madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
1d ago
This is a possible explanation, but as far as I can tell, not a necessary one, except inasmuch as one could stretch the word algorithm - which carries a connotation (or perhaps definition, if you cherry-pick one) of precision and repeatability - to encompass any process - although perhaps we are talking past each other here.
No, I think this makes sense. But it's not the crux of the argument. The virtual machine approach comes down to something like chaos theory. You can have a fully deterministic system, like a mathematical model of the weather, and still can't predict where it ends up without running a simulation. The inputs and inner workings of a mind-like system are so high-volume that you don't get clean and complete predictability at the high level where you deal with things like everyday concepts and decisions. There's noise. Humans err and LLMs hallucinate. But the system substrate is still fully deterministic for LLMs, and neurons firing for humans might doesn't need any inherent fudge factor for humans either for the firings to add up to doing stupid or confused stuff for the human.
The interesting arguments for human specialness usually postulate some sort of qualitative difference for humans and the people who posit them tend to not sound like they'd agree that you could run something that behaves more or less exactly like a live human in a large enough computer simulation. Nobody is arguing that humans are algorithm-like in that they don't make sloppy errors when responding to high-level stimuli. People are arguing that humans are simulatable given a big enough simulation, which means that replacing humans doesn't require God's divine power to imbue an immortal soul in crude matter that allows it to sense and reason, but might instead be done just by coming up with a clever way to compute a very large number.
My personal take is that AIs are likely to continue to be "spiky" in their intelligence for the near future but that's not because of abstract beliefs so much as it is just observing their overall trajectory and what I know about how they work. There will probably always be things that humans are better at doing, but I think that is a claim I can make with some confidence because humans like doing things like procreating, not because of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Humans are going to keep being better at conceiving babies and nursing them, sure. But will they stay better at something that keeps them from being killed by Skynet or being reduced to animals who mostly just eat, shit and fuck because all productive work and scientific thinking is being done much better by machines?
madeofmeat
2d ago
The Aeon author did tackle the idea that the mind is an algorithm, which is, as I understand it, part of the theory of computation.
Yep, this is a much less prone to confusion way of saying it than "the mind is a computer".
We have good reasons to think the brain does not run on an algorithm; as the author of the piece I linked to points out, memory is extremely inexact, which is the opposite of what we would expect if the brain operated in an algorithmic manner.
And this is utterly confused. Douglas Hofstadter's cartoon illustrated the error pithily way back in Gödel, Escher, Bach. The algorithm is exact (the small, correct sums in the Hofstadter cartoon), but it's also too precise and constrained to do mind-like stuff directly in the small. Instead, the mind runs on a sort of virtual machine (big numbers built from the small sums in the cartoon) built up by the algorithm that can do complex pattern recognition and creative solutions, but is also constantly getting things wrong. As we see from AIs, virtual machines like this can be implemented on silicon just fine and they exhibit the same behavior of being able to do difficult useful stuff but also constantly getting details wrong on their own.
In short, the idea that the mind is a computer is a sloppy one even if the motte is more defensible than the bailey by far precisely because the word "computer" makes it inherently a metaphor that yields a motte-and-bailey, even subconsciously.
I sorta agree here. It's basically an accident of history that "computers", things with hard drives, keyboards, operating systems, files, RAM and CPUs, and "computation", the evaluation of primitive recursive mathematical functions which matches what a Turing machine (which, again, isn't a "machine" that you build from wires and bolts, but a mathematical construct), ended up using the same terminology up to "computer" being right there in the name "computer science". This is why the cognitive science school is called "computationalism" instead of "computerism" and the practitioners optimistically thought that given a name like that, obviously people would think Turing machines, not quad core Mac Pros.
As I understand it, it works something like this. Gödel's incompleteness theorem says you can't algorithmically "solve" math (in the sense that there's not a super-algorithm that can do all mathematics). Penrose said "aha but humans can so we're BETTER THAN TURING MACHINES." The skepticism of Penrose isn't that Gödel is wrong, it's about whether or not humans can do that. If Gödel's incompleteness theorems suggest that our universe isn't a simulation, that's a different line of argument.
The problem with Penrose's argument is that humans are doing math pretty much as you'd expect if constrained by Gödel. By stumbling into theorems, working hard trying to prove them, and sometimes finding themselves stuck and unable to show something as either true or untrue. The crackpot smell with the physics paper is that Gödel's theorem is ultimately pretty limited. It says that any formal system powerful enough to do any sort of interesting math in allows stating the equivalent of the liar's paradox, which cannot logically resolve to be either true or false, therefore you can't have a mechanism for determining the truth of any proposition because you have liar's paradox propositions floating around. The equivalent impossibility theorem for computer science is the halting problem, you can't write a program that looks at the source code of any program and tells whether the program will terminate. For simulations, this would be saying something like that you need to actually run the simulation to see what kind of state it ultimately ends up in (and whether it stops at a steady state or goes on forever), and can't just look at the simulation's source code and figure it out. But it doesn't prohibit running the simulation and looking at what happens in it while it's running.
Even assuming the article is correct, I'm not sure it'll tell us anything useful about human capabilities versus silicon. Halting problem style arguments do claim that we can't build a literal machine-god that can figure out the exact trajectory of our universe ahead of time just by thinking hard. But that's not necessary to have machines that are better at doing everything humans value doing.
madeofmeat
2d ago
Perhaps the human mind is a computer in the sense that everything is, but there doesn't seem to be good evidence that it is a computer in the sense that the metaphor is helpful to understanding the human mind.
That's the thing. People didn't decide a priori that "everything is a computer". People just went looking for things that can't be mapped into computers all over nature and never found one.
Perhaps the human mind can't perform any mathematical calculations that cannot be performed by a Turing machine, but that doesn't mean that saying it is a computer is a helpful analogy.
This is pretty much what the debate comes down to though, remember the original argument was about whether we should expect AIs to surpass humans in everything humans can do. People keep trying to claim that humans have some magical domains of competence that will remain out of reach of AIs. For this to be an useful argument against claims of AI doom, it needs to cash out as the human mind doing some sort of work that shows up as output in the world, like a symphony or a beautiful masterpiece on a canvas. The theory of computation is very different from actual computer engineering, and the Aeon magazine writer seems to not understand this. It doesn't say anything about bytes, files, subroutines, operating systems, databases, images or buffers, just that there is some finite-length (but probably very long) lawful process that generates the speech or movement that shows that the thinking happened, and that the process could be translated to be run by a Turing machine.
While I am sure that "not everyone agrees" my understanding is that it seems pretty clear that the universe, itself, is not simulable.
I'm not a theoretical physicist but I'm pretty willing to bet that a physics paper that appeals to Gödel's incompleteness theorem for wide-ranging claims about the ultimate nature of reality will not end up receiving wide scientific agreement. The Gödel argument is basically the same thing Roger Penrose goes on about, and it goes back to John Lucas in 1959. It's had plenty of time to convince people and as far as I understand it by and large hasn't done that.
madeofmeat
3d ago
The thing is, I can’t code. I rely mainly on vuln scanning and static code testing, with a little bit of pen testing knowledge thrown in. Any advice on where I should start if I want to learn more about app development and coding?
Learn C to the point where you understand how to work with pointers and the whole business of a function receiving the pointer of a memory region and doing stuff to it. This is old-school, there's little new programming that should be done with C because of how hard it is to write secure programs in it. But it's great as a model that fits in your head for how the ground floor works in an actual computer program. Doubly so if you're interested in infosec, since a lot of attacks involve impendance mismatch between the conceptual idea of a program and the boots-on-ground reality of its runtime that's probably dealing with something written in C near the bottom.
You'll want to learn another programming language to write actual software in, but whatever you pick, if you know C, you now have the mental tool of asking "what kind of C program does this weird thing this programming language does reduce to?", which will hopefully help you see it as more of a useful tool than an inscrutable black box.
madeofmeat
3d ago
Neuroscience still has a lot of ground to cover, but we already know the brain isn't a binary computer. It seems to me that one very easily could be a materialist and think that the brain is not a computer and I've always been a bit puzzled by the consistent tendency to equivocate them.
The claim isn't that the brain is a "binary computer", it's that it's that however the brain works, it does not have computational capabilities that go beyond what is expressible by a Turing machine. So far we haven't been able to come up with a physical system of whatever sort that everyone agrees is able to come up with results that something like a digital computer can not even in principle. Roger Penrose does think that the human brain is one of those, and some mathematical insights humans can have are literally examples of super-Turing computation, but most everyone else thinks he's being a crank about this.
madeofmeat
7d ago
What, on God's green earth, would make you think that people want things to be fair or consistent? This is something you want, this is something autistic people want, this is something scientists want when running experiments and even then you'd need something to act as a control. The state of the world is not fair; this is the way of the world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, the systems we build around her as superior broken apes who are above it all are designed around it and the more of us there are the more you have to design for edge cases.
What do you think laws are for?
madeofmeat
10d ago
I feel like the current discourse advocating religion is pretty similar to the current discourse advocating wokeness. People probably know it's bullshit, but push it anyway because they think lying the right way will bring us a better world. A type of person thinks that sure, it's bullshit, but it's our good sort of bullshit that keeps the queers and the degenerates down instead of elevating them and will lead to prosperity and clean cities. Only you're still lying about important things, you know you are, and the same dynamics that broke down the consensus religion of previous generations will hit you as well.
What do you make of God not being a viable concept to appeal to in public discourse? We're living in a sort of mixed postmodern picture where everything is real and truths don't matter when it's about the dignity of religious people, but then if there is a global pandemic the alternative truth that microbes don't exist and sickness arises from peoples' chakras being spiritually misaligned will not be given equal hearing. Right now metaphysical beliefs from any religion seem to have no purchase in the sort of consensus reality discourse that says things like "our ongoing pandemic is caused by contagious microbes". If the place of religion in society is that the secular morlocks go "that's very nice dear, now go play in the corner, we've got three nuclear power plants to build and an mRNA vaccine to sequence against the latest pandemic", how does that look for religion's claimed capability to ascertain very important things about existence? People who like religions seem to want to generally to downplay this instead of honestly thinking what it entails. Fighting science hasn't gone very well, religious people enthusiastically tried, got trounced, and then developed sophisticated ideas about "separate magisteria" and coexisting with science. Coexisting with science is tricky as well, since science keeps moving. You can go "but consciousness!" today, but what if we get a broadly accepted scientific theory of consciousness in 2038? People who wanted to keep space for religion could go "but élan vital!" in 1910 but that one was doing significantly worse 50 years later. Doesn't stop people from still trying though.
The public discourse thing seems to not be just about the rise of science, it's also about the rise of cosmopolitanism. It's hard to ignore that there have been multiple very different world religions that all have had significant civilizations associated with them. "Why are you convinced it's specifically the religion you were raised in that's right" is a tough question. It's not a question asking you to tell you what you like specifically about your own religion. It's asking that if you think your own religion gets something specifically right that other religions don't, isn't it a bit suspicious it's mostly people who were raised in that religion who think so, and people who were raised with other world religions by and large happy there. If you take the consciousness and quantum physics thing seriously instead of just dishonestly dishing it out as apologetics for your pre-existing bottom line, this is a problem, because you're fishing for something that's the same in everyone's reality, not just a nice story of cultural tradition. Even if you think something like a first mover argument is convincing, it doesn't specify the God of Abraham who is particularly disgusted by the sight of human feces. If you take religions at face value, at most one can be right, but religious people who claim inner conviction of the truth of their own religion specifically seem to be happy with their own thing and there's no widespread movement of Sikhs, Shintoists, Catholics, Orthodox Zoroastrians and Jains going "so I looked into this American Mormonism thing and turns out my inner conviction of the truth of God now feels like the Mormons got a better picture of things than the thing I was raised with." So if there's one correct religion, religious people seem to not be very good at discovering it, and if you want to think that the religions all point to the same thing, then you run afoul with many religions themselves saying, nope, our specific picture is correct, people who think otherwise are damned heathens. If you think the first mover is valid but are agnostic about everything past that, you can't very honestly commit to an existing religion like Christianity that demands adherence to all sorts of specific things beyond that, and you lose the social cohesion angle. And if you want to stick with your one specific religion while ignoring this part, you've sunken pretty well into the woke-equivalent "we know it's bullshit but we'll lie to everyone that it's true to reap social benefits" thing again.
madeofmeat
11d ago
The idea that anyone would discuss their favorite 80s movie is equally absurd. First, nobody really thought of 80s movies as a distinct category. A more accurate description would have been asking about movies shown on cable ad nauseum. And the only 80s movies with any purchase among high school kids at the time would have been kids stuff like the Goonies or ET, or maybe comedies like Ghostbusters. Nobody was discussing something as obviously dated as Aliens. And nobody was certainly seeking out movies from the 80s as an exercise in nostalgia.
I was a kid in the 80s and I remember thinking about 80s movies as a distinct category in the 90s. I'd imprinted on the specifically 80s thing where movies had a central scifi or supernatural premise, took it reasonably seriously and had plenty of practical special effects. Aliens and Blade Runner were ten years old but they still had huge cultural cachet, as did the Star Wars movies with the newest one being from 1983. I remember wondering what happened to 80s moviemaking and why new movies in the 90s didn't feel the same anymore. I still feel like there were clear inflection points in movies around 1980 (maybe because Star Wars introduced the scifi blockbuster concept) and then again around 1990 (maybe CGI effects changed the aesthetics and cheap direct-to-video stuff started eating the market of the expensive tentpole films?)
madeofmeat
18d ago
There was some dark humor in Dishonored in that the nonlethal ways to eliminate your targets were stuff like them being sold as slaves with their tongues cut out or getting locked in a rape dungeon for life, that quite possibly left them wishing you'd just killed them instead.
madeofmeat
23d ago
Alexander Wales wasn't impressed by the quality of the worldbuilding.
madeofmeat
23d ago
It's kind of sad that the socialization part is both maybe the most important of these and the one least solvable just by you acting in a disciplined and regimented way yourself. If the people around you aren't your people and they don't care about things that you care about and you don't care about things they care about and every time socialization happens it's around things they care about and you don't, at some point you just become too tired and stop going.
madeofmeat
24d ago
That's what the texts Christians are supposed to believe in say, but the reality is pretty complex. Educated people in medieval Europe probably could claim Christian metaphysics as the correct theory of reality and not get pushback, but at some point pretty long ago this stopped being a thing. I'm pretty sure things had moved from thinking this was literally true to lip service by the late 1800s, and by now the Christians themselves know this too. There's a lot of twisting your brain to apologetics-pretzels to keep things going, and everyone openly knows that apologetics-pretzels-work can be necessary even for the people on the inside and there's no deep exchange of ideas with people on the outside because outsiders will just point-blank reject essential premises of the religious worldview. There's also very long tradition of co-existing with religions you don't share, which relies on things being explicitly labelled with "this is a religion", which is only a thing if you're living in a cosmopolitan society where you actually need to routinely deal with multiple religions.
Progressivism right now is a lot more like what religions might have been like in societies before things got to the point of a cosmopolitan Roman Empire. At that point people weren't saying "this is our religion", it was just the shared understanding how to act in the society and what the world was like. Once you need to interact regularly with people who have a different religion who you can't just conquer and subjugate, your own religion has a new authority problem and you start needing words like "religion". Once the world starts being much bigger and more advanced than when your religion was formulated, so your religious dogma both looks absurd at face value and your clerics start getting curbstomped in public debates because people don't share their load-bearing assumptions about how their worldview works anymore, you have more problems. Progressivism is still new enough that it hasn't really run into either of these problems, while they have been undeniable reality for religious people for centuries now. You can say Christianity is the literal truth, but with the sociological support not being around anymore it will look like performing to everyone, and people will assume even you treat it as performative more than literal.
Yeah, actually predicting live humans is a whole another ballgame. It's a very important question if you're looking for something like digital uploads of live humans, but matters much less for the job replacement question with AIs. What matters for the human replacement question is being able to do economically valuable actions skillfully and purposefully. Many different people can learn to do these. If you need to run a waste disposal plant effectively, you don't specifically need John Smith from Glendale, Arizona to do it. If it's a managerial position, you don't need a person physically present even. The manager needs to have the ability, intent, and awareness to perform their job, but from there on they can then pretty much do it by closely monitoring how things are going and sending emails, and it's a job any reasonably intelligent adult human can learn to do in time.
The economic human replacement question isn't about humans being exchanged with drop-in androids who look indistinguishable from live humans. It's about possibly quite non-human AIs being nevertheless able to learn and do economically valued work cheaper and better than humans, and what humans will do now. Used to be that humans would learn some new job and do that when specific machines automated the old one, but if it's general-purpose AIs replacing jobs instead of special-purpose machines, with any new job you have the question of why not have AIs learn that job as well and start doing it cheaper and better than humans.
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