[pnf]

Instincts in animals (including humans) are deterministic insofar as they determine the behavior of the animal. A bird may choose one stick or another but it can't choose not to build a nest. A human can. This may be unique to humans. Heidegger refers to this as world-openness, meaning our world is not closed by our instincts. Unlike most animals, humans don't possess enough instincts to survive in nature. We are "insufficiently-determined". Hence, to survive, we augment our nature with our culture, which acts as a second nature within which we can act unthinkingly (as animals do). Without this second nature we shall surely die (hence the furious culture wars). Not incidentally, this is one of the anthropological arguments against state of nature political theories: there's no such thing and never has been in the history of the species.

Animals may be more or less undetermined but a bee will make honey and an ant will gather food regardless of any individual instance of bee or ant intelligence.

The problem with the above objection is that there is no account of "meaning" in what an AGI does. In other words, it's still a computer. To say that the entropy of the system will determine the entity's indeterminism is akin to arguments saying Schrodinger's cat is evidence for the possibility of human free will. It's a category error. Unless you want to argue that humans are also computers (which is the position of many strict materialists) then there is still a huge gap to account for in terms of meaning that can't be defined away satisfyingly. We all know what it's like to be an intelligence. At best, people say we can't know if an AGI also knows that because we can't inspect their "minds". This argument is justified by recourse to the principle of the multiple instantiability of intelligence. If we admit that non-carbon-based life forms could be intelligent (e.g., extraterrestrials) then we may admit that intelligence could be in silica as well. Without the ability to introspect other minds, we assume they are like ours and not simply "zombies". The above arguments (reducible to "Well, how do you KNOW anyone else has a mind?") are based in a kind of skeptical solipsism. The part about intelligence being demarcated by non-determinism and the way that argument fails is a side-step of the hard problem of consciousness.

[nb3423]

Humans actually take very little to non relevant decisions. The "free will" is mostly an illusion, you "choose" between equivalent options, not between actually different "life paths".

You can "decide" you won't "build a nest", but you'll certainly look for refuge if it is raining, or it's very cold. In the end, the human behavior is actually fully deterministic.

I'm sure FAANG already know this because they have the datapoints from billions of humans beings doing exactly the same stuff everyday for decades now.

This is probably how LLM can extrapolate all the things they "know" from human generated text: their tokens reflect the human behavior determinism a its fullest expression

(hence at more data for training, much better/closer their behavior ressemble the human behavior/ideas)

[pnf]

I can't agree with you although I can understand why you believe these things. Human instinct is, as I say, insufficiently-determined for survival. Is "free will" mostly an illusion? Or is it "fully deterministic"? If it is mostly then it is not "fully" determined. I'd be curious to hear how you think that can be and whether you make decisions in your own life or if you are resigned to your fate.

In any case, I'm not saying individual humans make many reasoned out decisions. Quite the opposite. Human individuals adopt a cultural second nature bequeathed to them by their heritage to avoid the necessity of making decisions. The culture over time adopts certain default decisions that are advantageous to survival. These are inculcated into the individual via their cultural conditioning. A baby has no culture and very few instincts (hunger, pleasure, pain, disgust). If you think humans are operating at the lower levels of instinct then why do they pursue or avoid certain behaviors that change over time? One answer is that they are responding to acceptable norms of behavior. As those norms change, they adapt and adopt. They change with the times, as the saying goes. A tiger can be trained to behave a certain way using stimulus/reward training but it doesn't self-regulate according to new norms. One could argue that elephants do this, if properly conditioned with a large stake early in life. But you could also make the case that elephants (like dolphins) are, like humans, self-conscious to a degree. I don't know if this is true, but it is an interesting thought. A more cynical person might say the elephant is not choosing anything but has been trained just like the tiger to avoid pain.

LLMs, or let us say AGI based on probabilistic models, can mimic behavior represented in its data and is very impressive at these language games and, with the right feedback, can correct some of its more glaring productions but it must ever be a parasite on human cultural production for it to gain what you call "knowledge". As a thought experiment, suppose we could set an LLM running on autopilot and send it into space with a feedback loop where it could add its productions to its source corpora. Is there any point in the future where it is generating new and coherent output? Or does it degenerate into raving madness?

[nb3423]

"I'd be curious to hear how you think that can be and whether you make decisions in your own life or if you are resigned to your fate."

haha just living life as usual, whatever internal stuff is feeding my main loop.

I left the deep thoughts to threads like this one and/or people more qualified.

[pnf]

Forgive the presumption, but I really think you should abandon that model of self understanding. Fatalism is a kind of disease that can be treated if caught early but is deadly if left undiagnosed. I don't believe you are really serious but I think it's important to not live hypocritically, which such a view makes unavoidable. But joking aside, one problem with thinking of your self as a kind of Javascript runtime is that it trivializes your life. Even if a computationalist model of mind were largely correct, which I don't believe, a life worth living would reject such a thing on principle, since to believe in it is to think of oneself as a philosophical zombie, which is a creature without consciousness, without will, condemned to infect others with its own nullity, treating brains as mere food rather than the seat of human uniqueness, unable to connect with others, or even notice others except as the motive objects of their ravenous impulses. Taken seriously to oneself, this attitude is a kind of spiritual suicide. I don't recommend.

[nb3423]

no biggy, thanks for your words, it's very much appreciated. I do live well, thinking about these things brings obviously some considerations, but ultimately I don't think about myself as a script, aside the technical considerations I also need to include a margin of error to these philosofical zombie hypothesis, and if there is 1% chance of error in it (which I think there should be a lot more, for there are lots of factors to be considered), I would be resigning my free will to a false assumption, so that's why I can't live under the assumption I have no free will.

Look at the history, many "definitive" hypothesis have been refuted along the centuries, when thinking about these I can just wonder how many people have lived their entire life under false premises, just because they were 100% sure "their" philosophy was the "definitive truth".

The truth in real life is a more fluid concept, it constantly changes with entropy (the main culprit if you go all the way down the reasons for change), so I can't take my hypothesis of human determinism as a definitive truth, neither live my life under that premise.

I'd recommend to anyone also to not live theirs thinking they cannot change their own fate.

Thanks again for your words, felt very touched.

[pnf]

That's nice to hear. I think you may end up surprised at how many of the certainties of life turn out, on inspection, to be full of qualifications. I can say that's been my experience. To quote Hamlet: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Luckily, you don't have to find all the caveats yourself, there are plenty of eager pokers-of-balloons in the world who will gladly point out the flaws in arguments. All you have to do is cultivate a love of the counterargument and many philosophical and political certainties ebb and fade, uncovering very few, very precious leftovers, like a tide going out. Those remnants can't be lost, though, because they are a sort of foundation of your true self. They can be covered over or left to ruin but they're always there for some reason. Thanks for the exchange. Best of luck.

[nb3423]

".. it must ever be a parasite on human cultural production for it to gain what you call "knowledge"

This thing goes way deep into AI theories, but probaly AGI and artificial beings self-consciusness are two different problems. I think when the second problem gets solved, the human cultural production would no longer be necessary to "create" new AI / AGIs.

[pnf]

Yes, I think that is one idea. But without true symbolism, where is the ground of understanding that would allow for synthetic generation going to come from? Right now, it has to be added by human coaches and means nothing to the model. Personally, I'm not confident we're anywhere near solving for artificial self-consciousness. Heck, we don't even understand human consciousness. But forever is a long time. I'm both impressed and unimpressed by the current LLM models. They will get better at what they do, I'm confident of that. But it does seem there's built-in limitation that can't be solved with this approach. It will be interesting, for instance, if logic gates can be encoded in a neural net architecture. That could allow them to reason the way a computer using a formal language today might. In that future, the language models are massively effective parsers plus some layers enabling it to be "Turing complete".