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by iamleppert 3225 days ago
He's making the age old mistake of conflating mapping input and outputs to intelligence.

Intelligence is not defined by the ability to recognize letters. Or play a game of Go.

Deep learning is a powerful tool for creating systems that have an ability to map inputs to outputs with very noisy, non-linear or complex data.

The mapping itself may be complex, but it's not going about solving problems like a person would. It has no idea what letters are, and how they fit into its world. It has no concept of self, cannot contemplate its own existence -- and perhaps most important of all, has no free will.

The moment we have some kind of deep learning or AI that has free will and can express interest in something other than what it has been trained on, I would say we are closer to unraveling the mystery of consicenesss and human intellect.

Even babies are animals exhibit many forms of free will, decision making, and novel behavior that cannot be explained with our current observations of route deep learning techniques.

2 comments

You are just thinking of very simple scenarios of supervised learning. Even the simplest of other examples like playing games can be thought as decision making(or free will?). Also then there are areas where deep learning research is heading, e.g. neural turing machines. It has just arrived and does not works great, but if the concept will be successful, it can be thought as free will by all definitions.
Isn't free will a non-deterministic thing? NTM, DNC etc. are very promising but at the end they are programs runned by a Turing Machine. Are free will/consciousness computable? this is the real question IMO.
Isn't free will a non-deterministic thing?

Whoo boy not sure that's a good rabbit hole to go down. If you're unfamiliar with compatibilism I'd suggest you check it out. I think hard determinism gives the most reasonable answer here with a resounding no.

As to the question of consciousness, it is yet to be well defined, with no possiblity to test (because of eg Qualia) so by definition you'd never verify or not. At most you'd recognize what you perceive as consciousness based on how you perceive other entities which you believe have it.

This is all a bunch of sentimental bullshit. I don't know why people pursue this doomed line of reasoning. The problem is that you can't distinguish free will from not free will in any meaningful way.

A much more fruitful challenge to the aliveness of computers is to ask a singulatarian to show us any deep neural net that can fold proteins in constant time like physical reality can instead of exponential time like a computer algorithm can. Then I will believe that computers are alive and mind uploading is possible.

I really like your argument about protein folding. It's another interest area of reversible computing. That is, we will never be able to create a more powerful computational structure that is itself an implementation of the state of matter itself. It will always be less efficient and require more space or energy to represent than nature can do. That is unless we can find methods or create artificial substances or circumstances that would otherwise be impossible or improbable for nature to create. Man made substances come to mind, that have structures and mechanical properties that far exceed anything found naturally.
I'm no expert on protein folding but isn't there a more mundane explanation? There's plenty of physical processes that a computer can't simulate because reality is massively parallel to a degree that a computer isn't. I'm not sure that would explain the constant vs exponential discrepancy but I'm not sure I see the connection between that and "aliveness".

Or maybe I do. I'm seeing a glimmer but I don't want to put words in your mouth.