captainclam

Oh never mind then.

I am sincerely curious about your thoughts on the origins of mitochondria, and how you came to feel so strongly about it.

Pens are all well and good, but what are people's favorite notebooks? I've found that the paper is perhaps just as important as the pen in a satisfactory writing experience.

Hmmm...this wasn't at all my point, but I understand why I my comment could be read this way (the failure to communicate is mine).

I am not suggesting an equivalency between all efforts at all levels, or that innate talent doesn't exist. I was not at all speculating about the nature of preternatural talent. The expertise-gap I was invoking was more like early undergrad to late grad school levels, not pick-up football to Premier League.

The concept I'm getting at is that of a mental block I have observed in myself, and I suspect resides in others, which is really subtle but ultimately quite limiting. I'd have to think harder than I want to at the moment if I were to try to articulate it more clearly, but I do want to be clear that my comment wasn't about innate talent.

A really fascinating corollary I've observed since I've gotten into more advanced maths, or even doing actual research as a PhD student, is that there's nothing special going on at the higher levels. You're just working with different materials. Materials that require more time and effort to 'get', but once you get them they are just another tool at your disposal.

I was similar to the author in that, throughout high school and undergrad, I presumed that the mind that could comprehend advanced math or do novel research (in any field) was truly unknowable. Like there was this x-factor they had that wasn't there for me.

I've long enjoyed puzzle games (like The Witness or Stephen's Sausage Roll). It turns out that problem solving in non-trivial domains is never terribly different than problem solving in those games, or any other domain really. Like my brain isn't doing anything different than the usual tree-search algorithm that any chess player performs when they are projecting moves ahead into the future.

Its just iterating on concepts that seem abstruse to most people. But at the end of the day, deep problem solving in math or AI research tends to be the same moving-shapes-around-in-my head that I would do if I was trying to move an awkwardly shaped couch through a narrow doorway.

"Classic Wolfram — brilliant, reimplements / comes at a current topic using only cellular automata, and draws some fairly deep philosophical conclusions that are pretty intriguing."

Wolfram has a hammer and sees everything as a nail. But its a really interesting hammer.

“Mimicry of mechanisms left by evolution” would be a much less parsimonious explanation than just having those mechanisms, i.e. Occam’s razor.

Addressing your first thought…anything that you would call “objective” can be “doubted” by ceding the tiny tiny possibility that you are a simulation or Boltzmann brain or brain in a vat. The evidence before you may not actually be representative of the “objective” reality.

The fact that there is experience at all, the contents of which may be “doubted”, cannot be doubted.

I’m not unequivocally claiming this but that’s the thrust of the argument.

Op writes "I’m writing this comment so that people who want to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-argued positions on the topic."

They very specifically state that these people are good points of entry for "well-argued positions on the topic." Linking to specific literature would have been better, but this isn't "materialism/physicalism is wrong because of these people's credentials."

I guess you could say I don't know RWP from Adam! :D

My og comment wasn't to accurately explain gradient optimization, I was just expressing a sentiment not especially aimed at experts and not especially requiring details.

Though I'm afraid I subjected you to the same "cringe" I experience when I read pop sci/tech articles describe deep learning optimization as "the algorithm" being "rewarded" or "punished," haha.

Ugh, exactly, it's so cool. I've been a deep learning practitioner for ~3 years now, and I feel like this notion has really been impressed upon me only recently.

I've spent an awful lot of mental energy trying to conceive of how these things work, when really it comes down to "does increasing this parameter improve the performance on this task? Yes? Move the dial up a bit. No? Down a bit..." x 1e9.

And the cool part is that this yields such rich, interesting, sometimes even useful, structures!

I like to think of this cognitive primitive as the analogue to the idea that thermodynamics is just the sum of particles bumping into each other. At the end of the day, that really is just it, but the collective behavior is something else entirely.

Haha, good point. I'm not a hopeless case after all.

I've never used social media or had a "problem" with my phone. So I used to read articles like this a little smugly, but I'm growing increasingly discomfited by the notion that I'm...out of touch..?

Yeah, it's probably overall a positive thing that I've never been hooked on instagram, but it's also a language/shared experience with which I have no point of contact. I'm a little worried that not having a social media presence /at all/ is going to turn or has turned from mildly admirable (such restraint!) to...weird.

And it's great to be weird! I just hope that it doesn't impact potential connections in the future.

Same here. The notion of wolves as a safety issue has literally not occurred to me until this person asked. I'm very alert to grizzly, moose, and mountain lions. Is there evidence that I should add wolves to that list?

In Montana, where this is a very hot issue, I have never heard of any concerns about the safety of humans around wolves, even from very vocal anti-wolf parties. The conflict arises from wolves' impact on our hunting and ranching interests. They also kill domestic dog breeds (coyotes do this as well).

Right, I do agree that the current LLM paradigm probably won't achieve true AGI; but I think that the current trajectory could produce a powerful enough generalist agent model to seriously put AI ethics to task at pretty much every angle.

1) It may be possible to brute-force a model into something that sufficiently resembles AGI for most use-cases (at least well enough to merit concern about who controls it) 2) Deep learning has never been terribly scientific, but here we are.

Wow, are you me? I also experience this specifically. The hallucinations tend to be "spiders" or intruders (spiders in quotes because they're more shadowy and ephemeral than your standard tarantula) and incidentally, it's been "ramping up" for me lately, to the extent that it's a pretty dependable, nightly occurrence. I too think about it a lot and worry about the early-onset dementia angle.

Do you have any conditions in the broad spectrum of "anxiety" disorders? I've had a pretty rocky relationship with my sympathetic nervous system; variably severe anxiety, some panic attacks, occasional bouts of depersonalization/derealization. It seems pretty likely that these symptoms spring from the same root cause as the "night terrors." Fortunately I'm not personally aware of a link between these issues and dementia, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone replies with a link to some study that ruins my day.

Interesting! I like that thought. I enjoy thinking about how surprisingly good we are at predicting trajectories, good enough that we can throw, catch, and dodge small objects with remarkable accuracy. I wonder if our internal calculations of acceleration due to gravity is purely learned, or future space-faring infants will be surprised by how their block castles react when they knock them over.

Thank you so much for the links! I just happen to be endeavoring to seriously learn this stuff at the moment, driven by interests in physics, differential geometry, and gamedev. I'm seriously jazzed to check these out, thank you.

I have, and I totally agree with your critiques, but I still enjoyed it. Do you have any suggestions for really good science fiction?

As evidenced by lots of people enjoying it.

Waaay harder than meth.

Correct, it is an enormous amount...Under Everett, the "number of worlds" practically exists on a continuous spectrum, so basically an infinitude of worlds. But this doesn't violate parsimony in terms of building a model of reality. I don't have the greatest comprehension of the history of science, but I imagine the behavior of water and gas was not initially explained as being the collective behavior of moles (6.02x10^23) and moles of individual molecules. The parsimony of thermodynamics is measured by the simplicity of the underlying equations that describe their behavior, not the staggering number of atoms involved.

As for observation, I didn't suggest there was anything special about observing. In fact, this is part of what makes Everett among the most parsimonious interpretations: While some (not all) other interpretations are tasked with explaining the nature of observation (what counts as observation, how quickly does collapse propagate, etc), under Everett, there is no notion of observation at all. My point about consciousness is that, being conscious, we are forced to have a point of view which depends on where we exist in/on the wave function. I wasn't suggesting that consciousness has any actual effect whatsoever on the wavefunction.

I admit that the nature of probability is among the most difficult parts of Everett to wrestle with, though I'm not sure I understand why subsequent observations should follow a radically different pattern? It's still the same wavefunction with the same distributions as before...Schrodinger's equation is the same wherever you are on the wavefunction.

I think because of the abuse of "many worlds" in science fiction media (especially as of late) as a convenient plot device, people develop this idea that it's an unserious proposal wrt the foundations of physics. As far as I have read, it strikes me as perhaps the most parsimonious interpretation of QM out there.

Genuinely curious, what do you mean by "but you didn't say it couldn't be this, nanananana...?" The Everett interpretation isn't some fantastical notion spun up by a scifi writer...it is simply the consequence of removing collapse of the wavefunction as an objective event from the picture. And if it turns out our observations wouldn't be changed by removing this feature, then perhaps it was an extraneous feature in the first place!

I think this question stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the Everett interpretation...the idea of "many worlds" (a phrase I do not favor specifically because of this very misunderstanding!) evokes this imagery of an entirely new universe BURSTING forth dramatically upon the collapse of the wave function, and as an entirely new universe is "created," the amount of extent energy is literally doubled (or multiplied by many times more). Indeed, where does this energy come from?

What the Everett interpretation suggests is that in the same way you are comfortable with the function f(x)=y having (infinitely) many values (you don't HAVE TO choose an x, ie the function doesn't collapse), the wavefunction simply is what it is and doesn't collapse either. What we observe as the collapse of a function is simply an artifact of being a conscious being that can only observe one value of the of the wavefunction at any particular moment.

None of these unique values (observables) of the wave function can interact with each other (in the same way the value of x=2 doesn't "interact" with the value of x=8 for f(x)=y), so energy cannot be gathered or duplicated at any particular point of the wave function, so this energy creation/duplication is no issue.

It's an awfully important distinction for the purported zombie!

I see this comment getting downvoted, but I agree with the sentiment; it suffices to say that if there a compelling mathematical structure exists, there will be people studying it. I imagine most graph theorists are hardly interested in the applications of their field, they just happen to be studying a structure which has much more intuitive practical applications (social networks, molecules, etc).

I've never understood why alien bacteria are a perceived threat. Viruses and bacteria share the same genetic material as we do, and literally evolved to infect organisms of that ilk. I have always supposed that alien viruses would just be inert, and alien bacteria would rapidly die off in the inhospitable environment of an earth-organism's body.

Doesn't this just completely dodge/dismiss the original question?

If I asked how biology worked, you wouldn't say "Survivorship bias: if biology didn't work, you wouldn't be here to ask the question."