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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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The Chinese Room again? Sigh.

Much as the Library of Babel is both exhaustive and utterly useless, it's the algorithmic capability of finding useful information and acting on it that matters, and not that it can theoretically be summoned. You can, if you are exceptionally stupid, try and make an LLM that works by outputting every single possible string of a given length until you get a satisfactory answer. The pitfalls are obvious.

In this particular case, you are merely frontloading the computation to a look-up table, not eliminating it entirely. For any practical configuration, someone had to go to the trouble of doing that. Human consciousness is a mess of individually stochastic neurons that in bulk can produce synchronous signals and something analogous to a clock rate, our perception of time as perfectly continuous is not representative of the underlying neuro-computation. You've just temporally shifted the cognition involved, not eliminated it, and our brain uses LUTs all the time, if you've memorized times tables, you're not doing elementary arithmetic to figure out 7*7=49. That's still maths.

So "computation be damned" is doing all the heavy lifting. Why don't you use your ML chops to run AIXI, if it's such a trivial thing to you?

Memory and response to inputs both mean the actual number of outputs would be infinite if not for mortality. As is, it's probably only one of those meaninglessly large journalist numbers like the number of atoms in the solar system or something. Not that you could in any way generate such a list of outputs without fully understanding and simulating my brain in the first place, even discounting the impossible time/space requirements of such a task.

More importantly, the computation is the entire fucking point. That this post could technically just be a meaningless random string of characters doesn't mean it is one, and you will not perceive it as one. It is very clearly chosen in a nonrandom process. Getting from your post to this reply required processing in my brain, something you can in no way skip by randomly picking one out of a list of all the possible outputs of my brain.