deltaonefour

See. This is another problem with philosophers. Did I say opposed to anything? You just pulled that notion out of your ass and assumed I don't understand science. You guys use big words but in actuality you make a lot of random irrational assumptions.

You cannot prove anything in science and therefore reality itself. This is a well known property of science and you can explain this property without utilizing pretentious vocabulary and concepts like "patterns." You already know what science is, so we won't get into it.

Even though science can't prove anything, it's still a valiant attempt at proof. Can't say the same for philosophy.

The basis is logic. Certain attributes of philosophy make it ludicrous. Additionally the way philosophers formulate arguments brings the whole field into question.

Philosophy is just a vocabulary word. It is a arbitrary word with a definition that is so general literally every academic field or school of thought on the face of the earth can fall under it's purview however ludicrous or legitimate. Literally, any form of deep thought or complicated complex is "philosophy." It's the most pointless and pretentious category to have ever existed.

This is the main problem with it. It's like a man who won 7 nobel prizes but is a child rapist at the same time.

There's a thing called philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. Every single thing on the face of the earth falls into the purview of philosophy. It's harder to see but the field is just as ludicrous as religion itself.

No doubt some of it's ideas are mind bending and complex. But that attribute is independent of legitimacy which philosophy lacks.

>So the assertion is, that you can achieve identical computational power to a neuron with a much simpler model.

I use the word "Must" as in "highly likely" if my words didn't convey the probability then my bad, but I assure you now that my intent is conveying a probability.

> There is insufficient evidence to conclude this.

There is enough evidence to show it is sufficiently high probability for consideration.

>If you said "I believe there might be" or "it's possible that" I would not have taken issue with it,

I did say this MULTIPLE times in subsequent responses. I am telling you now that is 100% what I meant. Now that we're clear, we are in agreement. This conversation is over.

1. Biology can produce things which are incredibly smart and efficient. It can also produce things which are dumb and inefficient.

By your second sentence it follows that such structures aren't a leap of faith. It is very possible.

2. Human intellect and consciousness is one of the most complex nuanced phenomena we are aware of in the universe.

complexity isn't indicative of efficiency.

3. The human brain is one of the most complex things we know about in the universe.

Same as above.

4. We know very many things about how the brain processes information. We know structure and function are heavily intertwined. We know that the brain uses virtually every aspect of neural biology, from macro structures down to intracellular mechanisms, to facilitate information processing.

But we don't know whether the entire structure is efficient.

>That is all evidence to support the belief that the complexity of the brain is meaningful with respect to the production of human intelligence.

But it is not evidence supporting the thesis that the brain being inefficient is a leap of faith.

>It seems that you want to believe that most of that complexity is not meaningful, and your only evidence is "you had a feeling" and "biology is inefficient sometimes".

The feeling has been rationalized. I explained the logic, it is now backed up. The criterion here is not absolutist. The criterion is just stating whether or not such a scenario is likely. IS it a leap of faith or is it not? I've sufficiently proved that the brain being inefficient is clearly NOT a leap of faith.

>If you want to prove it's not a leap of faith, you have to present examples in which the information processing of the brain is actually inefficient, or how it can be replaced by a much simpler system. Otherwise it's all just a guess.

Easy we have many ML models that already beat humans at certain tasks.. Those models use much less neurons then the entire brain itself and follows a much simpler model. See spam filters. It shows that a simpler model is already possible for certain aspects of intelligence.

I disagree with you. I believe I've shown enough evidence to move the probability out of "leap of faith" territory. I just threw in the example up above because you requested it.

My take is it has absolutely nothing to do with why I think philosophy is complete garbage.

Think of it this way. If let's say a cultist religious sect believes in science and contributes to science then at the same time this cultist religion also believes that the universe is a bubble sitting on the nose of a cosmic hippo.... Then despite the good science, the entire cultist religion is still utter bullshit.

That being said it is still highly questionable how large and how meaningful philosophies contributions are to math and science. Historically they may have been one in the same field, but today there is clearly a category error.

I would say philosophy contributed nothing to math and science. It only seems that way. What's actually going on is if a philosopher contributes something to math, he is actually doing mathematics, he is not doing philosophy. Same with science. If a philosopher reshapes science he is doing science, he is not doing philosophy. Because philosophy is a bullshit category that literally encompasses everything under the sun I dismiss it entirely.

I didn't read the article or listen to the audio you sent me. I may if I have time later on in the week. But in my opinion, that is an article on math, not philosophy. Nothing is philosophy it's all bullshit to me.

Also please don't tell me my argument here is philosophical and therefore contradictory. Absolutely please don't sink that low.

Not talking about agi. I am doing proof by contradiction. Yes current models of ML are primitive but the reasoning attributes you brought up have been reproduced in ML.. albeit in a primitive way.

It is still proof by contradiction, what you say is categorically not true.

>This is a massive leap of faith and I don't know how you can possibly argue otherwise!

YOu need to explain how it's a leap of faith. That means low probability. So you need to explain the sample space and the numerator.

For me I explained. The sample space is ALL models for physical processes. Given that most of these models are elegant with efficient and simple primitives. It follows via probability that modeling intelligence by probability will most likely be the same way. See what I did there? I actually logically explained why it's not a leap of faith.

>Is it? I thought you said your brain was just an inefficient accidental mess? Why would you trust it?

First off being inefficient is different from being correct. The brain can be correct AND inefficient at the same time. It can also be correct about some things and incorrect about other things. This is obvious if you look at the world around you. People are often wrong. They are also often right. Evidence is everywhere and obvious.

> But biology has also produced systems which are far beyond what we've been able to engineer.

Sure it does. But I talk in terms of probabilities and possibilities. I am addressing the "leap of faith." I am saying because such and such is extremely possible... my statement is not a leap of faith. In this case I am saying inefficiencies are very possible. Thus my statement is highly realistic.

I never made a statement about anything absolute. I never said that absolutely the brain is inefficient. I simply said my statement is categorically not a leap of faith because it is VERY possible. And i provided logical evidence supporting this.

It's not a massive leap of faith at all. Two reasons:

   1. We know how natural selection works, and it clearly often produces unnecessary parts for many things.
   2. There is physical evidence of evolution creating unnecessary and inefficient parts and components. 

1. Natural selection works by randomly creating a fixed set of features both bad and good and then selecting the best one. Thus the features are bounded by randomness. If the random mutation doesn't create the most efficient part then The only thing that can be selected is an inefficient part. This follows that it is VERY possible that many processing modalities of the brain CAN be unnecessary. It is NOT a massive leap of faith.

Additionally the selection criteria is simply survival. Not efficiency. As long as the "processing modalities" in the brain aid in survival the selection process does not interfere. Thus all kinds of arbitrary processing modalities both efficient and inefficient can occur so long as the modalities do not detriment survival. Why does stupidity evolve? Well stupid people aren't smart enough to create nuclear bombs to kill themselves. Thus stupidity is a possible trait, similar to how inefficient and unnecessary "processing modalities" are possible, mayhap being stupider aided in survival or didn't contribute anything at all. Just looking at people responding to me on HN, alot of them are pretty stupid (physical evidence). Not pointing out which one, certainly not you.

2. There is (alot) of physical evidence of the above. For example, the wheel is a very efficient way of traveling yet no animal has evolved some form of a wheel. The reasoning is actually more complicated about why a wheel hasn't evolved but the general idea I described above still applies... both natural selection and random mutation were not able to generate the series of intermediate traits required to form wheels.

Thus from the reasoning above it is very possible for the brain to evolve with unnecessary and inefficient "processing modalities".

Yes this idea did begin as a gut feeling. Subconscious processing is often times correct and logical. It is unwise to constantly mistrust it. It is always wise to analyze these "feelings" in attempt to break down the logic behind why it occurred.

What my self analysis tells me is this: Given the fact that MANY of our mathematical models for physical processes involve elegant and straightforward primitives it follows that intelligence will also VERY likely be such a model as well and very likely much more simplified then the human brain.

I hate philosophers and I think the entire field is illegitimate. Not to be insulting to you personally. It's just my opinion of the field in general. I have nothing against you.

I look at your entire field with very high disdain. To me it one of the most inconsistent, illogical and irrational and useless academic fields in existence. Useless is ok. Irrational is not ok.

I once gave a deep, complex and logical argument to a philosopher about why i thought philosophy was complete bullshit. He laughed at me and said my argument included elements of philosophy, and since my argument contained philosophy I was basically proving philosophy to be not bullshit. Seriously, if you cannot comprehend how stupid that argument is, then it's fine. I actually have nothing more to say on the matter. Agree to disagree.

That's a large deviation. But I can see that as a realistic possibility.

Likely because people are unfamiliar with what you're talking about. I never heard of this.

The example conversation given in the article is long and complex and there are no obvious surface level flaws. If there are contradictions and flaws they are not noticeable but even if these flaws existed I would argue that such contradictory things also exist in human conversations and human thought. Humans by nature are contradictory and the conversation in the article shows no extraordinary deviation.

If you inspected real conversations between two sentient beings you can ALSO find equivalent flaws is the short of my argument. The given conversation is more or less indistinguishable. Contradictions found through scrutiny is far past the bar of even human intelligence.

Additionally the conversation is complex enough such that if there were identity related questions that can break it, the complexity of the AIs answers for other topics makes it look like such flaws can actually be mended with additional training. It is a very realistic possibility given the jump from earlier AIs.

>We can't perfectly model a physical system (a quantum system, at some level) with classical computing. We'd need a quantum computer,

No we don't. The probability wave can be simulated. Decoherence cannot be simulated unless we have a true random number generator. But this is a simulation. We can perfectly simulate, but not perfectly recreate. In fact even with entropy for random number generation derived directly from quantum foam you cannot deterministically recreate the behavior of any atom. You can only "simulate." because the nature of the math equation involves randomness and perfectly imitating randomness involves luck.

>The question is what it's "pointing" from. And, of course, we have no idea; we can't even prove that this is the case.

Your statement is also highly unlikely. It's like saying the universe was created by a turtle. You can't prove or disprove it. But it can still be considered absurd.

>One is a perfect substitute for (or copy of) the other. Consciousness likely violates this. We believe (although, without proof) that a perfect physical copy of a person would harbor a separate consciousness and that they would in fact diverge.

The word consciousness is loaded, poorly defined and complicated. It is a language phenomenon that tricks people into thinking consciousness is some profound concept. It is not. It is simply a series of thousands of attributes related to intelligence such that if you have all the attributes you are conscious if you are missing one attribute, you are not conscious and nobody fully agrees on what all these attributes are. That's it. So they argue about it thinking it's some philosophical debate when they're really just arguing about vocabulary and trying to map out the definition of a loaded word.

It's a big trick.

A copy of consciousness would be like a copy of a computer. There's nothing magical about it. Would the copy of a computer behave exactly identical to the original? Maybe not "exactly" but they would be similar... but there is nothing profound about that.

You're getting hung up on the pointer. So if I copy a computer will the "pointer" suddenly be confused? No. It won't be because there is no "pointer" to a computer just like consciousness is NOT a pointer. It's actually shows bias the fact that you have this notion of a pointer. Think about it. If I copy a rock what happens to the pointer of the rock? When I copy a printout what happens to the pointer to that printout? Why does consciousness arbitrarily out of nowhere suddenly have a possibility of a pointer? What is it that makes you think this unprovable concept of a pointer applies just to consciousness but you don't really think about it for other mundane forms copying?

It's bias for the word "consciousness" likely caused by the "big trick" I talked about above.

You are a physical being you are not a pointer pointing to a physical being... the brain and your soul are one in the same thing. This makes sense because this is how we assume all OTHER things in the universe work. There's no pointer pointing to them so why is there suddenly a pointer to consciousness? You said it's unprovable, but to even entertain this possibility is like entertaining the possibility the universe was created by a turtle. Possible... but unprovable.

Anterograde amnesia is a condition where a human has lost his/her ability form new memories, aka learn. They can't remember anything past 3 minutes*.

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

These people are clearly still sentient.

There is still some form of memory there but the overall mechanism is largely gone.

Not true. It's called unsupervised learning.

>Whether we are more than computers is almost a religious question (I believe yes, but I can't prove it).

This is actually not true and can logically be shown. We can model atoms with computation. Thus if all matter including the brain is made up of atoms then it can be simulated via a math equation.

It's a logical conclusion. The answer is yes it's possible.

We have a math function that defines atoms. Atoms can be simulated. If all things are made of atoms then all things can be simulated. If all things can be simulated then YES all things can be defined by a mathematical function including the brain.

In fact, it's been done already. Researchers have already simulated part of a mouse brain. The reason why they can't do humans is only scale. Humans have far more neurons so it's harder to do a brute force copy and the computing budget is more larger. See the Blue brain project, it's actually old news.

https://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/

I'm not converting him. I'm just talking about the classification of the word religion and the dichotomy between science and religion.

Whether a religion is True or real is not a topic I touched upon.

No. I'm not. I'm saying there must be simple model primitives that don't involve electromagnetic fields and other strange communication channels that arise out of evolution that can be used to model intelligence.

We aren't fully clear about what this model of intelligence is, but I'm instinctively sure that it won't have to involve anything as complex as biological neurons that communicate through thousands of different pathways and electromagnetic side effects too.

I think he's saying something along the lines that intelligence is mutually exclusive to learning.

If we create a neural net that has the equivalent knowledge and intelligence of a human 5 year old but that neural net learns slower and was produced on 10 trillion pieces of data then we STILL have created a sentient AI despite the fact the learning algorithm is shit.

There must be something "turing complete-ish" about neural nets. As in although the primitive element of a human neuron is complex, you can achieve identical computational power with a much simpler model.

>But this isn't fully accurate - the premise of religion is to believe in /certain/ things without evidence, specifically unknowable things.

No. This is CATEGORICALLY WRONG. There are tons of instances of religion making claims on Knowable things. You make the statement yourself about clay and adam and eve. There is ZERO dichotomy between knowable and unknowable things in the category of religion.

What you're talking about is how some people try to reconcile the contradiction. They try to believe a subset of things Science makes no claim about. However THIS IS NOT the premise of RELIGION, it is your personal premise. The overwhelming majority of people and religions believe in things that contradict with things that are knowable.

Additionally EVEN if you choose to define religion as the belief of things that are unknowable (which is not true) there's STILL a problem with contradiction. The contradiction is different religions make different claims that conflict with each other. Because that "domain" has no evidence the claims are random and arbitrary and easily contradict each other.

>Science and religion deal in different domains, and it is quite possible to hold a faith-based religion while fully subscribing to evidence based science.

No it is the SAME domain. The domain is reality as we know it. Again this is categorically wrong. You may personally try to reconcile the contradiction by adjusting your domain and definitions but the global definition of religion and science as we know it operate on the domain of ALL of reality.

>A contradiction only arises if the religion makes doctrinal claims about scientific matters - for example, there are those who believe that the Earth is 4000 years old.

See. You state there is a contradiction above, at the same time you claim that there isn't one as if there's two definitions of religion. Your personal definition and a global definition. If the above applies to the definition of religion, then none of your claims are true.

>However, belief in a deity whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means that by definition the pursuit of science is compatible with religion.

You have to also realize that what is unknowable is a MOVING target. Many people have held your philosophy of merging science and religion be dividing reality into two subsets of knowable things and unknowable things. Then they make absolute statements on things that are unknowable like the earth is the center of the solar system. See the problem here? At one point in time the centrality of the solar system was a thing that was just as mysterious as the nature of god.

When science advanced and the unknowable becomes known. The religion changes. It makes an absolute statement then it renegs that statement. If religion is suppose to make ABSOLUTE claims about realiy, then the fact that science will constantly cause religion to reneg those ABSOLUTE claims displays a fundamental incompatibility.

One of the last questions about reality is whether their is a deity. It is only currently unknowable, but may be knowable in the future.

One thing I've noticed as that people of your type still believe in some sort of soul or afterlife. This sort of thing is actually knowable and already contradicted by science and basic logic.

You are going off topic. I am simply addressing your claim that the universe is made up of simple rules and saying it's NOT TRUE. I am ignoring the rest of your claims.

I am saying THAT specific claim is incorrect.

Whether it's possible to simulate human intelligence on a computer, it is certainly a viable possibility. I never made a statement agreeing or disagreeing with this. I basically agree so I didn't address THAT part of your claim.

There's actually more compelling evidence for your statement. The IBM blue brain project already did this with part of the rat brain. All this stuff is nothing new though, so it was uninteresting to me. I only addressed the part of your statement that is CATEGORICALLY WRONG.

It's harder to see but you're the one being irrational here. First off I'm not claiming this evidence is definitive, it is only convincing and compelling. Anyway, lets examine your claim:

>It's a system designed to mimic the external behavior of humans, and it's being prompted in ways that elicit the desired responses. The superstitious responses some people have to this are predictable, but not rational.

Your claim is, given a conversation thread that appears to be between two sentient beings your claim is that one of these beings is not sentient and is only imitating sentience in a way that is indistinguishable from actual sentience.

This is an actual possibility. What you say may be true. The irrationality occurs because this claim is possible for ALL possible conversation threads here on HN.

The conversation between the chatbot is indistinguishable from an actual conversation between two humans YET with no additional evidence you are able to claim that the chatbot is imitating sentience. You can say the same thing for all conversations here on HN. Yet you only make that claim exclusively for the chatbot conversation without additional evidence. Making new claims with no additional evidence is irrational.

That being said MY claim is that the evidence presented by this person is convincing and compelling but not definitive. The rationality here is actually really straightforward.

  1. All previous evidence of conversations with AI were significantly less complex. 
  2. All previous evidence of conversations with AI showed OBVIOUS signs of not being sentience.

Thus it is rational to say that the evidence is convincing and compelling because the CURRENT evidence is BETTER then PREVIOUS evidence. Additionally, there is NO EVIDENCE against sentience here, because we cannot differentiate between something that is actually sentient or perfectly imitating sentience.

I'm going by your definition and example of simulation.

The answer to your question is that it takes a super computer to simulate 5 atoms interacting with each other. And the simulation won't be real time either.

So reality is not "simple" enough to be simulated accurately.

The simulations that do exist are gross simplifications called models and in no way accurate to what's really going on. Those models are usually application specific and are only relatively accurate within that scope.

You can make an argument that human intelligence can be simulated by a application specific model, however your statement of the universe being axiomatically premised in simple rules is categorically wrong.

It is. Religion is faith based. Science is evidence based. They are opposites. But people can be contradictory. They can believe both are the same without realizing it. You are such a person.

The premise of religion is to believe in things without evidence. Science is more complex, but at a simple level you can say the premise of science is to believe things that have strong evidence. Opposites. Everyone knows this on an intuitive level. Let us assume for arguments sake that religions are all true.

Let's take Christianity for example. If Christianity was evidence based and very likely to be true... Why isn't Christianity called a science?

Why isn't biology called a religion? What is the fundamental difference in categorization if both biology and Christianity (or any other religion you want to put in place of Christianity) are real concepts?

What is it in our subconscious that is causing us to categorize some things as science and other things as religion when both are true and real aspects of reality? Why does this categorization exist? If physics is true and biology is true and Christianity is true, how come only Christianity falls into the religion categorization and physics and biology fall into science?

The answer is trivial. It is because on some level all humans, including you know that religion is "less true" then science. You can see the difference. You know that mythological beliefs like walking on water or coming back from the dead are on Shakey less evidence based grounds.

Everything in science has a high bar for verification. We trust it because it lets our engines run and our planes fly, and every human knows that religious claims have a much lower bar and are less trust worthy.

Again my claim is that the fact that you can categorize aspects of the world as either religion or science, it shows that at a subconscious level you are aware of this dichotomy even when you believe both science and religion are real.

So what I'm saying is you already know that science and religion are contradictory. But your surface level beliefs and behavior are masking this subconciouse awareness.

Other way around.

Consciousness is a loaded word. It tricks you into thinking that there's some profound concept here. There isn't.

When you contemplate consciousness you're not contemplating about anything profound. You're actually just contemplating vocabulary and how to map out the exact definition of the word "consciousness"

Really all it is, is just studying a collection of arbitrary intellectual attributes that we're not clear about which attributes are encompassed in the word "consciousness." Thinking about it results in just a large categorization problem of stating axioms like: " oh consciousness must include the ability to be sad" and other random attribute selection stuff.

It is a language phenomenon not a philosophical phenomenon. Don't fall for the trap. It is similar to the question what is "life." Well "life" is also another loaded word.

>the universe itself operates on mostly simple rules

It does not. The rules are very complex. Schrodinger's equation is incredibly hard to solve. And we don't even know all the rules or if our current model of the rules is correct.

Science is at odds with religion anyway. The two things are fundamental opposites.

You can set moral standards to not discriminate. But when you judge the situation dispassionately without polluting the logic with "morals" the discrimination makes factual sense. Religion is the opposite of science.