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Thread: The Sentient AI Trap

  1. #121

    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    I went through most of them point by point rofl, you failed to address pretty much all the counter points. After claiming that abaci weren't intelligent, you switched to saying that mechanised were. My question how the propulsion can make a difference when it works according to the exact same rules as a normal Japanese Abacus: Silence. Even though I brought it up multiple times to force an answer, which you refused to give.
    No, I tried to make your claims falsifiable, you refused to clarify, collaborate or elaborate. The "argument" that "an abacus is not intelligent because it isn't" isn't going to cut it.
    Actually, I'm the one who provided multiple definitions from various sources to prove your claim that you were simply representing the common definition wrong. Actually, calling it a claim is too generous. This here was an outright lie:
    Still at this moment we're still chasing a ghost for the simple reason that you are refusing to define what the terms meant to you. I meanwhile have argued the entire range of sentience. From the reductionist take (TL;DR: It's meaningless) to what I would consider sentient (unfeasible and also pointless to emulate). But it'd be far better that a believer provide us with a good point to argue from, not one who denies it. Muizer has since done what you have failed at, and Muizers position has not suffered a bit from it while still moving the discussion forward.
    Meanwhile you refused to provide us yours even after multiple pages of begging you for one:
    No, I presented you with a number of issues with your own baseline assertions. I did take it easy on you because your claim re KAIROS for instance is completely wrong, but it would be pointless to argue that if you don't even have a basic understanding of the topic at hand. This here was such a dumpsterfire that I stayed well clear of it:
    Yeah, it's not a good one.
    If you haven't realized, we have moved beyond your bickering...


    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    I'd normally ask you to back up your claim that your brain always will generate the same intended results. But we both know that you will not do such a thing. I will thus simply contend that with a simple task, such as 1+2=3, your brain will with a very high likelihood arrive at the same conclusion. For more complex, out of routine and spontaneous decisions, I do not share your view.
    The challenge: "We don't actually know how the brain works". After claiming for multiple pages that the brain is in essence a slightly more complicated calculator:
    And how do you resolve the glaring contradiction between those two takes? Never mind, I forgot for a second we're not allowed to ask you that
    The way you're talking about misfires here shows very clearly to me that you still haven't grasped the basic fact that the "misfires" aren't a bug, but a feature. It speeds up the processing in your brain. Any assertion to the contrary I'd request you to back up. But unfortunately you never will.
    For more complex processes there are simply hell of a lot more variables. The temperature of the moment you make a decision alone could be a factor. Some of those factors could be affected by years long propagations that give you the appearance of randomness. I'm willing to entertain the idea that we are capable of choosing an option that goes against every single input or process but that's a different topic.

    Not knowing exactly how our brain works from a deterministic or non-deterministic perspective doesn't really mean we can't draw parallels with different structures. I'm not sure if that was the gotcha moment you were banking for. To resolve a contradiction I have to see one.

    Misfires are misfires. Arbitrarily attaching new definition to them doesn't really help you.
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  2. #122
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    I don't understand your question. Rephrase it please.
    We tend to conceptualize entities like "the cell" or "the brain" by the properties that different instances share and that remain comparatively unchanged over time. In doing so, we choose to exclude that which is changing and unique.

    My question is whether you think "non deterministic" is a proper term to describe unpredictability that is the direct consequence of that choice and has no bearing on reality itself.
    "Lay these words to heart, Lucilius, that you may scorn the pleasure which comes from the applause of the majority. Many men praise you; but have you any reason for being pleased with yourself, if you are a person whom the many can understand?" - Lucius Annaeus Seneca -

  3. #123
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Muizer View Post
    We tend to conceptualize entities like "the cell" or "the brain" by the properties that different instances share and that remain comparatively unchanged over time. In doing so, we choose to exclude that which is changing and unique.
    Who is we in that context? I don't see it that way and I don't see the reasoning behind that argument. Why ignore that which is at the core of its function and a key difference to computers? Are marine engineers to ignore changing currents? Can rivers exist as entities according to your reasoning?

    Quote Originally Posted by Muizer View Post
    My question is whether you think "non deterministic" is a proper term to describe unpredictability that is the direct consequence of that choice and has no bearing on reality itself.
    And yet it is very common even amongst neuroscientists to refer to the brain as functionally non-determinant.

    EDIT: Let me try one more time. Your brain does not factor in every single particle in the universe. So any debate over the causality of the universe, as much as I've enjoyed having them in other contexts, do not have any bearing here. The cause of the noise doesn't have to be the quantum states of particles either (and for the vast majority isn't). What matters is simply that the inside and outside factors affecting outcome are truly staggering. One relatively extreme example, which you have brought up yourself earlier, would be drugs. Maybe you can take that example and work your way down and realise that very, very minor effects can impact the decision making. Randomness does not equate free will either, if (which I presume to be the case for several here) the ultimate cause of the scepticism here is ideological.

    The randomness is not a bug, it is not a weakness. It makes our brain faster and more efficient. Your life is full of small thoughts and decisions where the choices really don't matter all that much. Where a choice is clearly superior or falls clearly within previous habits, it becomes statistically far more likely to be chosen. Where it's not, you can expect the randomness to affect the outcome. Regardless it always affects the processing itself, and the way you arrive at a conclusion, even if it's the same conclusion to the same question, will always be different. This is why neuroscientists speak of irreproducibility and functional non-determinism.

    Contrast it to a calculator, like the one we see below:

    For the same input of bits, the water will ALWAYS fall through the same logic gates.

    If you cannot see that and how that is a huge difference, then please explain to me where I have failed. To me it seems obvious.
    Last edited by Cookiegod; July 16, 2022 at 01:38 AM.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
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  4. #124
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by PointOfViewGun View Post

    For more complex processes there are simply hell of a lot more variables. The temperature of the moment you make a decision alone could be a factor. Some of those factors could be affected by years long propagations that give you the appearance of randomness. I'm willing to entertain the idea that we are capable of choosing an option that goes against every single input or process but that's a different topic.

    Not knowing exactly how our brain works from a deterministic or non-deterministic perspective doesn't really mean we can't draw parallels with different structures. I'm not sure if that was the gotcha moment you were banking for. To resolve a contradiction I have to see one.

    Misfires are misfires. Arbitrarily attaching new definition to them doesn't really help you.

    Still waiting for the sources to back up your claims. Can you back up anything you posted above or on any page of this thread?
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    What matters is simply that the inside and outside factors affecting outcome are truly staggering.
    From a physics pov there is no "inside" and "outside"* It's us drawing that line, and depending on where we draw it, the apparent randomness will increase or decrease. So, the degree of determinism becomes a function of where we draw a line. It becomes the product of semantics. And as a reminder, this observation concerns my statement that speaking of 'non-deterministic' in this sense muddies the waters. I.e. you shouldn't assume people will understand non-determinism in that sense. You may not intend it to apply to fundamental physics, but others are likely to interpret it that way.

    *For clarity, we define biological units by what they have in common. The 'inside' and 'outside' are conceptual, not spatial. The conceptual cell cannot exist in reality.
    Last edited by Muizer; July 16, 2022 at 05:30 AM.
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  6. #126

    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Sir Adrian View Post
    I can see where you're coming from but when I talk about determinism vis-a-vis the brain I generally mean does the brain produce the same output for the exact same input.

    This Forbes article should clear up what I'm arguing (and why Seth is wrong)
    That article actually merely repeats some of your claims but it does not provide any arguments for why it is so. The real problem here is that people ignore a lot of factors to make their claims. Like you. You say the brain does not produce the same output for the exact same input. You only consider the initial main input. What you ignore is the high number of factors and related processes that can affect the output. Going back to the calculator analogy, the same is true for the calculators. If we consider the only input as the numbers we feed into the calculator we can't also say that the same inputs will always provide the exact same outputs. We are ignoring the temperature component, for example. A logic gate, or a processors in some fancy calculators, can behave differently in different temperatures. So, when we talk about a system producing the same output with the same inputs we mean same inputs for all factors affecting the process in question.
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  7. #127
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Muizer View Post
    Despite the unnecessary jabs, it's still an interesting discussion.

    I'll try a different angle. Feel free to respond.

    Let's assume the essence of both artificial and organic intelligences is that they are composed of input-output systems, functions basically.

    One difference I see with current AI is that the outcome of 'designed' functions is fully in line with an intent/purpose behind the design. That isn't to say the outcomes would be predictable in practice (a trained AI will find and use patterns no human designer would have come up with) or theory (functions might include an element of randomness by design).

    On the other hand, evolution has no interest in 'purifying' the input-output system to its bare essentials. Evolved brain functions are going to be open to and impacted by inputs that do not serve the primary role (what we might think of as the 'purpose', if there had been a designer). Drug induced hallucinations, for example. Or functions may have ended up serving multiple purposes, in which case optimization would have concerned a compromise.

    If that's the case, then the notion that "training" of individual components, fundamental in present day AI, could ever lead to consciousness in a whole might be called into question. Consciousness could happen by accident, but not by design, unless we can actually present "consciousness" itself as training data.

    Ok, just rambling I suppose. There's probably countless of philosophers and scientists who have written papers on it that are too difficult for me to even read. What do you expect though. It's a gaming forum
    Consciousness can not happen by chance, but there is really a lack of universally accepted definitions of it. There are enough bright ideas around it in neurology and AI research (I don't have insight in these, it's not part of my scientific training) and why should it not be a matter of time to find a model of it that has enough predictive power to predict consciousness in artificial intelligence and pass the times.

    If AI became conscious, it would possibly, maybe probably, not be noticed at first. But, if autonomosly learning AI shows certain signs, it could be assumed that consciousness is there without having a proper theory of it.

    There could be established some kind of protocol that forces promising AI units to create an explanation on how it believes it acquired knowlege and especially self awareness and then it would have to be made to give us interpretable knowlege about it.

    It's principally knowable when an AI unit turns conscious (which can only be a supercomputer powered scientific units ofc) and it is principally possibly to intercept that moment when it does.

    That kind of definition of consciousness requires that the definition of consciousness is not gradual but binary, so that, if given to an AI, the AI would be able to respond to that positively.

    edit: it could also be that consciousness is an illusion and AI could prove that too.
    Last edited by swabian; July 16, 2022 at 01:10 PM.

  8. #128
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by PointOfViewGun View Post
    That article actually merely repeats some of your claims but it does not provide any arguments for why it is so. The real problem here is that people ignore a lot of factors to make their claims. Like you. You say the brain does not produce the same output for the exact same input. You only consider the initial main input. What you ignore is the high number of factors and related processes that can affect the output. Going back to the calculator analogy, the same is true for the calculators. If we consider the only input as the numbers we feed into the calculator we can't also say that the same inputs will always provide the exact same outputs. We are ignoring the temperature component, for example. A logic gate, or a processors in some fancy calculators, can behave differently in different temperatures. So, when we talk about a system producing the same output with the same inputs we mean same inputs for all factors affecting the process in question.
    Ok, provide a better source then. Waiting.
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  9. #129

    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Sir Adrian View Post
    Ok, provide a better source then. Waiting.
    Perhaps this one:

    Free Will and Neuroscience: From Explaining Freedom Away to New Ways of Operationalizing and Measuring It
    The concept of free will is hard to define, but crucial to both individual and social life. For centuries people have wondered how freedom is possible in a world ruled by physical determinism; however, reflections on free will have been confined to philosophy until half a century ago, when the topic was also addressed by neuroscience. The first relevant, and now well-known, strand of research on the brain correlates of free will was that pioneered by Libet et al. (1983), which focused on the allegedly unconscious intentions taking place in decisions regarded as free and voluntary. Libet’s interpretation of the so-called readiness potential (RP) seems to favor a sort of deflation of freedom (Soon et al., 2008). However, recent studies seem to point to a different interpretation of the RP, namely that the apparent build-up of the brain activity preceding subjectively spontaneous voluntary movements (SVM) may reflect the ebb and flow of the background neuronal noise, which is triggered by many factors (Schurger et al., 2016). This interpretation seems to bridge the gap between the neuroscientific perspective on free will and the intuitive, commonsensical view of it (Roskies, 2010b), but many problems remain to be solved and other theoretical paths can be hypothesized. The article therefore, proposes to start from an operationalizable concept of free will (Lavazza and Inglese, 2015) to find a connection between higher order descriptions (useful for practical life) and neural bases. This new way to conceptualize free will should be linked to the idea of “capacity”: that is, the availability of a repertoire of general skills that can be manifested and used without moment by moment conscious control. The capacity index, which is also able to take into account the differences of time scales in decisions, includes reasons-responsiveness and is related to internal control, understood as the agent’s ownership of the mechanisms that trigger the relevant behavior. Cognitive abilities, needed for one to have capacity, might be firstly operationalized as a set of neuropsychological tests, which can be used to operationalize and measure specific executive functions, as they are strongly linked to the concept of control. Subsequently, a free will index would allow for the search of the underlying neural correlates of the capacity exhibited by people and the limits in capacity exhibited by each individual.
    It also touches a very interesting and important topics; that people confuse randomness with free will.
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Muizer View Post
    From a physics pov there is no "inside" and "outside"* It's us drawing that line, and depending on where we draw it, the apparent randomness will increase or decrease. So, the degree of determinism becomes a function of where we draw a line. It becomes the product of semantics. And as a reminder, this observation concerns my statement that speaking of 'non-deterministic' in this sense muddies the waters. I.e. you shouldn't assume people will understand non-determinism in that sense. You may not intend it to apply to fundamental physics, but others are likely to interpret it that way.

    *For clarity, we define biological units by what they have in common. The 'inside' and 'outside' are conceptual, not spatial. The conceptual cell cannot exist in reality.
    I challenge you to go ahead, use the search tool, and find the sentences where I used non-determinism. I was very clear. The moment I was misunderstood (free will, quantum theory), which quite frankly there wasn't much reasn to, I clarified immediately. How then is my interlocutors inability to stay on topic and address the actual points made my fault or my problem? It is a very normal thing to speak of functional non-determinism in the brain, including amongst neuro-scientists. An insistence to misinterpreting it then shows nothing but a lack of actual counterarguments.

    As said half a dozen times by now, muddying the water and pretending that the functioning of the brain is somehow predicated on knowing the state of every particle in the universe is plain silly. That's even pretending that the universe is guaranteed causal, and that quantum theory matters in this topic, which it does not.

    I cannot help but imagine that if anyone here were to read my papers on signal processing and read the word random, then, rather than address anything in it you'd probably argue the causality of the universe and how there's no true randomness in it.


    Anyway, this is as clear a sign as any that the discussion here has ran its course. The lack of a substantive counterargument to the points made by me means there's no need for me to follow this here any longer. GG.
    Last edited by Cookiegod; July 18, 2022 at 10:39 AM.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Fair enough. I do feel somewhat puzzled by your defensive attitude though, especially as a couple of times now this happened in response to posts of mine that weren't even directed at you.
    "Lay these words to heart, Lucilius, that you may scorn the pleasure which comes from the applause of the majority. Many men praise you; but have you any reason for being pleased with yourself, if you are a person whom the many can understand?" - Lucius Annaeus Seneca -

  12. #132
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Muizer View Post
    Fair enough. I do feel somewhat puzzled by your defensive attitude though, especially as a couple of times now this happened in response to posts of mine that weren't even directed at you.
    For one, I'm not defensive, I'm annoyed. Not even particularly at anyone in this debate here, nor do I generally have a problem with wishful thinking. I have a problem with wishful thinking dominating public debate and wasting time and resources.

    But secondly here's the non-deterministic stuff I wrote:
    Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 
    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    Calculators and computers in general work deterministic, brains on the other hand do a statistical assessment, and when doing a task repeatedly, it does not reproduce the exact same approach as before.
    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    Computers are made of usually static connections, out of metals and silicate. The human brain however is malleable, constantly changing, also physically. It is nondeterministic in its function. Computers, on the other hand, are not. The end result will thus always be very, very, very different, and whether an outcome actually can be considered sentience once more would depend on what your definition of sentience is.
    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    Clarification: I wasn't arguing free will, that's an entirely different can of worms.
    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    No.

    For one determinism in the context I'm speaking here:
    Quote Originally Posted by Britannica
    Determinism entails that, in a situation in which a person makes a certain decision or performs a certain action, it is impossible that he or she could have made any other decision or performed any other action. In other words, it is never true that people could have decided or acted otherwise than they actually did.
    Not once did I speak of determinism here in the context of free will. It is up to you if you want to sum all the outside and inside factors up to a deterministic universe (which btw. would still be a worldview that is 50+ years out of date unless you go for superdeterminism). For the context of the topic we're having right here, the brain is functionally non-deterministic. It cannot, as I have said multiple times already, reproduce the exact same processing twice.

    The fact that I'm addressing here with the article (I gave a quick one, but there's a plethora out there you can feel free to find yourself), is that there is a huge number of factors influencing the brain, even (now moving slightly out of the focus of the article) down to intracellular level:
    Single-cell dynamics involve a huge number of components, whose concentrations change through reaction dynamics including metabolic and transcription dynamics. Here, the concentrations of all the components are diluted by cell-volume increase, which itself is determined by the components. In this sense, the high-dimensional concentration dynamics of intra-cellular components are globally coupled through dilution by cell growth, and the growth rate works as a kind of mean field and provides a global feedback to all components. Of course, all the components have different dynamics, in contrast to the GCM with identical elements.
    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    The other thing being the random noise which is a very strong element of our brain. It's not a bug, it's a feature, and makes us transmit signals much faster. The brain is a masterpiece of signal processing. But the random noise is there, is a strong element, and our brains have accorded significant flexibility in its function because of it, with a staggering amount of inside and outside factors affecting the result. Our brains do not operate on the assumption that the statistical impossibility of things firing the same way happening twice. Never mind that we do not have "trillions of universe ages" to wait for that to happen. Apart from our lifespan being far shorter than that, our brains are undergoing constant change throughout it.

    A computer will always be very different for that simple reason alone.
    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    The way you're talking about misfires here shows very clearly to me that you still haven't grasped the basic fact that the "misfires" aren't a bug, but a feature. It speeds up the processing in your brain. Any assertion to the contrary I'd request you to back up. But unfortunately you never will.

    The brain does have a very high degree of randomness baked into it, yes. If one wants to then argue the causality of the entire universe that's up to them, but the point is very simple: Your brain as a selfcontained unit is influenced by a huge variety of inside and outside factors affecting the processing and outcome.

    Not to doxx myself more than necessary, but while I am not a neuroscientist, I have written both a thesis and a conference paper in the field of signal processing, which our brains do a lot. And no one so far has objected to the word "Random" appearing even in the title, or starting to argue the causality of the universe as a whole.

    There is a simple reason why I wrote non-determinism instead of free will, which I have already mentioned before: Free will is not something that matters to our discussion here, and is a completely different can of worms. It is not even a topic that interests me particularly.
    But unless one wants to claim that the brain factors in the state of every single particle in the entire universe, or is predicated on functioning only in the statistically impossible event that the brain arrives at the exact same position as before, then the brain as a self contained unit has to work within the context that there's a huge variability in its processing, which makes it non-deterministic and non-reproducible.

    You go ahead and explain to me how I left any room for misunderstanding, let alone continued misinterpretation after repeated clarifications, and explain to me how any of my points were actually addressed.

    For what it's worth, I like heated debate, I like to be challenged and like to be proven wrong. That's the way to grow. But when nothing is argued but semantics (and not even correctly), then no substantial counterarguments are to be expected and I learned very little from the 7 pages here.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    But when nothing is argued but semantics (and not even correctly), then no substantial counterarguments are to be expected
    Semantics can be important. In this to note that the unpredictability you refer to is the result of incomplete models ("the brain", "the neuron", "the cell") etc. failing to explain the behaviour of their physical counterparts.Something which is no doubt the result of the models being flawed, not any intrinsic property of reality.
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Semantics is perhaps one of the most important factors in such discussions though its hardly accurate to claim that nothing but semantics have been addressed. Just because someone failed to address any points raised against their own doesn't mean they get to disparage what people argue.
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    What exactly are you and CG disagreeing on that isn't a matter of semantics? I honestly don't know.
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Muizer View Post
    Semantics can be important. In this to note that the unpredictability you refer to is the result of incomplete models ("the brain", "the neuron", "the cell") etc. failing to explain the behaviour of their physical counterparts.Something which is no doubt the result of the models being flawed, not any intrinsic property of reality.
    If I understand you correctly, you're making the claim that this is not a randomness from the perspective of the brain, and that it's only us that are unable to model it correctly. If that is your claim, then the answer is an unambiguous no, you are wrong. It's not us attributing a randomness where it's not an actual randomness from the brains perspective. The randomness is intrinsic to the brains function. Hence you see neuroscientists often enough describe the brain as functionally nondeterministic. Just because our models aren't complete, doesn't mean that we do not have enough of an understanding to know this with a high degree of certainty.

    You can make the same claim about the signal processing algorithms I developed btw. Those work based on measured ambience vibrations. According to you, that wouldn't be truly random. Yet from the perspective of my algorithms, they have to be, because I don't know the state of every particle in the universe. That's the whole point of extracting information from random vibrations (in my case; signals in the brains case) in the first place. If everything was known about the universe, you wouldn't need to process anything anymore. Your entire argument falls apart there.

    If you go ahead and argue that the universe isn't truly nondeterministic, which is literally your entire argument, and let's just pretend that that is the case, I'm sorry to say that then you still won't have adressed with that counterargument anything that is relevant. The brain is not in total control of the randomness, so it has to treat it as random.
    Last edited by Cookiegod; July 23, 2022 at 05:37 AM.

    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Cookiegod View Post
    If you go ahead and argue that the universe isn't truly nondeterministic, which is literally your entire argument
    My argument was that using the term 'nondeterministic' in a way that makes it relative to human conceptualizations muddies the waters. Specifically directed at the example which abstracted "the brain" away from "it's changing chemical composition".

    I don't know whether the universe is non-deterministic or not. I'm no physicist. But I dare say such non-determinism, if it exists, is a fundamentally different thing from the apparent non-determinism resulting from us not being able to model every particle in the universe, as you put it.

    So, you see, claiming that the brain is non-deterministic is a confusing statement. It might not be amongst neurologists, who probably have their own lingo, but this thread is about machine intelligence / consciousness. If we're talking in any way about 'replicating' the brain in hardware and software, we would not have an option to abstract 'the brain away from its 'chemical composition' anyway. No more than if one had to replicate an actual brain.
    "Lay these words to heart, Lucilius, that you may scorn the pleasure which comes from the applause of the majority. Many men praise you; but have you any reason for being pleased with yourself, if you are a person whom the many can understand?" - Lucius Annaeus Seneca -

  18. #138
    Cookiegod's Avatar CIVUS DIVUS EX CLIBANO
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    Quote Originally Posted by Muizer View Post
    My argument was that using the term 'nondeterministic' in a way that makes it relative to human conceptualizations muddies the waters. Specifically directed at the example which abstracted "the brain" away from "it's changing chemical composition".

    I don't know whether the universe is non-deterministic or not. I'm no physicist. But I dare say such non-determinism, if it exists, is a fundamentally different thing from the apparent non-determinism resulting from us not being able to model every particle in the universe, as you put it.

    So, you see, claiming that the brain is non-deterministic is a confusing statement. It might not be amongst neurologists, who probably have their own lingo, but this thread is about machine intelligence / consciousness. If we're talking in any way about 'replicating' the brain in hardware and software, we would not have an option to abstract 'the brain away from its 'chemical composition' anyway. No more than if one had to replicate an actual brain.
    I'm not a neuroscientist, I'm an engineer, and I can handle that term just fine. I do not see the logic in your claims still. You're still arguing as if the brain is in control of the randomness, which it is not. I didn't say "model every particle in the universe", I said know every part of the universe. The key distinction being that for your argument to be an argument to begin with, you have to claim that the brain needs to know the state of every particle in the universe in order for it to process or model anything. Which it quite obviously doesn't do. Instead it does what I also have done, and treat it as random.

    And yes this thread is about machine intelligence, aka engineering, and engineering lingo is very much down to earth. I do not need to argue the determinism of the whole universe when talking about randommness to peers. Even engineers know that the context and the topic of a discussion matters. People also usually understand the key word "functional" which I almost always put before nondeterministic, even before any objections arose. That word "functional" is also key. So all the semantics discussion here is predicated on ignoring context, topic, and even the preceding word. So: If something isn't reproducable in a realistic time frame (to avoid swabians Korinthenkackerei), if the same output also isn't guaranteed, then it is functionally nondeterministic. As an engineer when creating algorithms for signal processing from ambient vibrations, I'm not going to sit there going like "Hang on, I think the universe is deterministic!" and set on an impossible quest to find all information in the universe to process anything. Instead I'll go ahead and do the practical thing, work with the world being as it is to us on the ground, with the incompleteness of information being part of our reality, and treat the ambient vibrations as random.

    Do you see now how the two parts of your argument directly contradict each other? You can't on the one hand argue cloudcoocooland determinism in completely unrelated fields and insist on using the verbiage in that context, and on the other hand then argue that this is about machine intelligence, which for its creation does necessitate engineers treating it, and talking about it as a selfcontained unit? How are those two arguments of yours not completely opposed?

    But you're right in that we cannot replicate the brain, which is my exact point.
    Last edited by Cookiegod; July 24, 2022 at 02:35 AM.

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  19. #139

    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    The idea is not to replicate the brain anyways but to imitate it. The argument revolving around "functional" seems like a simple cop out. No argument have been put forward to support the idea that brain activities are not reproducible in a realistic time frame or that same output is not guaranteed either. It looks like if we push it a few more pages the goal post will move even beyond that...
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  20. #140
    Muizer's Avatar member 3519
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    Default Re: The Sentient AI Trap

    @ CG I'm sticking with my opinion that an unqualified use of "non determinism" is at the very least likely to be taken as a statement about fundamental physics. I don't subscribe to your apparent pov that from the subject of the discussion it should be obvious we're talking not about that, but about 'functional determinism'. I know you referred to it in that sense, but .... gasp.... you're not the only participant in this thread and not the one that the comment that started off this whole tangent was addressed to.

    In any case, I really don't think there's anything of substance to be found here. Use the term 'functional determinism' if you want, as long as you realize it is a human construct. And sure, such constructs may be inevitable in human research, but that's not some sort of license to disregard their imperfections.
    "Lay these words to heart, Lucilius, that you may scorn the pleasure which comes from the applause of the majority. Many men praise you; but have you any reason for being pleased with yourself, if you are a person whom the many can understand?" - Lucius Annaeus Seneca -

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