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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

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”?

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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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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