Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjcon | Hacker News Reader

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> Example?

Take just about anything from the reinforcement learning for ai agents domain - I'm particular to neuroevolution examples. Here's a simple one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb4LAT3cJfM

No behaviors preprogrammed just a simple simulation environment with environmental constraints.

> Humans are certainly not "hardwired" to prove mathematical statements, yet they do.

Umm... yeah we are? We're just chemical reactions and physics, there is no escaping that. Are we extremely sophisticated and complex, absolutely but that doesn't make us nondeterministic in any meaningful or special way.

> it's clear that the human mind has a property that the current generation of AI agents does not emulate at all

Certainly but it is a matter of degree, not a matter of possessing an ill-defined concept like "consciousness" which is what I was responding to (Unless we want to call "consciousness" an emergent phenomena arising from complexity -I'm fine with that - but the word is loaded with plenty of other connotations so I find its use counterproductive personally).

> Umm... yeah we are? We're just chemical reactions and physics, there is no escaping that. Are we extremely sophisticated and complex, absolutely but that doesn't make us nondeterministic in any meaningful or special way.

Every day we are confronted with rather obvious nondeterminism that seems to originate in consciousness and has no scientific explanation that I'm aware of. It is undeniable that physical reality is affected by decisions made by conscious agents. Here's a simple example: say that we are trying to predict the position of a cell in a human body. It's motion is surely governed by a host of physical and chemical reactions, that can be described microscopically, but where that cell is in five minutes cannot possibly be described solely by those microscopic laws. The human may decide to get up and walk to the other side of the room. I am not personally convinced that the decisions to get up and move are the deterministic result of physical laws that follow directly from the initial conditions at the big bang. If there were some compelling scientific theory that could actually explain a theory of consciousness that was consistent with subjective experience and didn't hand wave it away as an emergent phenomenon, I'd be open to it. You are making a very bold claim when you state we are "just" physical and chemical reactions that I don't think is fully justified in light of the limitations of existing scientific theories.

> I am not personally convinced that the decisions to get up and move are the deterministic result of physical laws that follow directly from the initial conditions at the Big Bang

Then that is a religious or philosophical conviction… not a scientific one. Believe whatever you want just don’t confuse the two.

The behaviors are in fact pre-programmed. The distinction between environment and agent is in my opinion an un-necessary and misleading one. The agent is at is and the agent "acts" as it acts as a union with its environment.

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