WHAT is going on with dropbox's designs lately? They are almost painful to use.
Here's another example: https://i.imgur.com/Y4JLsmU.png
The down arrow means "download", so the side arrow must mean...."sideload"?
541 karma · joined January 27, 2016
Here's another example: https://i.imgur.com/Y4JLsmU.png
The down arrow means "download", so the side arrow must mean...."sideload"?
I don't think there is a shortcoming in your knowledge. Your metaphysics intuition is correctly tuned: simulations cannot feel.
>We create a physics simulation of a human brain. Can the brain write a novel? Answer questions about what it's like to perceive the color red? This is just a yes or no question.
GPT-3 can do both of these things. Is it conscious? If you need a direct answer, it is yes. But when we reword your second question as "can a simulated brain experience the color red?" the answer becomes more clear; the simulation can identify a wavelength and know it is called "red". But the experiential part is akin to explaining color to a blind person.
A simulated brain could identify molecular patterns of cocoa and sugar, but can it know what it is like to taste chocolate? Think about what it means to taste chocolate. Is it purely quantitative, like the balance of ingredients, or is there something else going on that is qualitative? Something abstract, something with meaning, something more close to the metal? We can probably agree that it feels like there is. What we are describing is subjectivity — your private conscious inner life. I suggest it is this that is fundamental and cannot be simulated. This is the layer where experience "happens". From this layer emerges meta-consciousness.
Here is an article by Bernardo Kastrup on meta-consciousness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590537/
Imagine you are programming an AI simulation. You could train a detector to associate a certain wavelength with a certain color. When shown a red light, the AI could say "that is red", because it correctly identified the wavelength. But it would never know what it feels like to see red, right? This is similar to how a blind person cannot know what it feels like to see red, but they can intellectually understand that it is an oscillation of 4.3*10^14 cycles per second.
A different example: you could train an AI to recognize 10,000 songs. It would listen to the frequencies and patterns, and make an identification.
In both of these cases, we have quantity as the input and output.
If after training, you asked the AI to identify the first song it was trained on, would the AI experience nostalgia? Would there be a way the AI "feels" about the song? We can probably both agree that the answer would be no. For the same reasons, the answer to your question is also no.
(edited for clarity)
Their operation would be perfectly compatible with the known laws of physics. But their operation is _not_ thinking itself, it's what thinking looks like when observed across a dissociative boundary. If I am sad, and you look at my face and see tears, you would never think that the tears were my sadness itself; they are a representation, an image, of the sadness. Tears are what sadness looks like from across that boundary. I experience sadness from a first-person perspective, you see my tears from a second-person perspective, across a dissociative boundary. So, you can measure electrical activity in your brain when you are thinking thoughts, but that activity is not your thoughts, in the same way that flames are the image of fire but they are not fire itself. Neuronal activity is the image of thought, it is what your thoughts look like from across a dissociative boundary.
>the answers exist and are for the most part known
I deeply disagree with this. I am not afraid of doing some reading, but I challenge you to find a single study that demonstrates how a certain combination of neurons firing leads to the experience of tasting vanilla.
So, instead of the physicalist paradigm of
Physics -> Chemistry -> Biology -> Psychology -> Consciousness
it is the idealist paradigm of
Consciousness -> Physics -> Chemistry -> Biology -> Psychology
Bernardo Kastrup on phenomenal consciousness:
>Our phenomenal consciousness is eminently qualitative, not quantitative. There is something it feels like to see the colour red, which is not captured by merely noting the frequency of red light. If we were to tell Helen Keller that red is an oscillation of approximately 4.3^1014 cycles per second, she would still not know what it feels like to see red. Analogously, what it feels like to listen to a Vivaldi sonata cannot be conveyed to a person born deaf, even if we show to the person the sonata’s complete power spectrum. Experiences are felt qualities — which philosophers and neuroscientists call ‘qualia’ — not fully describable by abstract quantities.
>Some genius comes around with a computer that given the necessary input, provides the solution...but now they do know that it's computable.
Can you give me a concrete example of input/output and how we would validate any output? You are suggesting the that the brain is the program, the physical world is the necessary input, and consciousness is the output (correct me if I'm wrong). But if I wrote a program to make a perfectly accurate simulation of a kidney, would you expect it to pee on my desk? Of course you wouldn't, so I'm not sure why we would expect that of the brain and consciousness.
Going back to your example, which I like, even if we had access to the code, the code is not the actual reality. It is an abstraction. We can dig through the code all we want, but we will never reach electricity and transistors, the true reality of the program. I think this is analogous to our own reality, where we can dig into spacetime at smaller and smaller distances, but never find "true reality". A hint that this is the case is the lack of operational meaning to distances < 10^-33cm and times < 10^43 sec (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz-Ve_1LX8w); the amount of energy required to probe those sizes creates a black hole. So something </i>must* be underlying spacetime. I think that something is phenomenal consciousness, mind-at-large, pure subjectivity, call it what you like. Spacetime is the source code, and phenomenal consciousness is the electricity and transistors.
(Also just to reiterate, my HN account is rate limited, so I may not be able to reply in a timely manner to any subsequent comments).
What kind of complex computation simulates the subjective experiences of wet, warm, and mushy?
EDIT: my account appears to be rate limited, so i am unable to post a reply until idk when....
By "subjective" I am referring to my conscious inner life, that there is something it is like to be me. I am an experiencer because I can experience things. My experiences are subjective and qualitative.
When I see something red, there actually is no "red" in reality, there is just an electromagnetic wave vibrating at a certain frequency. But I still have a "red" experience. In the same way, I can also have a wet, warm, or mushy experience. How do the subjective qualities of my experience arise from quantities like spin, charge, mass, etc?
Having said that...from their homepage: "The poo is immoral"
One of my issues with motivation is what you mentioned: I really really struggle to get invested. Things that are "work" seem to live in an anti-motivation bucket, regardless of how organically interesting they may be to me outside of a work contest. I'm in my 30s now, and I've been doing this my whole life and it is killing me. It takes a tremendous amount of effort and an extremely imminent deadline to get me to start anything. This (ostensibly) runs completely contrary to my self-concept and value system, but the motivation problem permeates every fucking inch of my life, and always has.
I can read this back and recognize a defeatist attitude, but I don't know what else to do.