We didn’t replicate the human brain. We built systems that can statistically approximate some of what the human brain might output in certain limited situations.
Which is equivalent to
"We didn't replicate the human brain. We partially replicated its functionality."
In that sense, I guess at least LLMs are not infringeing on the kind of patents that would get the owners of AI labs hit by lightning.
Maybe we should be asking what our own "system prompts" are ?
- ~3rd century BCE : The invention of hydraulic engineering (eg aqueducs) in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body accounted for both physical and mental functioning.
- Pre-Socratic Greece : The ancient Greeks saw the mind as a chariot pulled by horses of reason and emotion.
- 1500s-1600s: Automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, Descartes suggested that cerebral hydraulic automata produced behavior by powering "animal spirits" through the nerves.
- 1700s–1800s: The mind worked like clockwork.
- Industrial revolution (1800s) : In the industrial revolution, the mind was understood as a steam engine.
- Late 1800s : Hermann von Helmholtz compared the mind's workings to telegraphy and hydraulics; the brain was likened to a telegraph network or a complex switchboard
- 1895 : Sigmund Freud in 1895 described a Project for a Scientific Psychology using a crude neural network model and borrowed concepts from thermodynamics, speaking of psychic energy, pressure, and discharge, essentially a hydraulic model of the psyche.
- 1930s–present : "our brain is a computer"
- and 2022-now: "We are LLMs!"
I can't wait to become a quantum chip, an NFT, and so on, as new things arrive. It doesn't make any of those models accurate. They're just the metaphor of the day.
My personal opinion is that eventually we may just get advanced enough genetic engineering combined with brain / computer networks that the real A.I. will just be a brain like thing grown in a lab but more specialised. Or who knows - our own brains might have some quantum inner workings as well we are unaware of !
I would argue that the inventors of those past technologies were trying to replicate other things (movement, energy, pressure, pneuma, psyche, physis, whatever) that felt deeply human to them, and that in the zeitgeist of his time, Hero of Alexandria (1 BC) could also have said:
> I suppose you could argue that none of the stories of the past had the actual philosophers behind them attempting to replicate "pneuma" though.
Paracelse was trying to create a homonculus by using semen, manure, and blood in the 16th century or so.
A few decades or centuries from now, maybe engineers will try to replicate "consciousness" (though it's pretty clear that Anthropic is already trying) when it has become clear to 22nd century people that giving an object "intelligence" gets you no closer to recreating humanity than "movement through pneumatics" does.
AI is something else, as it should be.
I enjoy asking my grandkids why mirrors reflect left to right and not top to bottom.
Nomenclature is just a convention of convenience and can be ever so judgemental.
Particle / anti-Particle ... way to lead the jury, hey?
What we do know is that when Bob walks up to a mirror he sees adastra22.
The glass is likely there to stop them touching and spawning a new universe.
And it would revolutionize our current understanding of physics to find out that p = p̄
Hold a written word in front of your eyes to read it.
Now flip it to the mirror to read the reflection:
Did you flip it horizontally? Then it reflected left-to-right.
Did you flip it vertically? Then it reflected top-to-bottom.
Someone saying that a mirror swaps left and right is comparing it to a photograph, and only because we, as bipedal creatures, really prefer to orient images of other humans with heads up.
This was my small "mind expansion moment" for today. Thanks!
This sub-thread is becoming unfairly more interesting than the main conversation at this point.
- Do you think a live video, shown on a phone screen, of you, is "you"?
- Do you think a still photograph of you is "you"?
- Do you think a set of bytes representing that photograph (or video) digitally is "you"?
- Do you think a compressed version of that photograph is "you"? Is there a limit to how much I can size down the image or compress it until it's no longer "you"?
- Do you think the base-10 number equivalent to that digitized picture is also "you"? Can I memorize "you" if I learn all the digits of that number? Can I write "you" on a piece of paper from memory? Is Pi a person?
- There is a very large number of reflecting surfaces in the world. How many of you are there?
- Does the "you" in the mirror persist if you walk off the frame and can no longer see yourself in the mirror? What happened to him? Does he live in a left-handed world? What happens if I shatter or paint over the mirror?
- If I draw you, is my drawing "you"? Does the accuracy of the drawing influence whether it is really "you" or not? If so, then does the accuracy/quality of the mirror influence whether it is "you" or not in the reflection? Are "you" fatter or slimmer, depending if the mirror is warped?
- If you're standing far from the mirror, but I'm close to it and I can see "you", why can I talk or signal to you and you don't respond?
Not only that! Does the decimal representation of π (which is infinite in length) contain all persons who ever existed, and will ever exist? Since π itself is a known reason, but its decimal representation is infinite, it means π cannot contain itself. So if it can contain every person that ever existed, but can't contain itself (which could conceivably contain everyone), then what does that even mean?
Aaargghh.
Spot me after the next rain. I'll be in the color indigo, right above the pot of gold, waving back.
One half of one dimension less than a human. But sure looks convincing on the surface.
Suppose if we wanted to get philosophical it could go in the "ceci n'est pas une pipe" direction but I agree