIf we are in a simulation than by definition we cannot get wet, we can only be simulated to be wet. Practically for us it makes no difference tho.
- Jtarii 1mo agoThat is an outstandingly bad argument.
- dpark 1mo agoThis doesn’t hold up to even a little bit of critical right. This boils down to “models aren’t real because they don’t affect the real world”. By the same rule, thought itself isn’t real. It’s an abstract notion that has no concrete effects in the real world. Putting thought into action in the real world requires a linkage between the thinker and the physical. In humans, that’s the body. But you can put an AI into robot body and suddenly it also has a linkage to the real world and can have concrete effects.
- Rendello 1mo agoA more accurate quote sidesteps the whole question: > The question of whether Machines Can Think […] is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim. – Edsger W. Dijkstra https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#1980s https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#1980s
- bitwize 1mo agoI've worked on AUVs, and in discussions with my colleagues we would often describe the machine as "swimming" out to some setpoint location, for instance. Since hearing that, discussions of a machine "thinking" or "believing" something didn't really bother me, even though Dijkstra was adamantly opposed to such language—because everyone in the conversation usually understood that the meaning was metaphorical, like the swimming submarine.
- fnordpiglet 1mo agoThis assumes that a human brain produces the only “real thought” - the difference being that the processes of digestion are specific to the human process and are physical chemical process with inputs, processes, and outputs that are highly specific. The idea of “thought” is not a specific physical phenomenon unless you constrain it to “thought produced by a human brain,” in which I agree.
- milgrim 1mo agoAnd a few sentences later: “Paul had rapidly decided that this whole debate was a distraction. For any human, absolute proof of a Copy’s sentience was impossible. For any Copy, the truth was self-evident: cogito ergo sum. End of discussion.”