| > 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. |
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.