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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

Notable that this is published by the Discovery Institute Press, the imprint of the Discovery Institute, the people behind "Intelligent design" and "Teach the controversy".

There have been lots of books making roughly the same argument from intuition - that it sure feels like we're special, and so therefore we must be special even if there's nothing in particular we can point to in favour of this notion - I can't strictly recommend any of them since I don't find them at all convincing but there's no need to fund the Discovery Institute if you want to read attempts at this argument.

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I find their argument to be particularly ludicrous in the light of LaMDA and DALL-e. Unless they can point to a specific process in us that’s not computing (and we can kind of define Einsteinian physics in terms of spacetime doing computation and transporting state) I’ll remain very sceptical.

And Google, Siri, and Alexa all agree I’m on the right track, BTW.

And on

> this is published by the Discovery Institute Press, the imprint of the Discovery Institute, the people behind "Intelligent design" and "Teach the controversy".

Why is this that it’s always the same kind of people that seem likely to seek comfort by chanting “You’ll not replace us”?

Google, Siri, and Alexa all agree I’m on the right track, BTW.

I would argue that they are so rudimentary and universally terrible that it argues the exact opposite.

They’re able to convert speech to text fairly well but understanding and taking action on that speech their common use cases are measured in the dozens.

I have an Echo in every room but I use Alexa for a shopping list, weather, to play music and set my thermostat. Anything other than that and it gets very lost.

Sorry. I was being sarcastic.

OTOH, we can’t argue they do the job of a not particularly bright human quite well, so, at least, those humans have already been replaced.

There was at least one POTUS in recent history that could be replaced by a probabilistic prose generator and nobody would notice.

The POTUS you are thinking about, at least could never be impersonated by Deep Fakes. Anybody would notice the missing outrageous statements.

It is levels of abstraction.

I can write DALL-e "Pope assasinated blood bath" and it will happily comply to generate images.

It will not stop and think twice that there are people who might be offended by the images. It will not stop and realize that it might not be appropriate to even generate such images.

Of course there are people who would happily create such pictures.

Generating pictures from a sentence based on somewhat connected images is not creative, yes it is funny and might be provocative but art is not just generating images - Picasso just painting any shit would still not be Picasso but yet another painter.

Van Gogh does not matter because he could paint night sky - any schmuck can paint a night sky and do it in weird way. It is story, it is bunch of other paintings he did.

> It will not stop and think twice

Of course it won’t. It has no concept of how images will emotionally affect the humans who see them, or humans, or that people see them.

You should know that Sir Roger Penrose wrote a book over thirty years ago that asserts human like intelligence is non-algorithmic, that is, unable to be simulated on a Turing Machine. Hence, the article linked to is probably right.

I, much less Penrose, have anything in common with the Discovery Institute, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong in their conclusions. Their ahem “methods” may be a bit suspect as well.

To learn more read “The Emperor’s New Mind”. It’s quite a book! A good addition to your summer reading list.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Mind

I read it, and I remain unconvinced. Quantum processes may introduce noise, or may result in actual useful computation that’s unique to organic brains, but still it is a form of computation, as much as anything that behaves according to natural laws are bound to them. I’m not sure exactly what Penrose was on to in that book, honestly.

Funny that two rebuttals against the argument in the article are:

1. Attacking the source (Discovery Institute)

2. "I remain unconvinced" when you can't attack the source (freaking Roger Penrose, lol)

> I’m not sure exactly what Penrose was on to in that book, honestly.

It is quite clear: he distinguishes between Turing computation (which non Quantum physics captures well) and super-Turing computation (which needs the mechanism in ORCH-OR).

I am not saying Penrose is correct but let us not resort to logical fallacies and straw men. It is exhausting.

> freaking Roger Penrose

Unless he is an expert on cognition or neurobiology, which he isn’t, I still think his opinion has no more value than mine and certainly has less value than that of a field expert.

And you did resort to a logical fallacy in that.

> And you did resort to a logical fallacy in that.

False. You should read my comment again or at least a few more times to understand the (relatively simple) point I was trying to make.

I was saying you couldn't employ ad hominem against Penrose because it was not easy for you to do so.

> Hence, the article linked to is probably right.

Only if Penrose's argument is probably right, which you seem to have taken for granted here.

Ugh...

I don't need Penrose - you still have training set for AI.

Humans don't have rigid specified training set, training human to live takes at least 20 years.

Each human has really exceptional path and there is no way to train two humans in exactly the same way even if they are identical twins.

Tell me how you do the same result with neural net that is trained in let's say 6 months, amount of data is not there.

Mostly neural nets are trained on images or on sounds - humans are trained on images/sounds/touch/smell/taste/emotions for years.

Our networks are continuously trained and never (major pathologies excepted) cease to be trained.

OTOH, a digital network can absorb inputs at a much faster signalling rate than biological ones. Digital networks also don’t try to replicate all aspects of biological brains and are a somewhat crude approximation of their biological counterparts.

The overview didn’t give too many details so hopefully I’m not arguing against too much of a straw man, but I don’t find the idea that certain physical processes mean we are fundamentally different is sound. By their very nature, those are processes that can be studied and replicated either in hardware, wetware, or pure simulation. If it’s “randomness” from quantum mechanics, then we introduce an RNG. If it’s the process of wave function collapse, then we use a quantum computer. Etc, etc.

It is an interesting book, and worth reading.

He argues, as you say, that we do things with our brains that can not be reproduced using algorithms. He bases the argument mainly, if I recall correctly, on the incompleteness theorems: we can apprehend certain statements in mathematics as “true” even though they can’t be proven within the system of definitions and axioms in which the statements are made.

However, this conclusion, whether it is ultimately defensible or not, is about replicating the human thought process with algorithms. It does not exclude the creation of machines that can do everything we can do. They just wouldn’t accomplish this through the execution of what we conventionally think of as computer programs.

If you believe that current AI implementations are capable of this sort of “everything we can do but differently” then I would be curious as to why nobody has made any progress whatsoever in the understanding of consciousness?

Are we to believe that humans are now able to replicate many of their own conscious abilities but with no real understanding of the mechanisms? A grid search of TensorFlow functions mashed together in different combinations could have done the same thing?

I am starting to feel like I am playing a Gary Marcus role here in this thread, against a mob of overly optimistic connectionists. (that may be too generous, I imagine many in this thread have no implementation experience with AI, just a Reader’s Digest level of understanding)

> If you believe that current AI implementations are capable of this sort of “everything we can do but differently”

Surely nobody believes that.

> progress whatsoever in the understanding of consciousness

How would we know if we’d made this progress? How do you know if any other person other than yourself is conscious? (I think this is called the “zombie problem”.)

How do I know I am conscious and my perception of my own consciousness isn’t an illusion itself?

We currently believe consciousness is an emerging phenomenon that happens to any sufficiently complex brain that posses the ability to gather and remember knowledge about itself and the organism that holds it.

I’m sure our first contact with alien intelligence will be extremely puzzling at first, then profoundly horrifying, and, finally, deeply enlightening.

> How do I know I am conscious and my perception of my own consciousness isn’t an illusion itself?

I can’t figure out what the difference would be between this “illusion” and “real” consciousness. Somewhere Sam Harris says something to the effect that our consciousness is the only thing we can be absolutely sure is real, almost by definition. If it were an illusion, then we would have to be conscious to experience the illusion.

> I can’t figure out what the difference would be between this “illusion” and “real” consciousness.

That's the point. We can't.

> If it were an illusion, then we would have to be conscious to experience the illusion.

Or, at least something other than us would need to be conscious in order to experience what it'd be like being us.

Not being algorithmic doesn't mean it can't be simulated or duplicated

(example, chaotic systems can and are simulated all the time)

But apart from that, the argument will be settled by someone that might manage to duplicate that. Or gives a more detailed and founded objection (Penrose missed all recent neuroscience discoveries for example). Until that happens, Penrose's book is more a strong opinion than anything else

Or, another possibility is that it is unable to be simulated fully but the simulated version is close enough for most purposes (including running Skynet or the Paperclip maximizer). Or plug a quantum computer to your machine and then it is fully able to be simulated.

We are so far away from understanding "thought" that I doubt we'll ever get there. We can't even explain how quantum physics gives rise to Newtonian physics, and those are both observable where "thought" is not!

It seems obvious that cognition/intelligence or whatever we want to call it is non-Turing because we simply cannot reproduce it with a Turing machine. Quantum computing here just makes things worse.

> argument from intuition - that it sure feels like we're special, and so therefore we must be special even if there's nothing in particular we can point to in favour of this notion

The reverse is no less of an argument from intuition. Yes, at first thought it’s compelling to think that consciousness arises from what we consider “material world” (see naïve realism[0]), so of course we should be able to come up with some arrangement of material world elements that creates a consciousness—but there’s nothing in particular we can point to in favor of the notion that consciousness arises from material world in the first place.

Neither position is known to be correct, it’s a philosophical issue in which you can argue for either side—but without an ability to show definite proof in favor of your take, ridiculing the other is just lazy thinking.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_realism

The fact you get drunk is very strong evidence though not proof that the material world creates consciousness.

Physical interactions impacting consciousness in a huge number of repeatable ways isn’t proof of anything but it's by far the simplest explanation.

Indeed, it’s not a proof. Deciding to buy and ingest alcohol (then neurons firing in certain ways, etc.) doesn’t violate a possible non-physicalist take in which the perception of that happening is a map of the territory that is your consciousness.

You can get drunk without realizing your drinking alcohol which means it’s more complicated than simple observation and expectation.

Keep trying to cover all the edge cases and you can end up with a god like collective unconscious that just happens to simulate the physical laws the way we currently expect even before humanity was aware of them. Which is undetectable dragon in your garage territory.

> You can get drunk without realizing your drinking alcohol

There’s been a conscious choice to produce alcohol and put it in your drink.

> Keep trying to cover all the edge cases

As if you don’t have any. Complexity of the territory aside, does this make more magic leaps than, say, mind-body dualism or discarding the one single thing directly accessible as an illusion?

> simulate the physical laws the way we currently expect even before humanity was aware of them

Our consciousness devises models to describe the perceived time-space that’s ultimately an artifact of consciousness itself. Though they seem to be useful, it’s up in the air whether they model the territory or the map, or what is the territory.

> There’s been a conscious choice to produce alcohol and put it in your drink.

Fruits etc can easily ferment without you realizing it. So people aren't necessarily aware they are adding alcohol not are you nessiarily aware you are drinking it.

> As if you don’t have any.

The material world explanation has zero edge cases it's completely self consistent.

> Fruits etc can easily ferment

Replace “alcohol” with “alcohol from fermented fruit”

> The material world explanation has zero edge cases it's completely self consistent.

The explanation of how consciousness arises from material world? Indulge me.

> Replace “alcohol” with “alcohol from fermented fruit”

That’s different, someone can be aware of fruit but not the alcohol within it. To assume they are interchangeable is it to make assumptions about what’s going on.

> The explanation of how consciousness arises from material world?

Consciousness is a product of the physical world. That's the theory and explanation.

> That’s different, someone can be aware of fruit but not the alcohol within it. To assume they are interchangeable is it to make assumptions about what’s going on.

I don’t follow. Perhaps you’re confusing awareness with consciousness.

> Consciousness is a product of the physical world. That's the theory and explanation.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the sophistication of physicalist takes. The hard problem, solved right in front of our eyes.

> Perhaps you’re confusing awareness with consciousness.

Nope, you are. Being conscious doesn't imply absolute awareness of everything. A conscious entity can do something without total to understand everything in all of existence across all space and time.

If I make something without alcohol and by the time you drink it it has alcohol then how am I supposed to know you where going to wait/it’s delayed in the mail or whatever.

> The hard problem, solved

Why assume it’s a hard problem? If you ask what 1 + 1 is don’t expect a long answer.

> Being conscious doesn't imply absolute awareness of everything.

Exactly…

> If you ask 1 + 1

1 + 1 is operating well-defined terms, this is not.

>but there’s nothing in particular we can point to in favor of the notion that consciousness arises from material world in the first place.

Yeah, just pretty much all of science, and that's rubbish anyways.

Where is the paper proving that conciousness is material in origin?

Essentially, the entire body of science is evidence that all phenomena are material in origin. We've yet to demonstrate a single one isn't.

Science does nothing to prove that though. "What is true reality" is a philosophical question. What you would be looking for is not a physics paper but some philosophical work.

Paraphrasing something that somebody said a long time ago...You mean their computations about thinking machines are not very interesting :-)

I’d add that their computations employ mechanisms that are outside the realm of logic.

That I know white noise generators that make a more convincing argument.

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