[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.

[mjburgess]

You think that reality is a pattern, and that properties obtain from configurations. Eg., that, of course, we can transmute gold into lead. Alchemy.

The problem with this is that the patterns have semantics, a pattern of wood does not have the same properties as a pattern of lead. The pattern isnt the important bit.

If you want to turn hydrogen into lead you first have to fire up a star and wait a very very long time, and as protons and electrons bundle up in every more complex configurations interactions between them come to dominate their properties... so that lead is nothing at all like hydrogen.

What is the only known element that enables "weak polymerisation", ie., adaptive self-replication at the molecular level: carbon.

What are the properties of all intelligent systems known to science? They're organic.

Why? This is no coincidence. In order to think, you have to grow -- self-replicate at every level from the cellular to organs, tissues... the material placitity of the machine that holds your thoughts has to itself adapt its structure to that of your body (the device which explores the world).

Now, should we expect hydrogen to do that? No. Silicon? No. Why would we? Ah, only because we loath the idea of being apes, and of oozing.. our biological disgust instincts tell us to run far away from it. How more beautiful if, like in genesis, we can fashion man out of clay and breath in life.

but alas, we arent clay; nor will clay ever think or desire or want.. clay cannot take impressions of the world without becoming an impression. It cannot adapt.

[FrustratedMonky]

"The pattern isn't the important bit."

I was taking pattern as the electrical impulses in the brain. Which I would say is everything when it comes to thought and thinking.

Human Neurons are just Calcium Voltage potentials. Just like weights in a NN.

Yes. The human brain neurons are far more complicated than that. There is a lot of chemical soup of hormones and modulators that factor into the voltage potentials. What you eat can impact gut, that impacts how many neurotransmitters are produced, that impact when a neuron fires, that is experienced as a mood, etc.... SO yes, the human brain cannot be separated from the body.

There is some entity, brain+body. And it so happens that it is made from Carbon . And we call things based on Carbon to be 'organic' and it can re-produce so we call it 'alive'. These are just definitions, that we have assigned to things.

Just like a CPU can't be removed from it's power supply and keep working. There is a 'system' and it has 'parts'.

That doesn't mean, we can't model a brain to a degree close enough that you couldn't tell an AI and Human apart.

I'm just saying, that when we do reach that point, then we'll be forced to realize the AI also has an internal subject experience, and is 'conscious', or we'll have to acknowledge that humans do not.

It will be either/or.

Humans and AI are both conscious, have internal subjective experience. or Neither do. And if neither do, then humans really are just hallucinating their inner experience, but not in control. Humans are also deterministic. Nothing special.

I see from your other posts, that you seem to be putting a lot of faith in Chaos Theory or Quantum Mechanics as some underlying explanation. To give humans the special sauce.

I'd just say, introducing randomness, does not make a system un-determined. That there is a lot of randomness in our 'chaotic' body, does not imbue it with agency. Randomness != Agency.

Edit: I like the clay example. I'd say that is like the NN that goes through training, then released, but the model is static. Doesn't get updated. Eventually these AI's will learn as they go and be continually updating.

[mjburgess]

Talking to people is a proxy measure of their subjective experience, it isn't a direct measure. Since you can talk to a tape recorder and, so long as it plays back responses, you and the tape recorder likewise are engaging as-if conversing.

Since computer science isnt a science, but a form of (applied, discrete) mathematics it encourages people to think in terms of functions with purely mathematical semantics, as if 2 + 2 = 4 were the same thing whether it modelled the divison of cells or the printing of a book.

What causes people to speak is our intentions, desires, theory of mind, representational ability, imagination... etc. We speak because we are in a shared world of social intentions, and we desire to communicate something about ourselves or this world to others.. we translate, clumsily, these features of our experience into text tokens; and hope that the agency we are speaking to can recover our mind from those tokens.

Over a million years we have specialised a culture of communication to enable this illusion to take place: the illusion that meaning is in the patterns of the symbols we use.

You can, of course, build a system to perfectly immitate these patterns; just as a video game, if you hold the viewer fixed, my appear to contain a world with a table and a glass. But if you reach for that glass of water, it isnt there: it's an illusion.

This is all statistical AI is: a trick. It's a replaying back of our own conversations to each other, as if it was a real conversation with us.

We can determine, as certain as you like, that there are no goals, intensions, desires, imagination, counterfactual reasoning -- no body, no observation. The machine is not in the world with us, and it not responsive to the world -- the machine generates text, it does not speak.

You inclination to analogise the machine to a person is just on the grounds that you are strapped into you chair, and observing the video game, believe you can grab the glass of water inside.

I am not strapped into a chair, nor do you have to be. You can do science: you can build real experimental explanations of how we form representations, intentions, goals, desires etc. And it is trivial to explain AI, there is no mystery to "compress reddit and query over its space of text tokens". There is only the illusion that the user is subject to -- the belief that the agency lies in this querying process, and not in the redditors who had cause to speak to each other about their experiences of hte world .

[FrustratedMonky]

Everyone is captivated by the current hot thing, LLM/GPT's.

But LLM's are not the whole of AI research.

A lot of your arguments are based on 'embodied' reasoning. Humans live in the world, they need to eat and survive. LLM's just compress what humans generated in the world. Correct, current LLM's are mostly regurgitating, but they don't "speak because we are in a shared world of social intentions".

I'd say game worlds are the frontier, because they are able to simulate a lower resolution world for current AI's to learn in. And in that world, they do embody it and have purpose (rewards/goals), they need to survive.

DeepMind's AlphaGo was when I switched. https://www.wired.com/2016/03/two-moves-alphago-lee-sedol-re... Move 37, it was called alien, creative, inhuman intelligence.

Now, scale that up to our world, with admittedly, thousands/millions of more variables. Put it in a robot body, with vision (the latest studies show AI vision building a world model context). Add some goals. Bam, some dangerous stuff, AI embodied in the world, with a goal to survive.

It might be far away, but where we are now was supposed to take another hundred years. So who knows.

The military is already running world simulations where the AI's goal function lead it to kill the soldier operating the AI in order to bypass him. It 'learned' to bypass the operator by killing them to achieve its goal.

Yes, Hyperbole. But really, not by much.

But back to our discussion. At that point, does the robot have an internal subjective perspective? Did AlphaGO when it was reasoning about its small low variable world?

[mjburgess]

It never has an "internal subjective experience" -- AlphaGO wasnt reasoning.

Reasoning is a cognitive process in which propositions, which model the world, are considered in turn and subject to ecological rationality (concerns of utilty, effort, interest, preference, etc.).

At no point in the flight of an aeroplane does it ever lay eggs.

You are using smoke to establish fire, these ways of measuring internal mental states of animals only work on animals.

If you can produce a robot with no prior conceptual scheme of, say, a novel apartment it is thrown into; a robot which can then determine what is in that apartment, how roughly it works (eg., light switch -> lights turn on), of an account of that apartment; explain why it has explored it; show that its behaviour is moderated and caused by these stated goals; ask it for opinions about the apartment etc. -- then we are actually playing the intelligence game, at least. Rather than stupid magic laterns.

Now, does this robot have a subjective experience?

Well I think we need to keep going with our tests: does it have an aversion to toxic stimulous? Is this aversion moderating its goals and behaviour? Are its memories contextualised by these aversions (eg., does its process of remembering display a variety when remembering negative vs. positive experiences)? And so on.

If I can ask, "Did you find my apartment fun?" and it can answer because it did, or did not -- then we're very close.

That is if we can show the reason it says, "yes" or "no" had to do with a history of taste, judgement, preference, curiosity, etc. all built up by itself -- not under "supervision with the right answers" but with no problem-specific answers ever given... and so on.

Questions of these kind arent even revenant to anything in AI. Any sincere AI engineer will say that they have nothing to do with the goals of the system theyre building. All AI that we can actually access, 100% has no interest, methods or ambitions to deliver any of the above.

AI isnt even in the category of intelligence; it isnt even trying to produce it.

[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?

[mjburgess]

I'm just driven mad by how people thinking physical objects with specific properties is "magic", but reducing reality down to abstract platonic mathematical forms is "science".

This is the opposite.

Gold isnt lead. Lead isnt wood. Cells are not bits of metal. Bits of metal do not polymerise. Bits of sand do not form weak covalent bonds...

It's kinda exhausting that this mathematical superstition is so prevalent in people who otherwise believe they are somehow anti magical thinking.

There is no more magical thinking in supposing that you can ignore reality, describe it in a formula, reinterpet that formula against some other reality, and it'll all work out.

As if, "2 + 2 = 4" means the same thing when it's "2 drivers + 2 drivers = 4 deaths" vs. "2 cookies + 2 cookies = 4 happy children"

The idea that reality is essentially mathematical and not essentially physical is pythagorean magical thinking. Science says the opposite.

All the mathematics in explanatory scientific laws are just paraphrases of descriptions of the physical properties of systems. None of it is actually mathematics.

Physics does not study "2". It studies there being earth and the sun and a force between them, summarised as "2 masses" etc.

[naasking]

> Gold isnt lead. Lead isnt wood. Cells are not bits of metal. Bits of metal do not polymerise. Bits of sand do not form weak covalent bonds...

That's not the argument. Both gold and lead are aggregates of fields. They don't have the same macroscopic properties but they do have the same microscopic properties (or attoscopic if you want to nitpick).

> The idea that reality is essentially mathematical and not essentially physical is pythagorean magical thinking. Science says the opposite.

Science says no such thing, and nobody is saying that reality is not physical. Those who adopt a mathematical universe hypothesis, or the like, say that reality is physical but that the physical is a subset of the mathematical.

> Physics does not study "2". It studies there being earth and the sun and a force between them, summarised as "2 masses" etc.

Mathematics is the study of structure. Physics is studying the structure of reality. There is therefore an obvious and inescapable link between mathematics and physics that you are simply not going to refute by repeatedly asserting that mathematical structures have nothing to do with physics. Of course any structures that have a formal correspondence have important equivalences, because that's literally what formal correspondence means.

[mjburgess]

"Formal equivalence" does not have any causal significance.

> They don't have the same macroscopic properties

Exactly... see the above...

Whenever you taalk about "formal" equivalece you mean: ignoring the causal semantics for the formula describing the system.

"2 + 2 = 4" is eqv. to "2 + 2 = 4" even when talking about wars, people, cars, animals, ... sand, cells, brains, bodies...

NO, obvious not. This isnt hard, this is obvious.

It requires some extraordinary magical thinking to suppose that field configurations of sand are equivalent to arbitary systems... this is obvious nonesense