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kbrkbr

576 karma · joined April 23, 2022

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kbrkbr··on Consciousness likely not unique to earthlings, paper says
I don't think there is a general consensus. In the 2020 Philpaper Survey roughly half of surveyed philosophers lean towards physicalism, roughly a third to non-physicalism, and the rest to something else.

https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all

kbrkbr··on Consciousness likely not unique to earthlings, paper says
Probably best to read the paper. I personally don't find it very convincing, because of the many speculative premises. But that is not a refutation.

Here it is:

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SubstrateFle...

kbrkbr··on What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
That's one opinion out of many. Some say so, some say so.

But you did not answer my question on how we talk about ethics in terms of actions and brain scans.

The devil is in the details, and when you try to express why it is bad to kill people over a small argument in terms of actions etc., then you might find that this is not as simple as you insinuated.

"There is no 'ethic' in nature" is also easy said in the armchair, but becomes a lifeless abstraction pretty fast when confronted with real human suffering and tears.

kbrkbr··on What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
I disagree. You can sense something using a thermostat. The thermostat is just a tool based on a functional relationship. "Sensing" has no literal, unequivocal use here.
kbrkbr··on What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
That already presupposes a very narrow idea of what's meaningful that is quite far away from everyday life, where we talk about and evaluate subjective experiences all the time.

How do we talk about ethics in terms of actions, reactions abd brain scans please? That looks like an uncovered check.

In what sense are they a shorthand for actions in the world?

kbrkbr··on What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
> "brain can sense the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions"

vs

> "implements a person, or point of view, or subjectively aware entity that supervises experiencing"

I think you are making a distinction without a difference. "Sense the world", "act", "plan" - that can only figuratively attributed to "the brain".

The concepts are already tied to what is named in the second opposition.

kbrkbr··on Dopamine Fracking
But what happens here, let me point that out for completeness, is not a dark conspiracy. At least not on this level.

People go to the grocery store and buy the cheapest thing that does the trick, probably because they can't afford something else. Bills want to be payed.

kbrkbr··on Let's celebrate work that is 100% human-made
What is dishonest about asking for clarification of submission criteria that are utterly unclear?

> Help us to signify and share projects done by humans (not AI).

Here is nothing about GenAI specifically.

Who else could be asked if not the ones that set up this collection?

kbrkbr··on Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
But isn't on the other hand the current AGI problem posed similar to the question "Are you not afraid that genetic engineers grow babies with bigger and bigger brains?" We don't know if that won't break down somewhere. Looking at different examples it probably will. Scaling things infinitely is a pure math only concept it seems.
kbrkbr··on Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
From my point of view we have simply no idea what a infinitely smart AGI is and how to build it.

How would it make the combinatorial explosion in state space search go away, to pick one example?

And if it doesn't, is it then an infinitely smart AGI?

The concept seems to assume all problems humans struggle with can be solved. The halting problem is one witness that this is probably not true.

kbrkbr··on It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
> if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love

There are two concepts of "may" at play here:

"may" in the sense of "nothing keeps us from imagining this", and in the sense of "we know how it works, and it can happen".

A car may crash, and glass may break are the latter.

But for the former we actually have no idea how this could work. That is what makes it a hard philosophical problem. That kind of "may" is cheap.

kbrkbr··on It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
But does the robot identify them in your view, or in its view?

If in your view, then you created a tool for yourself. Like a Geiger counter.

If in its view, ask it what it thinks about consciousness and qualia.

kbrkbr··on AI didn't delete your database, you did
I think they are not actually intelligent. Fix all random seeds and other sources of randomness, and try the same prompt twice, and check how intelligent that looks, as a first approximation.

On a more technical level very serious people have voiced doubts, for example Richard Sutton in an interview with Dwarkash Patel [1].

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=21EYKqUsPfg&pp=ygUnZmF0aGVyIG9...

kbrkbr··on AI didn't delete your database, you did
An LLM generates plausible text token by token. It is at its core a deterministic function with some randomization and some clever tricks to make it look like an agent dialoguing or reasoning.

Plausible text sometimes is right, sometimes not.

Humans have a world model, a model of what happens. LLMs have a model of what humans would plausibly say.

The only good guardrail seems human-in-the-loop.

kbrkbr··on AI didn't delete your database, you did
That.

"And it confessed in writing" - no, it created probabilistically token after token based on the context without any other access to what happened.

LLMs can't explain themselves in the manner relevant here, much less confess.

kbrkbr··on Security through obscurity is not bad
> Obscurity is not security.

So ASLR [1] is not a security control? I guess you are pretty alone with this opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomiza...

kbrkbr··on When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
"The universe is fundamentally just a complicated clockwork"

Unknown Ptolemy disciple

kbrkbr··on New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming
Not if you are an aphantast.
kbrkbr··on What can we gain by losing infinity?
You say that as if we knew the number of atoms in the universe, or its size, age, and "duration".

But none of this can be observed either, which in my book makes your argument a bit weak.

Your "universal reality" is a construction relying in big parts on the mathematics relying on infinity as a concept.

kbrkbr··on What can we gain by losing infinity?
Can you observe 2.34 x 10^456789 apples?
kbrkbr··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
Yeah. Cargo-cult engineering meets the Streisand effect.
kbrkbr··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
The AI does nothing the like. It predicts tokens. That's it.

Describing the tech in anthropomorphic terms does not make it a person.

kbrkbr··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
If that is your hope you are probably in for a rude awakening. Left brained/right brained is a wooden exaggeration according to more recent research [1].

[1] e.g. https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/left-brain-vs-right-brain-t...

kbrkbr··on Why meaningful days look like nothing while you are living them
I think we are discussing the wrong problem here. I have no solution to offer, but I think the problem is not so much generated content, but the surroundings in which it can thrive and become the content you see everywhere.

If we hadn't removed the gatekeepers everywhere (and I know there are problems with them, too), then all that technology would not be able to do much harm.

It might also have to do with incentives. The incentives in our economy are not to help and advance society, the invisible hand nonwithstanding.

kbrkbr··on OpenAI isn't just buying a podcast – it's buying influence
I find not only the content of this article interesting, but also the form. It seems written by ChatGPT, starting from the headline with its "Not just A, but B"-topos and the for cnn completely untypical m-dash.
kbrkbr··on Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer
Oh my goodness, yes. And how often their role assumption does not work!

I need privileges to do thing A, so I assume the role, and even though the role is shown as active, the buttons are still greyed out. Sometimes it works after 10 minutes and 7x F5, most often however I do a complete relogin with MFA in an incognito window. Not distracting at all, and even that does not work sometimes.

kbrkbr··on Is playing music good for the brain?
For me too. The headline question however was not "Is playing music good for people?", but "Is playing music good for the brain?"

That's not nearly as easy to answer.

kbrkbr··on US to deploy additional troops to the Middle East, officials say
Sorry, but the hospital ship is in Greenland, providing free health care to people who already have public healthcare.

https://apnews.com/article/greenland-trump-denmark-us-b2624b...

kbrkbr··on Cursor Composer 2 is just Kimi K2.5 with RL
Why not?
kbrkbr··on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story
That's why I was asking for a rationale. The devil is in the details. Otherwise motorcycling will be next, alcohol, excessive gaming, etc. etc.
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