DonaldFisk

3 ms·

1.
by DonaldFisk 9d ago
Dirac was talking about the fundamental laws. In favour of his point, and not known at the time he gave the talk, the standard model of particle physics is based on the symmetry groups U(1), SU(2), and SU(3), so Lie groups (which mathemat
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by DonaldFisk 9d ago
Correct (but now we know it should be somewhat higher than that), and 1039 should be 10^39, one of Dirac's Large Numbers, the size of the observable universe in atomic units, and also the ratio of electromagnetic to gravitational force
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by DonaldFisk 16d ago
> Why can't a computer program have those? Because it isn't a physical object capable of sensing the physical environment, the way the brain is via the sense organs. I don't rule out the possibility that a robot, equippe
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by DonaldFisk 17d ago
Sorry for the late reply. > If consciousness is fundamental (ie substance dualism) then how is it exerting influence over our behavior? If I understand you correctly, it might not be exerting influence over our behaviour. By influence, a
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by DonaldFisk 20d ago
There's some simplification. I was initially puzzled about why it was United Kingdom and not Great Britain, as part of UK is on the island of Ireland. Also absent are countries that aren't fully independent, the largest being
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by DonaldFisk 22d ago
> I'm asking on what basis you claim it to be categorically impossible. Because the neural correlates of consciousness wouldn't exist in their brain. I've even looked into what happens if someone, blind from birth, takes
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by DonaldFisk 23d ago
> Aren't you inventing that whole cloth? I should have said, "I think that consciousness ..." > So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step ... I should have said, "The conscious experienc
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by DonaldFisk 23d ago
> On what basis could you possibly make this claim? People with absent qualia have been asked, e.g. Knut Nordby: https://www.consc.net/misc/achromat.html "Although I have acquired a thorough theoretical knowled
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by DonaldFisk 23d ago
> Aren't those two statements at odds? Sensing (i.e. picking up information about its environment through sense organs) is a physical phenomenon and is reasonably well-understood. Consciousness is non=physical and takes that infor
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by DonaldFisk 23d ago
I've already answered this. There's no way someone deaf from birth could know what it's like to hear sounds, by looking at the pixels in a sound recording they know the format of, and if you don't believe me you can as
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by DonaldFisk 23d ago
Quite a lot has been published about neural correlates of consciousness, so I'll go with whatever the evidence suggests. There are literally hundreds of attempted explanations of phenomenal consciousness, none of which is generally acc
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by DonaldFisk 23d ago
People aren't just consciousness, they're conscious of things. Of course a deaf or blind person is conscious, even if they've been deaf or blind since birth. But they aren't conscious of hearing or seeing things, a
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by DonaldFisk 23d ago
I just explained this. If someone looks at the contents of an image file without displaying it, they don't experience the colours either. So how can LLMs experience them?
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by DonaldFisk 23d ago
My training data on qualia is actually seeing, hearing, and otherwise sensing things, not just reading about them.
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by DonaldFisk 23d ago
That's the definition that matters. And as it's impossible to describe in words what it's like to experience qualia, and LLMs are trained on words, they cannot know what it's like. Even if images and sounds are inclu
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by DonaldFisk 1mo ago
A Portuguese Jesuit, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Pina
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by DonaldFisk 2mo ago
I initially responded to CSMastermind whose post explicitly mentioned LLMs and the Turing test, which involves interacting with a computer solely by typing and reading text. You first mentioned consciousness. We can tell that other people
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by DonaldFisk 2mo ago
> If something is indistinguishable from a human in its outward behavior, then I'd be forced to admit that it's as intelligent/conscious/sentient/whatever as a human, regardless of how it works internally. It&#x2
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by DonaldFisk 2mo ago
I think that recent LLMs do pass the Turing test, but I don't think it is a good test for intelligence, for two reasons: emergent complexity and pareidolia. Arguably, ELIZA passed the Turing test ca. 1967: https://archive.
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by DonaldFisk 2mo ago
The breathing marks are clear in the Ancient Library texts (e.g. St John's Gospel), but difficult to make out on Hacker News. A propos of breathing marks, iota subscripts, and the three different accent marks of Classical Greek, when I
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by DonaldFisk 3mo ago
I have always assumed that Alan Kay compared Lisp to Maxwell's Equations because of the similarity between the interplay of eval and apply in Lisp on the one hand, and the interplay of the electric and magnetic fields in Maxwell's
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by DonaldFisk 3mo ago
I'm unsure what to make of the post you're replying to, but the idea that there's a connexion between consciousness and quantum phenomena isn't just a New Age idea. Eugene Wigner wasn't New Agey, and he wrote Rema
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by DonaldFisk 3mo ago
People smoke a lot less. We have antibiotics. Life expectancy is up.
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by DonaldFisk 3mo ago
It's confusing because different people mean different things when using political terms. The political compass ( https://www.politicalcompass.org ) has two axes: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian. On it, socialists
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by DonaldFisk 3mo ago
I was puzzled by this: (rplacd (quote tt) (quote ...)) and later (print (cdr (quote tt))). But it appears to be valid in PDP-1 Lisp (though not in either Lisp 1.5 or modern Lisps). From https://s3data.computerhistory.org/
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Has the answer to life's origins been hiding in our cells all along?(newscientist.com)
7 points by DonaldFisk 3mo ago|1 comments
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by DonaldFisk 4mo ago
I'm interested in how they work, but building anything like them, given the hardware I have, would be impractical. I've seen others use them, including to answer some questions I had, but the answers they gave were obvious, unhe
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by DonaldFisk 4mo ago
The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was in 1956, before I was born. AI itself is even older than that (e.g. William Grey Walter's robots, Elmer and Elsie in 1948), but it was called cybernetics back then.
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by DonaldFisk 4mo ago
It's in the name "Hacker News". Hackers are people who enjoy doing the programming themselves, because they get satisfaction from it. Often they program in their spare time, and sometimes what they develop has little to n
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by DonaldFisk 5mo ago
This will fix it: https://www.stretch.site And here's the clip with aspect ratio corrected: https://www.stretch.site/?videoUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...

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