[bubblyworld]

This is an old argument against determinism - I think a serious challenge is that:

1. Modern physics suggests you can implement such a lookup table for any subset of our universe.

2. We are a subset of the universe.

3. Therefore we are representable by lookup tables too.

...so your argument appears to prove too much, namely that humans aren't thinking beings either. Which is fine, but personally I don't think that's a useful definition of "thinking".

[mjburgess]

We're not a lookup table of the things we're, eg., saying, or doing etc. Nor are we looking up, in this sense, when we act.

ie., when you compress text into an NN and use it to generate text, the generated text is just a synthesis of the compressed text.

Whereas when I type, I am not synthesising text. Rather I have the skill of typing, I have an interior subjectivity of thoughts, I have memories which arent text, and so on.

When my fingers move across the keyboard it isn't because they are looking up text.

Our causal properties (experiencing, thinking, seeing, feeling, remembering, moving, speaking, growing, digesting ...) are not each, "index on the total history of prior experience", "index on the total history of prior seeing". The world directly causes, eg., us to see -- seeing isnt a lookup table of prior seeings.

( Also, the whole of physics is formulated in terms that cannot be made into a lookup table; and there is no evidence, only insistence, of the converse. )

[bubblyworld]

I strongly disagree with your last statement - physics explicitly _is_ formulated in terms that can be made into a lookup table (see phase spaces in classical mechanics, for instance).

My point is that there's a finite light cone of possible causal influences over you at any moment in time, and in principle you can break those down into state variables finely enough to predict future states of a person. This is isomorphic to a lookup table, albeit one we aren't able to construct right now.

Im not suggesting it's enough to consider just the person in this scenario - the causal factors are part of the lookup.

[imtringued]

How do you lookup quantum mechanics? Please tell the physicists about your breakthroughs.

[bubblyworld]

No need, physicists already do this all the time - any computer simulation of quantum mechanical systems has to come to terms with the same problems (namely quantising the state space and representing the dynamics deterministically).

[mjburgess]

Physicists simulate on computers only what can be, which is almost nothing. Consider obtaining the dynamics of water by simulating all its parts: proton flow, hydrogen bonding etc. of 10^{PHYSICALLY UNCOMPUTABLE} interactions.

The simulations which do exist fail to model vast amounts. This is why, say, climate change is given as a prediction on temperature -- because it can be obtained as a mean which ignores "basically everything".

And it can be easily show that the assumptions of QM are false if Hilbert space is computable (QM becomes non-linear); and of classical mechanics (which becomes non-deterministic); and so on. ie., that the issue isnt merely 10^{PHYSICALLY UNCOMPUTABLE} but that non-computable functions are essential to the formulation.

The assertion that the world is computable is just that: there are no research projects, no textbooks, no experiments, no formalism to replace physics or anything like it -- nothing. All the basic assumptions of physics would have to be false, and we would have to have good reasons for supposing so.

This is just nonsense. The world is geometrical as described by physics. It is not computational as described by the discrete mathematician whose megalomania and platonism knows no bounds.

[bubblyworld]

To be honest, I don't really understand what you mean by Hilbert spaces being computable, and what that has to do with the linearity of QM, determinism of classical mechanics, universe being geometrical and not computational etc. I'm familiar with all of those concepts, but not sure how they tie together here. If you have resources you could share I would appreciate it (I had little success with google).

[naasking]

> The assertion that the world is computable is just that: there are no research projects, no textbooks, no experiments, no formalism to replace physics or anything like it -- nothing. All the basic assumptions of physics would have to be false, and we would have to have good reasons for supposing so.

I have no idea what this means. Physics must be computable from straightforward physical arguments like the Bekenstein Bound: finite volumes must contain finite information. Any physical object has finite volume at any given time, the universe included, ergo they must contain finite information. Any system consisting of finite information can be modeled as a finite state machine.

[FrustratedMonky]

"I am not synthesising text"

Then what are you doing?

I think you are falling for the same arguments as 'mystics'. Somehow your inner thoughts are un-explainable. But nothing in your argument explains it, you are just taking your own inner experience itself as the mystical explanation.

The old 'I think therefore I am' argument.

And where did the 'thinking' come from?

[mjburgess]

It's entirely explainable, I just explained it in the other comment, "Somatosenstory representations are built by the sensory-motor system."

Do you really think the meat of my body is growing so as to record every symbol i've seen, or even an induction across them?

I find this inability to think outside of the switching frequencies of a silicon chip as they model the patterns of text tokens on reddit, absolutely bizarre.

You're an ape, have some appreciation for it. You're much more interesting than what openai can steal from amazon's ebook library.

[FrustratedMonky]

My view is opposite.

"inability to think outside of the switching frequencies of a silicon chip"

Why can't you "think outside", and conceptualize that this 'internal subjective experience' we are having, is not unique, and could be taking place inside a silicon based NN?

It helps to meditate and observe your own thoughts, and how they arise. You can begin to realize that you don't 'think'. You don't think about what to think and thus think it. Thoughts just become un-bidden.

Its back to the Schopenhauer quote "“A man can do as he will, but not will as he will.”

Then, when you begin to notice the mechanistic nature of your own mind, you will have less resistance to how 'silicon' is also reacting. Silicon and Carbon both reacting to inputs, processing.

[mjburgess]

Organisms are mechanistic, there's nothing "not mechanistic" about the mind.

Its insane to suppose that somatosensory representation building, which requires organic neruoplasticity to be connected to the organically adaptive neuromotor system, etc. etc. etc. can just be instantiated in a bit of sand.

This is deeply mystical, pseudoscience.

You're credulously throwing away any kind of empirical analysis of the world in terms of it's properties and their mechanisms for the deeply mystical view that, unique in amongst all properties of the world, consciousness needs no empirical analysis of the properties of the systems which have it.

Of gold we ask: what makes it shine; of fire: what makes it hot.. and so on for everything empirical in the world.

But with the mind we must stop! No! No! do not do any science! please that might mean we can't be scammed by a VC out of our investment money; i cannot babble endlessly about scifi star treck episodes! no no! please do not rob me of my scifi religion! please please, do not ruin commander data for me!

Well there is no commander data. And the properties of gold are not those of sand, nor those of animals. And just as no bit of silicon will be trasumted into gold by the running of an NN on its electric field; likewise, no bit of silicon will desire or wish or conceive of anything.

We are biological organisms; we do not have souls, even if in your religion, the soul is "a pattern". Your consciousness will not be uploaded; commander data will never visit; and your local VC shyster is on a stock manipulation grift to bamboozle you out of money.

[FrustratedMonky]

Really. I'm not sure what you are getting at. I think from your last few sentences. We actually agree, and maybe just miss-understanding.

I'm agreeing, to the mechanistic nature. Nothing Mystical. Just physical world. No souls. I was trying to get you to see the mechanistic nature of mind, then you tell me to stop being Mystical?

You think that generating a mind from sand is 'mystical'. "just be instantiated in a bit of sand?"

But don't seem to realize Carbon, is also just a basic element. So why is any reasoning based from Carbon, Non-mystical? But Silicon is?

Then some other sentences seem to be </sarcasm>. But in these discussions it is hard to tell when someone is being sarcastic or making a point.

Like this sentence:: "We are biological organisms; we do not have souls, even if in your religion, the soul is "a pattern". Your consciousness will not be uploaded; commander data will never visit; and your local VC shyster is on a stock manipulation grift to bamboozle you out of money."

I totally agree, no soul, it is a pattern. That does not mean we can't create a 'mind' from silicon, that is based on a pattern, and be equivalent in functionality.

I also agree, we will never be uploaded. I don't think we'll ever be able to measure the human neurons to a degree to allow this. But that doesn't mean we'll never build a NN with as many connections as a human brain has, and that it wont also be able to have a 'pattern' of self.

And, there is a lot of VC Shysters out there, doesn't mean a lot of real progress is not being made.

[naasking]

> Its insane to suppose that somatosensory representation building, which requires organic neruoplasticity to be connected to the organically adaptive neuromotor system, etc. etc. etc. can just be instantiated in a bit of sand.

Why? That's just an assertion, not an argument. All of those big words and sophisticated concepts you used all reduce to field interactions that we've mostly captured mathematically. Unless you're imbuing these things with some magical essence that can't be observed, but then who's doing the pseudoscience?

[mewpmewp2]

Typing is just a medium, it is irrelevant. Seeing and all the other senses that you mentioned are input within a context window.

[mjburgess]

uhuh.. and how do you form the inputs into that context window?

Turns out you need to move (indeed, adapt) the body in order to form the very techinques which become concepts that can be given as inputs.

The eye does not move on its own, it has to be directed to attend to reality as conceptualised -- where do these come from? Somatosenstory representations are built by the sensory-motor system.

Or, simply: in order to first think, we move.

[clooper]

How are people lookup tables? In the case of neural networks the representation of the table is obvious, it's just numbers. What would be the equivalent table for the liver?

My argument isn't abstract. Neural networks really are just numerical functions which can be expanded into their equivalent graph representations.

[josh-stylo]

Not sure what he's referring to in terms of modern physics saying we're just a lookup table but at the very least, you could say the same thing about the conversation that we're having now. You read words, those words map to meaning representation in our heads, we then generate a response.

[clooper]

Obviously if we are interacting over a digital medium then the responses will be encoded as numbers but there is no way to reduce an entire person to a lookup table. Measured output of human behavior can be expressed as lists of numbers but thinking is not the same as the list of numbers, unlike in the case of neural networks where the graph and the network are actually equivalent.

[mewpmewp2]

You could represent all the input on different levels as numbers, e.g. all EM waves hitting our eyes, then all the physical output from our body also as numbers, and everything that causes this output from input within is what you would consider to be a lookup table.

[clooper]

What are the dimension of the input and output spaces involved in this idealization? In the case of a neural network there is no idealization. The network is software, it's a number. It's inputs and outputs are all bounded and can be expressed as a table of bounded tuples.

[mewpmewp2]

You could pick a very large number depending on a reasonable processing capability a human has, which represents all the significant physical interactions on a human body over a certain amount of time. Then take the output over a certain amount of time, being all movements of the body.

If you wanted to focus on thoughts alone, you might want to skip few layers/systems, to give input directly to whatever causes thoughts to happen.

All particles and their interactions could also be represented as numbers. But it just depends on what level we do this, and at what level what kind of complex logic is required.

[ccozan]

I think the OP is right. All the input to a human brain can be expressed as numbers, at any given time a specific radiation, vibration, or chemical reaction is hitting our "sensors" and by the law of physics this is just numbers ( in terms of differentiation, brain does not know absolute values ).

Our output ( mechanical and vibrations ) is also fully quantifiable, thus numbers.

One giant lookup table.

[bubblyworld]

People really are just stacks of molecules that can be broken down into their causal properties - moreover, we know those causal properties to a high degree of accuracy these days.

I'm suggesting that for any given human/environment pair, there is a lookup table that produces that person's actual behaviour in that situation. Modern physics lets us approximate this lookup table, and presumably better physics would give us a better lookup table.

Since human behaviour can in principle be described with a lookup table, I see this as a bad reason to rule out a system as "thinking".

Perhaps there is another way to describe neural nets, one that does not use the language of lookup tables, that makes it feel more like thinking and less like lookups.

One such approach I've seen is looking for embedded world models in neural nets.