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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26721 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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It mostly strikes me as incoherent, no number of d20s can implement computation

Granted, the d20s are an intentional Reductio ad Absurdum, but if @self_made_human's mechanistic model of consciousness is correct, there is nothing their brain (or your brain for that matter) can produce that could not be reproduced by (or replaced with) rolling dice on a sufficiently detailed random encounter table "computation" be damned.

Edit: fixed link

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?

The Chinese Room keeps coming up because it happens to be an apt analogy/useful illustration. See my reply down-thread.

Why don't you use your ML chops to run AIXI, if it's such a trivial thing to you?

How can you be sure that I haven't?

How can you be sure that I haven't?

Given that AIXI is uncomputable, I'm eagerly awaiting the announcement of you being the recepient of the Turing award.

Given that AIXI is uncomputable...

Only if you assume that both consciousness and reality are inductive, and you know what they say about assumptions right? ;-)

Edit: to be less inflammatory.

By Allah, is that comment the one you wish to rephrase to be less inflammatory?

For anyone reading, the original was along the lines of "Only if you assume reality is inductive ;)". That would probably be the least inflammatory or questionable thing you've said in living memory. It's like if someone resurrected Hitler and gave him a rundown of all the unkind things people have said about him over the years, and his takeaway was to give up on vegetarianism.

By Allah, is that comment the one you wish to rephrase to be less inflammatory? For anyone reading, the original was along the lines of "Only if you assume reality is inductive ;)"

Yes, and that was not the original.

Reality is clearly whatever you wish it to be, Hlynka 🙏

Wishing has nothing to do with it.

The ultimate measure of a Shaman is whether his Hexes work.

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.

That this post could technically just be a meaningless random string of characters doesn't mean it is one...

Precisely. But how would you go about demonstrating that?

Basic information theory would suffice, unless you want me to demonstrate the concepts of meaning or the validity of induction. In which case you've retreated from your original point to the standard 'treating solipsism as a gotcha against materialists' position. This has come up so often on this board, I should come up with a catchy enough formulation to make it my flair: either any communication happens between real minds existing in an inductive external reality (including thoughts as communication across time) or the concept of communication is nonsense. So prepend any communication ever with "Conditional on solipsism being false,".

Which brings us right back to @firmamenti and @ChickenOverlord's exchange at the top of this thread.

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