[soist]

AlphaZero did not create any experiences. AlphaZero was software written by people to play board games and that's all it ever did.

[rocqua]

Are you launching into a semantic argument about the word 'experience'? If so, it might help to state what essential properties alphago was missing that makes it 'not having an experience'.

Otherwise this can quickly devolve into the common useless semantic discussion.

[soist]

Just making sure no one is confused by common computationalist sophistry and how they attribute personal characteristics to computers and software. People can have and can create experiences, computers can only execute their programmed instructions.

[gowld]

Username `soist is an abbreviation for `solipsist, then?

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

On what priors are you making that statement?

[soist]

Rephrase your question. I don't know what you're asking.

[nertirs]

I think he meant to ask, what is the difference between an experience and a predefined instruction?

[visarga]

AZ trained in self-play mode for millions of games, over multiple generations of a player pool.

[soist]

I am familiar with the literature on reinforcement learning.

[pharrington]

They're saying the board games AlphaZero played with itself are experiences.

[soist]

And I am saying they are confused because they are attributing personal characteristics to computers and software. By spelling out what computers are doing it becomes very obvious that there is nothing that can be aware of any experiences in computers as it is all simply a sequence of arithmetic operations. If you can explain which sequence of arithmetic operations corresponds to "experiences" in computers then you might be less confused than all the people who keep claiming computers can think and feel.

[nyssos]

> By spelling out what computers are doing it becomes very obvious that there is nothing that can be aware of any experiences in computers as it is all simply a sequence of arithmetic operations.

By spelling out what brains are doing it becomes very obvious that it's all simply a sequence of chemical reactions - and yet here we are, having experiences. Software will never have a human experience - but neither will a chimp, or an octopus, or a Zeta-Reticulan.

Mammalian neurons are not the only possible substrate for intelligence; if they're the only possible substrate for consciousness, then the fact that we're conscious is an inexplicable miracle.

[godelski]

If an algorithmic process is an experience and a collection of experiences is intelligence then we get some pretty wild conclusions that I don't think most people would be attempting to claim as it'd make them sound like a lunatic (or a hippy).

Consider the (algorithmic) mechanical process of screwing in a screw into a board. This screw has an "experience" and therefore intelligence. So... The screw is intelligent? Very low intelligence, but intelligent according to this definition.

But we have an even bigger problem. There's the metaset of experiences, that's the collection of several screws (or the screw, board, and screwdriver together). So we now have a meta intelligence! And we have several because there's the different operations on these sets to perform.

You might be okay with this or maybe you're saying it needs memory. If the later you hopefully quickly realize this means a classic computer is intelligent but due to the many ways information can be stored it does not solve our above conundrum.

So we must then come to the conclusion that all things AND any set of things have intelligence. Which kinda makes the whole discussion meaningless. Or, we must need a more refined definition of intelligence which more closely reflects what people actually are trying to convey when they use this word.

[soist]

This is a common retort. You can read my other comments if you want to understand why you're not really addressing my points because I have already addressed how reductionism does not apply to living organisms but it does apply to computers.