soloist11

I don't know what atoms and chemicals have to do with my argument but the substitutions you've made don't make sense and I would call it ill-typed. A composition of numbers is also a number but a composition of atoms is something else and not an atom so I didn't really follow the rest of your argument.

Computers have a formal theory and to say that a computer has intentions and can think would be equivalent to supplying a constructive proof (program) demonstrating conformance to a specification for thought and intention. These don't exist so from a constructive perspective it is valid to say that all claims of computers and software having intentions and thoughts are simply magical, confused, non-constructive, and ill-typed beliefs.

My point is that when people say computers and software can have intentions they're stating an unfounded and often confused belief about what computers are capable of as domains for arithmetic operations. Furthermore, the Curry-Howard correspondence establishes an equivalence between proofs in formal systems and computer programs. So I don't consider what the social media gurus are saying about algorithms and AI to be truthful/verifiable/valid because to argue that computers can think and have intentions is equivalent to providing a proof/program which shows that thinking and intentionality can be expressed as a statement in some formal/symbolic/logical system and then implemented on a digital computer.

None of the people who claimed that LLMs were a hop and skip away from achieving human level intelligence ever made any formal statements in a logically verifiable syntax. They simply handwaved and made vague gestures about emergence which were essentially magical beliefs about computers and software.

What you have outlined about minds and patterns seems like what Leibniz and Spinoza wrote about but I don't really know much about their writing so I don't really think what you're saying is controversial. Many people would agree that there must be irreducible properties of reality that human minds are not capable of understanding in full generality.

People like that are often schizophrenic.

> Personally, I'm a subjective idealist, who believes that intentionality is an irreducible aspect of reality. So no, I don't believe in physical reductionism, nor do I believe that algorithms can have intentions by way of physical reductionism.

I don't follow. If intentionality is an irreducible aspect of reality then algorithms as part of reality must also have it as realizable objects with their own irreducible aspects.

I don't think algorithms can have intentionality because algorithms are arithmetic operations implemented on digital computers and arithmetic operations, no matter how they are stacked, do not have intentions. It's a category error to attribute intentions to algorithms because if an algorithm has intentions then so must numbers and arithmetic operations of numbers. As compositions of elementary operations there must be some element in the composite with intentionality or the claim is that it is an emergent property in which case it becomes another unfounded belief in some magical quality of computers and I don't think computers have any magical qualities other than domains for digital circuits and numeric computation.

It's a vacuous statement. All physical systems are computers because the logic of computationalism is circular. Everything is a computer so there is no meaning in the statement and the danger is that as more people start believing in the circular logic of computationalism they'll be more willing to delegate their cognition to computers even in cases where they should not, e.g. social media and algorithmic feeds designed to increase engagement and profits for advertisers.

Lying is intentional, algorithms and computers do not have intentions. People can lie, computers can only execute their programmed instructions. Much of AI discourse is extremely confusing and confused because people keep attributing needs and intentions to computers and algorithms.

The social media gurus don't help with these issues by claiming that non-intentional objects are going to cause humanity's demise when there are much more pertinent issues to be concerned about like global warming, corporate malfeasance, and the general plundering of the biosphere. Algorithms that lie are not even in the top 100 list of things that people should be concerned about.

Everything computes in a general sense, even atoms. But one could just as easily say everything is "just" mathematics because all models of reality are mathematical. In general I think it's important to be wary of totalizing ontologies and metaphysics of reality that reduce everything to a single universal substance (monadology) or activity like computation (computationalism).

All I've seen are pump and dump schemes. What useful strands are you talking about?

What you are suggesting would require coordination on a scale that's almost unimaginable. The effort and coordination required would be similar to wartime mobilization.

The theory of charges has Z/2 symmetry.

So it sounds like LLMs will not achieve AGI.

It's impossible to take these people seriously. They have turned themselves into clowns.

This is a great opportunity to present my own company which is also working on developing not just a super intelligence but an ultra genius intelligence with a patented and trademarked architecture called the panoptic computronium cathedral™. We are so focused on development that we didn't even bother setting up an announcement page because it would have taken time away from the most important technical problem of our time and every nanosecond counts when working on such an important task. My days are structured around writing code and developing the necessary practices and rituals for the coming technological god which will be implemented with mathematics on GPUs. If anyone wants to work on the development of this god then I will post a job announcement at some point and spell out the requirements for what it takes to work at my company.

What's the failure rate of GPUs over a 10 year period?

Category theory is being applied in all sorts of domains and recently has been making some inroads in ML as well, e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.07032

I had a similar thought the other day about transistors, computers, and data centers. There is a qualitative difference between one transistor and a lot of them packed together into a CPU or GPU but there is no qualitative difference between a computer and a data center other than the speed at which parallel computation can happen. So I don't really understand what threshold AGI is supposed to happen at if it hasn't already happened at AWS and Google data centers.