As it turns out you can't have strong socialist policies and also open borders.
6,082 karma · joined February 12, 2009
>the burden should always be on the ones who are stronger to accommodate those who are weaker.
Is this a universal principle? Does this come with any limits at all? A salient example that comes up often: classrooms tend to have a small handful of extremely disruptive students that ruin the experience for everyone else. The current thinking is to not suspend/expel these kids because they are disadvantaged or whatever. But in doing so the other kids suffer greatly, not to mention the teachers.
How do you manage different dimensions of strength/advantage? It is the weakest in society (women, children) that bear a disproportionate burden of allowing large amounts of immigration from third-world countries. Why are the rights of women and children secondary to the rights of immigrants?
A comically bad faith reading of what I said. Clearly no point in engaging.
This is just a bad faith misrepresentation of the context. Note the context of the OP is Swedish nationalism.
> You aren't "easily recognizing" anything, you are having a feeling about people different from you and trying to rationalize it afterwards.
It's not really that hard. Some traits off the top of my head: speaks English, values meritocracy and the rule of law, individualist over collectivist, ecumenical/egalitarian over sectarian, culturally Christian or downstream of it.
> If immigration was so obviously bad, do you think a nation of immigrants would be able to get to this point?
This point only makes sense if you assume immigrants are an undifferentiated lump. But of course this isn't true.
>The "homogenous countries" started 2 world wars, one of them to "preserve their culture, ethnicities, identities". Would this not support the worldview that immigration has net benefits?
Oversimplification to the point of bad faith
>Also, can you explain how ethnic cleansing preserves culture and identities?
Obviously a disingenuous question
This sentiment is just so utterly foreign to me that I can't comprehend how someone could rationally think this way. I mean, I'm a black man whose ancestors have lived in America since the slave ships, and I easily recognize that some people are more American than others. And Americans only have like 1% of the cultural and ethnic identity that most European nations have. Why are you blind to the importance of the deep historical roots that bind a nation together? Why do you think the very force (namely kinship ties) that has driven humanity forward for the last hundred thousand years has, in the blink of an eye, become irrelevant?
I have a few different answers here. None are rock solid. Lets take it as a given that planning requires a unified representation of all inputs to the planning apparatus. Now, going with the example from earlier: an organism touches a hot stove and recoils. We can imagine this behavior without any accompanying qualia. But to plan subsequent behavior around the hot stove, the damaging hotness must be represented in the unified representation in a way that intrinsically carries the semantics of negative valence. Phenomenal pain just is "semantics of negative valence featured in a unified representation". My claim is that this is a conceptual identity; you can't have one without the other. This gives the planning apparatus competence at engaging with signals of bodily damage.
Without intrinsic semantics/phenomenality all you have is a signal with no intrinsic meaning and some context to select behavior downstream of the signal. But planning in dynamic environments requires much more flexible signaling than this kind of static context can provide.
>AI systems weigh negative valence and execute long-term plans without any qualia.
AI systems are highly fragmented representations. It's why you can get them to contradict themselves in the same session, or even one sentence after another. They are not an exemplar of coherent behavior. There's also no negative valence in LLMs. At most they have a representation of good/bad and this spectrum influences the valence/quality/alignment in their behavior. But valence as such is external to the LLM.
>consider that there are many examples in which humans are able to perform very complex tasks in the absence of qualia. Consider, for instance, the phenomena of highway hypnosis, blindsight or sleepwalking - humans can do incredibly complicated things without qualia.
Complexity is relative. The complexity of tasks sans qualia are always starkly deficient compared to comparable tasks with qualia. A wide look at cognitive science demonstrates the inherent value of qualia to highly complex tasks or tasks executed over long timescales.
>This argument is circular. The original claim is that behaving coherently in a a complex environment requires consciousness. By shifting the goalposts...
The goalposts aren't shifted, I'm clarifying the target of the term behavior as there was clearly a disagreement in meaning.
>to say that only voluntary behaviors qualify, you are begging the question. The entire notion of "voluntary" implies conscious intent, so your argument has become "consciously willed behaviors require consciousness".
This misunderstands the debate. The philosophical issue of consciousness is how to explain consciousness given the in principle completeness of physical descriptions and their categorical distinction from phenomenal descriptions. In this context, voluntary behavior is just higher order/complex behavior, it is not taken as downstream of consciousness in principle. There is a parallel conversation in psychology/cognitive science where consciousness is largely understood as wakefulness, attention, reportability, intentionality, etc. In this context "consciousness" (in this restricted sense) is a pre-requisite of voluntary behavior. But that's neither here nor there with regards to the philosophical debate.
Yes, reflexive avoidance behavior doesn't require conscious experience. But as the environment of the organism gets more complex, reflexive avoidance behavior isn't sufficient for competence. For an agent in a complex environment, competent damage avoidance requires engaging with negative valence as a cognitive entity to be planned around and weighed against other interests. This requires unification and consciousness.
>Another counterargument is that our brains carry out lots of "coherent" functions "in the dark". Consider, for example, thermoregulation
This isn't an example of coherent behavior in the sense being used here. The issue is one of voluntary behavior being coherently executed as to achieve some goal without undermining itself.
>do you believe that a thermostat is conscious?
No. No self model, no consciousness.
A successful organism exhibits a high level of competence at reacting appropriately to environmental/sensory states. The "light's being on" is how the brain represents being situated in a world and the significant features therein. Representations within this gestalt are inherently meaningful. For example, phenomenal pain brings with it competence at protecting bodily integrity. The memory of pain becomes part of the explanatory narrative for the monitoring function that tracks progress towards goals ensuring coherent behavior (imagine being fearful of a stove but not knowing why). The contents of consciousness is the semantic engine that induces competent behavior over time on otherwise naive entities.
I've thought a lot about what is lacking in modern VLMs that preclude consciousness. In my view the difference is that their talk of "self" is a simulacrum of the real thing. Current models are feed forward and so self-talk is driven by some parameter that turns on when the network detects context that possibly references the model, and this parameter drives downstream self-talk. It's a very good simulacrum, but it is a far cry from a model with recurrent self-reference around which the inference process is organized. The richness of the self-model in a hypothetical recurrent network with capabilities of modern LMs is much greater than the parameter on/off representation in feed forward networks.
Absolutely! Inside one of the black boxes could be an audio device replaying a tape. The other could be a person thinking and responding. The massive lookup table construct people like to reference is just another kind of recorder, it takes every possible conversation that could happen in some finite sequence of characters and produces the precomputed continuation on demand. No one ever asks where those conversations came from. If God has to imagine them in his mind, conversing with the lookup table is just conversing with God.
Why do such systems need this gestalt? Why consciousness instead of everything happening in the dark? The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same goal. It's how behavior over time doesn't undermine its purpose. Fragmented, incoherent behavior does not serve self-preservation.
LLMs as they are currently constructed probably aren't conscious, but we are a hop skip and a jump away from ones that are.
There is a classical algorithm for every quantum algorithm if you're willing to waste a massive amount of space and time. There is a finite-state automata that can recognize any string some Turing machine can recognize. Yet we recognize these as distinct classes of computation. Mathematicians can get away with ignoring the tractability of finding an object with such and such properties. The rest of us can't.
Sure, there is a formal equivalence between LLMs and Markov chains, and this formal equivalence is useful for analysis. But this equivalence is not a constraint on the nature of the computations LLMs are doing. The formal equivalence does not mean that LLMs are "just predicting the next token". A probability distribution is a formal characterization of the statistical relationships between inputs and outputs. But this formalization does not undermine potentially further structure underlying the probability distribution (e.g. a deterministic mapping from inputs to outputs).
>if the transformer is reasoning, so is the hash map built from it.
Definitely not. "Formal" reasoning is making deductions based on the "form" or shape of some statement. In other words, transitioning from some token sequence to another sequence in virtue of the semantic structure of the token sequence (as opposed to its semantic content). Thus a necessary condition for reasoning is the ability to inspect the structure of the input rather than see it as a formless blob. Transformers can plausibly do this; lookup tables, Markov chains, etc necessarily cannot.
>For the record, "X is more expressive than Y" means "there exists at least one thing that Y cannot represent and X can".
Maybe expressive is the wrong word. But when a model has to wait for someone else to do the work then copy the answer, I call bullshit on it being (computationally) equivalent.
>but the same tokens in two different orders are two different lookup keys
This is necessarily true for Markov chains and not necessarily true for Transformers. Transformers learn invariance over certain kinds of semantically irrelevant transformations. The Markov chain simply has to learn each input variant independently, resulting in an explosion of state space and data requirements compared to the functionally equivalent transformer. Expressive power matters.
I really don't get people's love for saying X is "just" Y (it's just a Markov chain, it's just a Kernel method). It's a strange pathology to focus on the superficial similarity while downplaying the boost in expressive power from where the models diverge.
Nonsense. Markov chains treat the past context as a single unit, an N-tuple with no internal structure. LLMs leverage the internal structure of the context which allows a large class of generalization that Markov chains necessarily miss.
But we can simply note that this description applies to any machine learning algorithm. Yet LLMs are lightyears better than, say, Markov chains. What people are after is something that elucidates the features of LLMs that allow them to be so productive over what came before.
The point is that saying they're just "predicting the next token" is not at all explanatory nor providing insight. Saying the brain is just firing action potentials gives you no understanding about how the brain does what it does or what the space of its capabilities are. Similarly, predicting the next token tells you nothing about the capabilities of LLMs.