[myrmidon]

> That's highly reductive of our capacities.

I'm not saying that GPT4 is as capable as a human-- it can not be, by design, because its architecture lacks memory/feedback paths that we have.

What I'm saying is that HOW it thinks might already be quite close in essence to how WE think.

> We are not weighted transformers that can be explained in an arxiv paper. GPT, at the end of the day, is a statistical inference model. That's it.

That is true but uninteresting-- my counterpoint is: If you concede that our brain is "simulatable", then you basically ALREADY reduced yourself to a register based VM-- the only remaining question is: what ressources (cycles/memory) are required to emulate human thought in real time, and what is the "simplest" program to achieve it (that might be something not MUCH more complicated than GPT4!).

[agentultra]

> What I'm saying is that HOW it thinks might already be quite close in essence to how WE think.

How would one be able to prove this? Nobody knows how we think, yet.

All one can say is that what GPT-4 outputs could plausible fool another human into believing another human wrote it. But that's exactly what it's designed to do, so what's interesting about that?

> If you concede that our brain is "simulatable",

It could be. Maybe. It might be that's what the universe is doing right now. Does it matter?

We're talking about writing an emulator on a Harvard-architecture computer that can fully simulate the physics and biological processes the make up a human brain. By interpreting this system in our emulator we'd be able to witness a new human being that is indistinguishable from one that isn't simulated, right?

That's not what GPT is doing. Not even close.

It turns out there's more to being human than being a register VM. Ever get punched in the face? Bleed? Fall in love? Look back on your life and decide you want to change? Write a book but never show it to anyone? Raise a child? Wonder why you dreamt about airplanes on Mars with your childhood imaginary friend? Why you hate bananas but like banana bread? Why you lie to everyone around you about how you really feel and are offended when others don't tell you the truth?

It's not so simple.

[myrmidon]

> We're talking about writing an emulator on a Harvard-architecture computer that can fully simulate the physics and biological processes the make up a human brain. By interpreting this system in our emulator we'd be able to witness a new human being that is indistinguishable from one that isn't simulated, right?

My point is: if you don't believe that there is magic pixy dust in our brains, then this would NECESSARILY be possible.

It would almost certainly be HIGHLY inefficient-- the "right way" to do AGI would be to find out which algorithmic structures are necessary for human level "performance", and implement them in a way that is suitable for your VM.

I'm arguing that GPT4 is essentially the second approach-- it lacks features for full human level performance BY DESIGN (e.g. requires pre-training, no online learning, etc.), but there is no reason to assume that the way it operates is fundamentally different from how *parts* of OUR mind work.

> It turns out there's more to being human than being a register VM. Ever get punched in the face? Bleed? Fall in love? Look back on your life and decide you want to change? Write a book but never show it to anyone? Raise a child? Wonder why you dreamt about airplanes on Mars with your childhood imaginary friend? Why you hate bananas but like banana bread? Why you lie to everyone around you about how you really feel and are offended when others don't tell you the truth?

I don not understand what you are getting at here. I consider myself a biological machine-- none of this is inconsitent with my worldview. I believe that a silicon based machine could emulate all of this if wired up properly.

PS: I often talk with people that explicitly DONT believe into the "pixy dust in our brains" (call it soul if you want), but on the other hand they strongly doubt the feasibility of AGI-- this is internally inconsistent and simply not a defensible point of view IMO.

[agentultra]

> I'm arguing that GPT4 is essentially the second approach

Ok, so then it is an algorithm that simulates a specific behaviour that produces plausibly human-level results.

My point is that this is not thinking, smart, or "general intelligence."

Let's say I write an algorithm that can also produce text. It's not an implementation of the specification for GPT-4 but something novel. It takes the exact same inputs and produces outputs that I share with you and claim is produced by GPT-4. And lo, success, you can't tell if it was produced by GTP-4 or my algorithm.

You claim it's the same thing as having GPT-4, right? If you can't tell the difference it must be the same thing.

Big deal. We can write computer programs that perform better than humans at chess, go, and now can write more text than us. We knew this was possible before we even begun on this endeavour. It's still not intelligent, conscious, smart, or anything resembling a complete human.

It's merely an algorithm that does one specific task.

> I don not understand what you are getting at here.

I've proven my point then.

There's more to the human experience than what can be simulated on a silicone chip and it doesn't have to do with hand-waving away all the complexity of reality as "magical pixie dust."

Take physical trauma. The experience of which by one human is not merely a fact. It is felt, it is reflected upon, and it is shared in the DNA of the person that experience it with their descendants. We have science investigating how trauma is shared through generations and the effects it has on our development.

You are more than a machine with inputs and outputs.

[myrmidon]

> My point is that this is not thinking, smart, or "general intelligence."

Why not? I would already, without hesitation, describe GPT4 as strictly more intelligent than my cat and also all gradeschoolers I've ever known... Maybe some adults, too- depends on your exact definition of intelligence.

> Let's say I write an algorithm [...], you can't tell if [input] was produced by GTP-4 or my algorithm.

Sure, I'd call your algorithm just as clever as GPT4 and approaching adult human levels of intelligence.

> It's still not intelligent, conscious, smart

Why not? What do these mean to you?

[agentultra]

> I would already, without hesitation, describe GPT4 as strictly more intelligent than my cat

Well if we're going to define intelligence based one what you believe it is then why don't you explain it?

I'm not the one claiming to know what intelligence is or that we can even simulate a system capable of emulating this characteristic. So if you hold the specification for human thought I think you ought to share it with us.

> Why not?

By definition. ChatGPT is designed for a single function, the description of which are the specifications and the code that implements it. Nothing in this specification implies it is capable of anything except what is described.

Calling it, "intelligent," is a mischaracterization at best and anthropomorphism at worst. The same follows for calling it "smart" or claiming it is, "skilled at X."

[int_19h]

You're the one claiming that GPT is not in any sense, shape, or form intelligent. Such claim inevitably carries a very strong implication that you know what intelligence is.

[myrmidon]

My explicit definition for "intelligence" would be something with an internal model of <reality> that you can exchange information with.

Cat is better at this than the robot vacuum, gradeschooler is better still and GPT (to me) seems to trump all of those.

[krickkrack]

"Nobody knows how we think, yet."

Then how can you confidently say we don't think 'like' Transformers/Attention/Statistical models/etc/etc?

[robwwilliams]

I think you would love to read Mark Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf. He asks these questions and like all if us struggles with answers.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8651250

[goatlover]

> If you concede that our brain is "simulatable", then you basically ALREADY reduced yourself to a register based VM-- the only remaining question is: what ressources (cycles/memory) are required to emulate human thought in real time

We haven't emulated brains yet, so we don't know. The OpenWorm project is interesting, but I don't know to what extent they've managed to faithfully recreate an accurate digital version of a nematode worm. I do know they had it driving around a robot.

Thing is that the our brains are only part of the nervous system, which extends throughout the body. So I don't know what happens if you only simulate just the brain part. Seems to me that the rest of the body kind of matters for proper functioning.

[myrmidon]

I personally believe that while interesting, projects like OpenWorm or humanbrainproject are extremely indirect and unpromising regarding AGI (or even for improving our understanding of human thinking in general).

To me, these are like building an instruction set emulator by scanning a SoC and then cobbling together a SPICE simulation of all the individual transistors-- the wrong level of abstraction and unlikely to EVER give decent performance.

People also like to point out that human neurons are diverse and hard to simulate accurately-- yeah sure, but to me that seems completely irrelevant to AGI, in the very same way that physically exact transistor modelling is irrelevant when implementing emulators.