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August West
Trad climber
Where the wind blows strange
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Still waiting for an atheist to be sworn On the Origin of Species.
Moose
Nice one Moose, but...
As a self-proclaimed atheist, when I get sworn in as President, it is going to be on the constitution.
You aren't being sworn in to uphold the bible, or the Koran, or even the Origin of Species...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Simply pointing out that if you want to argue something you should at least be able to define the terms of your own argument.
Thing is, I've never felt like I was arguing. Rather offering up my observations and how I arrived at my conclusions. None of what I am saying is particularly original or new. But I have been around these issues enough to know that "should at least be able to define the terms," while it sounds like a simple statement, is anything but.
For example, say you don't believe Nagel when he says that consciousness is NOT a causal question. If you did believe him, a causal definition would not wash, since you would be explaining the topo, so to speak, leaving out the issue at question, which is the experiential aspect about consciousness rendered through CLIMBING THE ACTUAL ROUTE. If by "definition" you mean a calculation, computation, equation or physical algorithm, you're essentially asking for a zebra to be a flying fox, then balking when nobody can deliver on what you are asking for. This does not make consciousness "mysterious." It's the most obvious fact in your life. It's just that it cannot be meaningfully framed in the terms we normally use to "describe" objects that appear "out there."
As mentioned, one of trying to posit consciousness in computational terms is that computations always refer to physical processes - as listed on the topo map, so to speak. In the case of consciousness, this means attempting, first, to consider consciousness to be a physical output, and second, to think of it in terms of some gap that has to be bridged or transition made from straight up physical brain function (dancing neurons) to the phenomenological milieu. No one has the slightest idea how that could ever be accomplished in computational terms because those terms are always used to frame an observable or at any rate a measurable physical phenomenon. When people try and force the issue, they inevitably end up in the black hole of Identity Theory in trying to frame the phenomenological AS a physical property, that is, trying to capture the EXPERIENCE of climbing by way of the notation on the topo, when the notation was never meant, nor ever can accomplish this no matter what future data you collect with whatever accuracy.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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What is it about religious folks that make them so opposed to consider agreed upon language?
What is it about science folks that inclines them to gross meaningless generalizations?
argue: give reasons or cite evidence in support of an idea, action, or theory, typically with the aim of persuading others to share one's view.
Great idea, give it a try.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Largo wrote: Thing is...with whatever accuracy.
So, all the endless logical and philosophical obfuscation aside - a fundamental consciousness spawns the material universe? Yes or no?
MikeL wrote: Isn’t this (experiencing, learning, generalizing) anthropomorphizing just a little bit?
I'd say more than a little bit, AlphaZero doesn't experience anything.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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So, Werner is your guru?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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What is happening can be viewed computationally because that is all that is happening: computations, and physical responses. The machine is not consciously aware of either BEING a machine, or climbing Chingando. It has no subjective experience whatsoever.
You like making counter arguments by painting the argument in the most absurd terms. I do believe you feel it is absurd to pursue a scientific explanation of "mind" (that from the other thread).
In this case, you actually don't know whether or not AlphaZero has had the equivalent to a "subjective experience," to paraphrase the Rolling Stones, "you're no school boy, but you know what it's like."
If your argument is reduced to just that, we as humans "know" what consciousness is, and we has humans "know" that machines don't have it, well there is not much I can argue about.
However, with AlphaZero we have something that has become the most accomplished chess player in the history of the game. The architecture used to build such a machine has very close analogs to our own brain, and it learned to be a great player after 4 hours of self play (but playing many more games than has ever been played and recorded by humans).
Chess grand masters are awed by the play, the insight, the depth of knowledge, the style. It's not like anything they'd seen before.
You basically state that no matter what, the machine is a machine, and since it is, it can't possibly have a "subjective experience," or "consciousness" or any of those things. For you to say otherwise would require you to accept that these experiences are more general, and that they are physical.
You are never going to accept that.
Your definition of "subjective experience," "mind," "consciousness," and all that is basically that they are attributes of humans (this is not definition per se, but a requirement, that is, nothing other than humans have it, what ever "it" is).
So do we say that AlphaZero is intelligent?
in·tel·li·gence
/inˈteləjəns/
noun
1. the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
It would seem to pass that test.
And if we accept that a machine is intelligent, do we separate intelligence from "mind," "consciousness," "subjective experience," etc? that is, intelligence is not a part of what we are talking about.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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So do we say that AlphaZero is intelligent?
I don't. It's a state machine which uses ML to advance from state to state.
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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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So do we say that AlphaZero is intelligent? So 500 million years ago would we have declared a tiny soft bellied fish, the ancestor to all vertebrates, has intelligence?
No, but it possessed the potential of Implicit, Explicit and Genetic memory and the ability to learn and adapt which lead to intelligence and consciousness. Self aware AI is only a matter of time- it won't take 500 million years.
Who would have thought the descendants of this tiny fish would reflexively delineate their own consciousness and spiritual relevance from the animal kingdom and perceptually stop time with Homo Sapiens at the terminus of advancement?
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WBraun
climber
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Self aware AI is only a matter of time- it won't take 500 million years.
LOL .... Artificial Intelligence does NOT have a self.
You should stick to building your fine structures which require nice intelligence .......
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WBraun
climber
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algorithms can be grown to give it a sense of curiosity, to ask it's own questions instead of just answering the ones given to it.
Right there is exactly how you are trying to artificially imitate human consciousness.
human consciousness is already there ,,,, and that is YOU yourself.
You people are insane can't even see your own selves ......
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Contractor
Boulder climber
CA
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Who would have imagined this thing would grow up to be an insane, gross materialist? Point taken though, I should stick to building houses.
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Trump
climber
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Yea I agree human consciousness is already there. I don’t think that it’s that we can’t see that, so much as it is that we want to understand what that thing is. So we’re programming these little machines to see what they can do, and how well that does or doesn’t match the thing that we do. And we’re thinking about ourselves as pieces of a bigger puzzle, where that puzzle is that what we are has been 4 billion years in the making.
Forgive me for the simplicity of my thoughts, but I kind of think one of the fundamental differences between AlphaZero and ourselves with respect to consciousness (or at least with respect to self-consciousness, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which people are talking about?) is that we are programmed with an implicit connection between our own thoughts - the stuff that goes on in our brains - and our own physical survival, along with an implicit bias towards our own survival. There’s a mind body connection that is programmed into us and is fundamentally part of what/who we are.
Our survival - our physical survival - is so fundamental to and so deeply ingrained in what and who we are (in the process that created us) that I think that there’s no us without it. And I think that if we look at human thinking, there’s pretty much no human thinking without it being expressed in our thinking, either.
Does AlphaZero care whether or not it survives? Can we make it care?
Who did our programming - my programming? I don’t think that I did. How did they do it, and can I do that, or can the programmers of AlphaZero do that? I’m somewhat of a defective human in that I’m not so self-confirming as to believe that I know the answer to that one.
Yet. But heck, 4 billion years ago I didn’t even have opposable thumbs, so maybe we’ll figure it out in time. Seems like we’re making some progress, any way.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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. . . agreed upon language
Ugh.
This would seem to refer to consensus, but among whom? The rabble, the intellectuals, the academics or experts in a field, the ruling or dominant class?
Skills in reading and writing are hardly obvious or easy for anyone. Both take a lot of thought and practice. A listener and speaker need to be focused on the object of a conversation (if they get it), not the words. Definitions are a start and a basis for conversation, but they won’t help one all that much to find and develop shared understanding. One can read a seminal 30-page journal article and have to go over and over it to finally see what’s being pointed at.
Any challenging discussion requires participants to try to understand what the other(s) are saying, what they mean, what they are pointing to. It takes work. If one finds that others mean other things than what one (he or herself) means, then he or she might point that out: “What I mean is blah blah blah, not this or that which you seem to mean or be saying.”
An etymology of the word discussion refers to throwing stuff over a wall to another. Dialogue, on the other hand, requires close listening and careful writing or speaking. (Spelling can be an indicator of how careful one’s thoughts and writing is.) In a dialogue, meaning shifts and changes as each speaker picks up the last thought or expression and makes changes to it, and passes it on to the next person.
Parading definitions as a way to make or prove a claim is sophomoric. There is a certain amount of stupidity and ignorance in it. Citing definitions also tends to reflect the extent to which a person tolerates ambiguity and uncertainty.
I’d say, it ain’t nothing but ambiguity and uncertainty for as far as the eye can see. Try naming one thing that is not ambiguous or uncertain. There appears to be only one thing, even if we don’t know what it is: consciousness. Consciousness seems to be an impossible thing to deny.
If definitions (no matter whose . . . the OED, Merriam’s, etc.) were the final description / attribution of things in the universe, there wouldn’t be any need for research or writing or formal education. We could just give people the OED (all 20 volumes), and tell them that everything is in it.
Brother.
Trump: Who did our programming - my programming?
It's a conspiracy, my friend. And you're in on it.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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AlphaZero a state machine? not in my understanding of the conventional application, if you apply it to chess. Certainly the computer algorithm is executed by a state machine, the actual processors. However, if one subscribes to the idea that behavior originates ultimately to protein synthesis, that too is a "state machine." It's not clear that is the relevant level to consider high order behavior.
For AlphaZero, from the supplemental material to the Science article:
"AlphaZero evaluates positions non-linearly using deep neural networks, rather than the linear evaluation function used in typical chess programs. This provides a more powerful evaluation function, but may also introduce larger worst-case generalisation errors. When combined with alpha-beta search, which computes an explicit minimax, the biggest errors are typically propagated directly to the root of the subtree. By contrast, AlphaZero’s MCTS [Monte Carlos Tree Search] averages over the position evaluations within a subtree, rather than computing the minimax evaluation of that subtree. We speculate that the approximation errors introduced by neural networks therefore tend to cancel out when evaluating a large subtree."
In some ways, the probabilistic approach breaks the causal connection which are a part of the state-machine description of such systems. Certainly conditional branches can depend on a calculation of state probability, but that is not what is going on here.
The researchers don't know either, "We speculate..."
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Trump
climber
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It’s
I think that healthy for a human is knowing what is, or at least believing that we do. Wishing us all health!
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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So, all the endless logical and philosophical obfuscation aside - a fundamental consciousness spawns the material universe? Yes or no?
It certainly does (spawns it) for our sensory, conscious understanding. The forms of sensibility are interpretations of what exists around us that feed the understanding but do not reflect directly reality. Our sensory experience is a reflective interpretation of reality created by the conscious mind. The outside thing as a perception is only inside.
Is life a fundamental aspect of the universe? I mean given the proper conditions, and those conditions must exist with some regularity given the scope of the universe, is life inevitable? Is it inevitable that life will produce, through natural selection, consciousness? Depends on what you mean by fundamental, perhaps "inevitable" is a better way of looking at it. Is anything that is inevitable then and therefore fundamental? I don't think the issue is obfuscation, the topic is just so complex.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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This would seem to refer to consensus, but among whom? The rabble, the intellectuals, the academics or experts in a field, the ruling or dominant class?
on the STForum it would seem like the answer to this would be "all of the above."
If you are criticizing me for using a "dictionary definition," as an authority, it is probably apt, however, using an authority (and dictionaries are the work of authorities) as a starting point for a discussion is an oft used pedagogical device for eliciting further discussion of the point.
So what is intelligence?
You will punt on this, asserting that it is just a rabbit hole for us all to fall down. This side steps the discussion, homogenizing it all to just some quagmire from which the eternal "Truth" can never be extracted.
If you actually believe in your program of the solitary researcher disconnected from any outside distraction is the ideal, then what use is language? which is by nature a means of communicating among many people. Communicating with oneself allows for the development of a language for one, whose definitions do not have to mean anything to anyone else.
Upon reaching the "Truth," of course, the language that it is written in is incomprehensible to anyone else. Perhaps it only matters that one believes that one has reached the "Truth" themselves, and can prove it to themselves, without caring to show anyone else.
(Read David Brooks' NYT OpEd today, poor Brooks, he's driven to extreme highs and lows by our times).
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Pretty basic, chess is a game of states - each player's move progressively advances the state of the game and each board position after a move represents the current state. How the game advances from state-to-state is another matter altogether. And while AlphaZero can map out the [full] truth of chess from any position, it isn't intelligent in any sense of the word to my way of thinking.
I earlier posted a six-part series on the technology used which is basically just two principal components: a neural network and an algorithm called Monte Carlo Tree Search (which dates back to the 1940s). Also, nothing about the DeepMind hardware resembles our brains neuroanatomy.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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You like making counter arguments by painting the argument in the most absurd terms. I do believe you feel it is absurd to pursue a scientific explanation of "mind" (that from the other thread).
In this case, you actually don't know whether or not AlphaZero has had the equivalent to a "subjective experience," to paraphrase the Rolling Stones, "you're no school boy, but you know what it's like."
If your argument is reduced to just that, we as humans "know" what consciousness is, and we has humans "know" that machines don't have it, well there is not much I can argue about.
However, with AlphaZero we have something that has become the most accomplished chess player in the history of the game. The architecture used to build such a machine has very close analogs to our own brain, and it learned to be a great player after 4 hours of self play (but playing many more games than has ever been played and recorded by humans).
Chess grand masters are awed by the play, the insight, the depth of knowledge, the style. It's not like anything they'd seen before.
You basically state that no matter what, the machine is a machine, and since it is, it can't possibly have a "subjective experience," or "consciousness" or any of those things. For you to say otherwise would require you to accept that these experiences are more general, and that they are physical.
I read this and I am, in a sense, mystified by your response, Ed. As mentioned, I have never looked at this like an argument, but rather an adventure that requires a constant updating and clarifying one's position, and what's more, for a position to be roundly described so we can follow the author's thinking on the subject.
And then we have you saying that I am positing things in absurd terms.
You said: I do believe you feel it is absurd to pursue a scientific explanation of "mind" (that from the other thread).
I gave as good an example as I could come up with for someone not fully giggy with the Consciousness game to try and understand the difference between objective and subjective, in ways I believed we could all understand. That the information gleaned from a topo was not and could never be a representation of the CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE of climbing the route listed on the topo. Is this something you are really wiling to try and refute? That objective information on the topo IS the conscious experience. Can you get the point at all, or does it seem "absurd" to you, and if so, why? I honestly have no idea where you would possibly be coming from if you said, Yes, the objective info on the topo fully explains your conscious experience of CLIMBING Chingando.
So when you say, "you feel it is absurd to pursue a scientific explanation of "mind," I have no idea whatsoever what you actually mean by this, or how you can possibly explain, by way of a topo (objective notation), so to speak, the reality of conscious experience, when objective information has always spoken for objective functioning.
Fact is, I think neuroscience has made great strides per explaining how the brain generates the raw data OF consciousness, but I'm at a total loss per why you believe that this data stream should or could explain or is any way a linear/causal "explanation" of why we are aware of same. Your arguments seem to work off the first assumption that the computation of objective data in and of itself "creates" conscious awareness, we simply don't yet understand the physical mechanism by which this magical act is accomplished. I'm also curious about what, in your experience as a conscious human being, ever made you believe that your awareness IS a computation, as opposed to a field in which computations arise and are known through your direct experience.
My sense of this is that you believe that by way of computations, consciousness is basically self-sourced, or is a causal output of computations, though there is nothing whatsoever that has been demonstrated that shows ANY relationship between physical structure, processing, complexity, etc. with conscious awareness.
Lastly, when Thomas Nagel said, The question of consciousness is not a causal question, what do you think he meant by that? Was Nagel another who simply "did not understand the data."
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Largo wrote: I read this and ...did not understand the data.
So, all the endless logical and philosophical obfuscation aside - a fundamental consciousness spawns the material universe? Yes or no?
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