The more interesting question is why are intelligence/beauty/consciousness emergent properties that exist in our minds.
Ants have developed architecture, with plumbing, ventilation, nurseries for rearing the young, and paved thoroughfares. Ants practice agriculture, including animal husbandry. Ants have social stratification that differs from but is comparable to that of human cultures, with division of labor into worker, soldier, and other specialties that do not have a clear human analogy.
Ants enslave other ants. Ants interactively teach other ants, something few other animals do, among them humans. Ants have built "supercolonies" dwarfing any human city, stretching over 5,000 km in one place. And ants too have a complex culture of sorts, including rich languages based on pheromones.
Despite the radically different nature of our two civilizations, it is undeniable from an objective standpoint that this level of society has been achieved by ants.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/t2h1vs/an...
I could go on and on. Point being, analogies are fun and sometimes illuminating, but they're just that. There's a vast difference in complexity between what ants do, and what humans do.
They're saying they accomplish incredible things for the size of their brain, which is absolutely and unequivocally true.
"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise".
Interesting parallell with intelligence/sentience/sapience. Despite the means, isn't the end result what you have to judge? The end result looks like a rudimentary civilization. How much back in time would we have to go back to find more sophistication in ant societies than humans?
I'm indeed talking about the ends. The operative phrase here is "it looks like". It looks like a civilization, there are even some structural similarities to be found - but it is not a civilization, anymore than a Lego brick with a computer sticker on it is a PC.
This is not to deny that ants are awesome and very much worth studying - my point is to avoid following flawed analogies too far. "Ant colonies look like rudimentary civilization, and civilization is/does X, therefore..." is going to be a nonsense statements for most of possible values of X.
Ants can do it as a consequence of their size. Relative lifting strength drops fast with increased size. Conversely, an ant scaled to human size would collapse under its own weight and cook itself to death - waste heat generation scales with volume (~ size³), while waste heat rejection scales with surface area (~ size²).
And it ain't a cognitive achievement anyway.
> Humans can't communicate in real-time with pheromones alone.
Yes. Because it's not as useful at our scale, nor is it real-time - chemical communication works better for small organisms and small volumes of living, as the travel speed and dissipation rate of pheromones is independent of organisms emitting them. Meanwhile, we have multiple ways of communicating real-time, some of which work at light speed which is the definition of "real time" (light speed in vacuum being the speed of causality itself).
> Most humans do not know how to build their own home.
Neither do ants.
> An ant might well consider us backwards, not advanced.
An ant can't consider us anything. The point I'm trying to get across is, just because the ant colony is capable of surprisingly high sophistication, doesn't mean the individual ants are.
As a counterpoint that's actually cognitive in nature: AFAIK individuals of many (most?) ant species can be easily tricked into following each other in a circle, and they will continue to do so until they start dying from starvation. This is because the ant isn't making a decision following a complex thought process - it's executing a simple algorithm, that works well in nature because nature is chaotic enough that stable ant circles are unlikely to form (and when they do, they're unlikely to be left undisturbed for long).
To give some examples of ant agriculture and animal husbandry, they cut and feed leaves to a fungus they farm for food. The fungus even communicates to the ants to switch to a different plant when the plant produces toxins in defense to cutting.
Ants herd aphids, protecting them from predators (ladybugs), secrete pheromones that direct and pacify them, and massage their abdomens to milk sugar dew.
But the same is true for an ant.
From the New Yorker [1]:
> The researchers aren’t yet sure exactly what causes the digestive slowdown. Maybe it’s stress. Maybe the fluid that ants exchange when they share food stimulates digestion. Maybe they die still looking for a relative to break bread with.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/lonely-a...
Perhaps intelligence is like a black box input to our bodies (call it the "soul", even though this isn't testable and therefore not a hypothesis). The mind therefore wouldn't play any more of a role in intelligence than the eye. And I'm not sure people would say the eye is necessary for understanding intelligence.
Now, I'm not really in a position to argue for such a thing, even if I believe it, but I'm curious what argument you might have against it.
The effect of drugs (including alcohol) on the mind. Of note is anesthesia which can reliably and reversibly stop internal experience in the mind.
For a non-physical soul to hold our mind we would expect significant divergence from the above. Out of body experiences and similar are indistinguishable from dreams/hallucinations when tested against external reality (remote viewing and the like).
This sounds like it assumes a physical mind could access a non-physical soul. All we probably know is that we have to be using an intact mind to use free will.
That's not a completely watertight argument.
Consider a traditional FM/AM radio. You can modify it, damage it, and get notable changes to its behaviour...
> Of note is anesthesia which can reliably and reversibly stop internal experience in the mind
...turn it off and on again...
> For a non-physical soul to hold our mind we would expect significant divergence from the above.
... yet concluding that all the noises produced from the radio are purely internal, mechanical and physical would be the wrong conclusion.
(I'm not arguing that the human brain/mind is anything like analogous to a radio, just pointing out the limits of this approach.)
Although, sure, if we could somehow manage to determine that souls did exist then presumably an AI model as capable as a human would also be eligible for one.
Some people think that neurons specifically aren't necessary for understanding intelligence but in the same way that understanding transistors isn't necessary to understand computers, that neurons comprise the units that more readily explain intelligence.
That’s not necessarily a disproof. It’s also not necessarily reasonable to conflate what we call “the soul” with intelligence.
This is entering the world of philosophy, metaphysics and religion and leaving the world of science.
The modern instinct is to simply call bullshit on anything which cannot be materially verified, which is in many ways a very wise thing to do. But it’s worth leaving a door open for weirdness, because apart from very limited kinds of mathematical truth (maybe), I think everything we’ve ever thought to be true has had deeper layers revealed to us than we could have previously imagined.
Consider the reported experience of people who’ve had strokes and lost their ability to speak, and then later regained that ability through therapy. They report experiencing their own thoughts and wanting to speak, but something goes wrong/they can’t translate that into a physical manifestation of their inner state.
Emotional regulation, personality, memory, processing speed, etc… are those really that different from speech? Are they really the essence of who we are, or are they a bridge to the physical world manifest within our bodies?
We can’t reverse most brain damage, so it’s usually not possible to ask a person what their experience of a damaged state is like in comparison to an improved state. We do have a rough, strange kind of comparison in thinking about our younger selves, though. We were all previously pre memory, drooling, poorly regulated babies (and before that, fetuses with no real perception at all). Is it right to say you didn’t have a soul when you were 3 weeks? A year? Two years? When exactly does “you” begin? I can’t remember who I was when I was when I was 2 months with any clarity at all, and you could certainly put different babies in doctored videos and I wouldn’t be able to tell what was me/make up stories and I’d probably just absorb them. But I’m still me and am that 2 month old, much later in time. Whatever I’m experiencing has a weird kind of continuity. Is that encoded in the brain, even though I can’t remember it? Almost definitely, yeah. Is that all of what that experience of continuity is, and where that sense is coming from? I’ve got no idea. I certainly feel deeper. Remember that we all are not living in the real world, we’re all living in our conscious perception. The notion that we can see all of it within a conscious mirror is a pretty bold claim. We can see a lot of it and damage the bridge/poke ourselves in the eyes with icepicks and whatnot, and that does stuff, but what exactly is it doing? Can we really know?
Intuitively most people would say they were still themselves when they were babies despite the lack of physical development of the brain. Whatever is constructing that continuous experience of self is not memory, because that’s not always there, not intelligence, because that’s not always there, not personality, because that’s not always there… it’s weird.
I think it’s important to remember that. Whenever people think they have human beings fully figured out down to the last mechanical detail and have sufficient understanding to declare who does and doesn’t have a soul and what that means in physical terms, bad things tend to happen. And that goes beyond a statement to be cautious about this kind of stuff purely out of moral hazard; the continual hazard is always as empirical as it is moral. We can never really know what we are. Our perceptual limitations may prove assumptions we make about what we are to be terribly, terribly wrong, despite what seems like certainty.
Suppose a soul is an immaterial source of intelligence, but it controls the body via machine-like material hardware such as neurons.
Or an alternative, suppose there is a soul inside your body “watching” the sensory activations within your brain like a movie. The brain and body create the movie & have some intelligence, but other important properties of the consciousness are bound to this observer entity.
In both these cases, the test just shows that if you damage the hardware, you can no longer observe intelligence because you’ve broken the end-to-end flow of the machine.
But yes, supposing that then you would expect to only see damages that correspond such as different forms of paralysis or other purely mechanical damages, not things that change the interior perspective.
Otherwise you start postulating the existence of a thing whose sole justification is your desire for the existence of that thing, which is natural when you start questioning beliefs and kick out all the supports without meaning to.
I think this is what Bertrand Russel's teapot was meant to ellucidate.
Is it?
These networks are capable of copying something, yes. Do we have a good understanding of what that is?
Not really, no. At least I don’t. I’m sure lots of people have a much better understanding than I do, but I think its hard to know exactly whats going on.
People dismiss the stochastic parrot argument because of how impressive big neural nets are, but it doesn’t really invalidate that argument. Is a very, very, very good parrot that learns from everyone at once doing basically the same as what we do? I’d argue no, at least not fully. It’s absorbed aspects of us extremely well/is a very weird, sophisticated mirror, yes, and is copying something somehow, probably in a way reminiscent of how we copy. Is it basically the same as what we’re doing when we think? Partially? Fully? Not at all?
A typical engineer would say “good enough”. That type of response is valuable in a lot of contexts, but I think the willingness to apply it to these models is pretty reckless, even if it’s impossible to easily “prove” why.
To be clear on the exact statement you made, I think you’re right/it’s pretty clear neurons play some very important role/potentially capture a ton of what we consider intelligence, but I don’t think anyone really knows what exactly is being captured/what amount of thought and experience they’re responsible for.
Anyway, thank you for a great answer and conversation throughout this thread.
Regards neural networks, parroting and the emulation of intelligence (or the difference between an emulation and the "real thing"):
Well, somewhat like you say, we cannot propose a valid comparison from one to the other without an understanding of one (consciousness) or both. It's fascinating that there are some open, valid and pressing questions about what / how the output of this new wave of software is concretized (from foundational, semi-statistical algorithms in this case.)
Yes, I do agree neurons have something to do with the "final output". But this is a subsection of the problem - organic neurons is-an/are order(s) of magnitude in complexity beyond what the tricky "parrot" is up to. Moreso, these components perform very different functionally - the known functions of the neuron compared to ANN, backprop etc. The entire stack.)
P.S: One interesting theory I like to simulate and/or entertain is that every organic cell in the body has something to do with the final output of consciousness.
And yeah, are definitely a lot of open questions related to all of this. Love how its brought so many deep questions into focus.
It would explain why most "experts" didn't see GTP-4's abilities coming. Many of them expected that it would take a major algorithm or technology improvement to do "real intelligent" things, because they fundamentally misunderstood intelligence.
Again, IANA neuroscientist, but this is my understanding from the literature and conversations with the scientists I work with.
1. Neurons connect all our senses and all our muscles.
2. Neurons are the definitive difference between the brain and the rest of the body. There is “other stuff” in the brain, but it’s not so different from the “other stuff” that’s in your rear end.
Don’t underestimate what a neuron can do. A single artificial neuron can fit a logistic regression model. A quarter of a million is on then scale of some our our largest AI, and biological neurons are far more connected than ANN. An ant quite likely has a more powerful brain than GPT-4.
Our digestive systems appear to be important to our behaviour, though. Some recent work in mice showed that if colonised with bacteria from faeces of humans with autism, the mice would begin to show autistic behaviours.
So, not sure your argument here is especially strong.
If the study you mention show something else, I would actually be very interested in a source.
Humans so far have done a great job at destroying nature faster than any other kind could.
And GPT4 was created for profit.
The paper is somewhat new so I haven't done a proper review to know if it's solid work yet, but this may offer some context for some of the comments in this thread.