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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Jan 31, 2017 - 05:13pm PT
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Werner, maybe the jail is an amorphous hell of consciousness without form, and we escaped from jail when we got to Earth? Or last when the universe was created?
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WBraun
climber
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Jan 31, 2017 - 05:17pm PT
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Maybe?
Now you're guessing and speculating what is brewing up in your mind from your material only experience.
Consciousness is NOT material.
By the way, NutAgain!, .... nice post you did up there on A1.
You do see beyond the norm much better than most .....
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Jan 31, 2017 - 07:00pm PT
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Song of the Dodo
Imagine a brilliant tactician that wants to achieve the objectives of whoever commands it, but it has no sense of value for dodo life, no ability to recognize what are the things that dodos consider worth dying for, or what constitutes a reasonable outcome for all dodo life, or whether it has values that are appropriate to exercise in our world. We need to invest more in dodo intelligence and understanding emotions, creating a real science out of raising our chicks.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 31, 2017 - 07:38pm PT
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The Man Who Saw Infinity.
See this movie - all who love math or just wondering genius.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jan 31, 2017 - 08:10pm PT
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Randisi: Why do context and object matter to you, Mike?
I’m always trying to focus on the object of conversation, Randisi. THAT’S what a conversation is focused on, rather than the a determination based upon a definitions of words. (I can imagine that statement may make no logical sense. If we didn't know what variables stood for, how could we argue that an equation was insightful?) Poetry relies upon metaphorical association. “What the heck is that poem talking about?”
How is it that a poet can use metaphors and a flurry of rhetorical techniques so that we get a subtle point on a complex idea without clear and discrete defintions?
I’d argue it’s much the same even in scientific research studies (from what I’ve seen). To assume (and think) that all scientific research studies are clear, discrete, and obvious is, . . . well, . . . indicative of little experience in the professional practice (IMO).
I’ll try to be clear about my own position. I don’t think any of us can say what anything is, but we can talk around and about our conceptions and our experiences. We can come to loose understandings about various things--but not exactly (which I embrace).
An author often suffers great pains to articulate what they are feeling or what’s in their mind. But we need a Spock-like mind-melding to see just what others are seeing. Context and getting some sense of the object of conversation usually increases understanding.
It’s the conversation that matters, not the words. But we generate the conversation with words.
It’s like an architect intending to make an “aesthetic statement,” one which can only be effected through indirect technical means.
An artist employs materials and various tools to articulate a vision. (Think: particular rock strata and formations, climbing competence, and the current state of technical tools.)
Paint, metal-working apparatus, various concepts of structural integrity and functionality, labor, the mathematics of physical stress vectors, the characteristics of various materials, and so forth are all important information and frameworks to understand and incorporate in any architectural effort, but not one or any of them together tell us how an architect’s "work of art" emerges from the mundane, inventory of material and human capabilities. N'est pas?
In the final analysis, this is what all of us are doing here, maybe. We are all presenting visions, and we rely upon many technical considerations to do so. Let's keep our eye on the ball: it’s not the technologies or the technical considerations that ultimately matter; it’s the visions. The technologies enable the visions. But first, one must have vision. Got one of those?
Context and knowing the “object of conversation” help a great deal to understand what people are talking about, what they are trying to point to (but they do not bring closure).
My conceited apology has usually been here: “we’re just talking.” I know that's an apparent cop-out to most, but it's sincere.
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WBraun
climber
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The Man Who Knew Infinity
It reminds me exactly of this thread.
The very first thing they say in this thread in a nutshell "there's no evidence and it's all bullsh!t, there's no need for this,
we already know that material nature is all in all and nothing more, etc etc etc"
Only "WE" material scientist will ultimately figgure everything out ..... in the future.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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I just recently saw the movie "The Man Who Knew Infinity," and it was a compelling romantic story based on Ramanujan's life at Cambridge. As far as I can tell, the screen writers cribbed extensively from both the C. P. Snow forward of C. H. Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology" and from the body of that work. In particular, the entire plot of the movie, and many of it's lines, seem taken directly from that forward.
But then, I much prefer reading these popular accounts than seeing the movie, for instance, I thought that the book by Sylvia Nasar, "A Beautiful Mind" was much much better than the movie of the same name...
this can all be excused in the name of "story telling," I'd rather think that good story tellers can be better.
In particular, and perhaps that is where the reference contacts this thread, one wonders at how this mathematics comes to be. And in Ramanujan's explanation it is divine, and perhaps Snow would be sympathetic to that explanation, but Hardy would not have. In spite of this difference of opinion, Hardy was compelled to work with Ramanujan because of the mathematics. The movie doesn't give us any idea why, we gain no insight, really, into what was so amazing.
In the movie it comes down to the number 1729, and whether or not it is remarkable. Does it not seem remarkable, first and foremost, that these men actually notice such things and have such thoughts? not just on a daily basis, but as a very part of their lives.
The statement of Ramanujan that 1729 is interesting, a story that Snow tells, appears instantaneously, his reply to Hardy's lament ("it didn't seem a very interesting number") was that it was the smallest number that can be expressed in two ways as the sum of cubes,
It even has it's own wiki page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1729_(number);
and a slightly deeper look
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
as an exercise, try to explain something amazing in the very next number you see...
lest you think I am just cranky about things scientific/mathematical, I found the biographical movie "Mr. Turner" about J. M. W. Turner equally thin... and in particular, the potential use of cinematography to capture some of the essence fell far short, no doubt because it takes time, such light conditions cannot be experienced on the schedule of a movie shoot.
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Jgill and Ed:
It’s a good story, I suppose.
I got passed up for a paid fellowship at Oxford’s Templeton College (business) coming out with my Ph.D. when the economy declined in 1993. Instead, I took my first job at U of Warwick outside of Coventry (my chair at the U of Illinois was a Brit).
I was a bit surprised at the social stratification that still existed at that time in the UK, especially as i found it in England. Perhaps it’s the same today. Back then I felt there was a strong sense of class structure among many Brits.
Srinivasa Ramanujan’s story should not be surprising to anyone—especially in the beginning of the last century. I wonder if the story in the book / movie is interesting for its mathematics, or class struggle.
One might hope or expect that mathematics would ignore class and other biases.
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jstan
climber
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A hypothesis:
Conceive if you will of a person who has consciousness but absolutely no sense of time. Time is the very stuff of consciousness.
And each of us comes equipped with a clock that regularly ticks about once per second.
Or consider the challenge of having no ego while facing a grizzly.
We, like all living things, are machines designed to survive. If we were not we would not be here.
To see what we are, we need first to find what survival requires of us.
For example, the chance of surviving is improved if we disregard the fact that death is inevitable. To improve our chance of survival we accept discomfort and even strange behavior at the end.
A small price to pay?
There are consequences to this hypothesis.
Secretariat’s heart was found to be twice normal size. And the horse won the Belmont thirty one lengths ahead. Tell me that horse had no ego. Go ahead. I dare you.
We need, here and elsewhere, to get our egos under control.
Things have changed here on earth.
Survival now requires this.
Watch Douglas Adams talk on the Kakapo. That is where we humans now find ourselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCsHuoVABgI
This thread is an experiment in “crowd thinking”. Has been looking more up to it’s potential the last day or two.
Go for it!
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 1, 2017 - 11:10am PT
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Ed is right that the seemingly transcendental aspects of the origin of the math was never touched upon in any substantive way. I was just pleased to see how at least some of the creative PROCESS was put on display, and that the source of the material came from such humble origins. And also to see the fierce resistance that many had to offering a new approach to what was apparently a pretty rigid paradigm. Radical ideas have always felt insane and unfounded because they are not strictly derivative. Plus most radical ideas don't pan out IME.
But the narrative for the movie lacked juice, for sure.
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WBraun
climber
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Or consider the challenge of having no ego while facing a grizzly.
No one has ever done it nor can it ever be done, nor will it ever be done.
Ego is the individual living entity's personality.
Just like no two snowflakes are ever the same.
It's false ego that you are worried about.
False ego is when the living entity falsely thinks in its materially contaminated mind "I am a product of material nature".
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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"Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. [...] It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done."
W. H. Hardy
He could be wrong. He was wrong about number theory serving no warlike purpose.
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jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
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I don't agree with Hardy's comment about second rate minds, but his statement defining the primary role of a research mathematician is generally accepted in the community. Intellectual exploration and discovery, invention, creativity, and rigorous logic are principles of the craft. Teaching in a small state university I was only on the fringe of this erudite mathematical society, fortunate to be a member of a small international specialty group that met periodically.
However, most mathematical progressions lead upward into higher and higher levels of abstraction and are of little consequence other than to bolster mathematical genealogy. When I visit ArXive.org and pull up papers in my broad general area (complex analysis) I am perplexed, unable to even decipher some of the titles, much less understand the research. This process perpetuates simply because each level of research gets more or less "mined out" and that frequently the easiest way to go is to generalize and move up into a higher plane of abstraction. And coupled with that goal is the concurrent effort to bring together various specialty areas, like analysis and algebra.
That's not to say that higher abstractions aren't useful. Hilbert spaces, at the beginning of the twentieth century, were considered quite abstract, but are very important in quantum theory.
As for Ramanujan, he had a singular ability to conceive very complicated functional expansions, which he wrote down - usually without proofs of their validity - in his notebooks. Over the years a number of PhD theses projects have explored and verified many of these formulae. Most if not all research mathematicians have this ability to a lessor extent - to have "aha!" moments in which it all comes together.
But Ramanujan seems to have been operating on a higher plane. This makes one wonder if AI at some point will surge past human abilities in this regard and establish such elaborate formulae that humans will simply concede, giving up trying to verify rigorously such results. The infamous Four color problem was "solved" in the 1970s by extensive use of computer programs testing many cases.
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WBraun
climber
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if AI at some point will surge past human abilities
Ain't never gonna happen ever.
Only God can do that.
You materialists are trying to imitate God = Failed .....
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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“we are escalating our capacity to meddle with forces beyond our maturity to manage and I don't see any way it will stop no matter how many conferences or discussions we have about it. The thing is, the bad outcomes can evolve so rapidly that we will barely blink and notice after the fact when we are beyond screwed. It will be one day where people are saying "yeah yeah those tinfoil hat conspiracy theory scientists have been warning about this" and then suddenly it will be everywhere.” -NutAgain
NutAgain, wow, that’s a pretty impressive post. It looks like you’re very much on top of it as you hit all the major salient points that concern much of the AI community. An impressive post esp if you’re not actively following these guys and the AI subjects.
Personally I think E Musk is way far out there dreaming way beyond his usual if he thinks any bio engineering anytime soon is going to substantially increase mind brain output through some sort of electronic interface let alone AI interface. Input to the mind-brain is one thing (conveyed over consolidated sensory nerves, eg optic or auditory), output (from a diffuse cerebrum or cortex?) - that's a whole nother beast, I’d say.
I wish we had more time and space, you raise a lot of interesting matter that is fun to philosophize over and is challenging to think through as mental exercise.
It is interesting that you mention the AI community and its output might benefit by bridging, if I got that right, between raising and training our children and training AI when it comes to instilling values.
Those guys in the pic video are all leaders in the field. It is quite a line-up of who’s who. If you haven’t already they’re each worth checking out at Wiki and also at youtube. Stuart Russell and Nick Bostrum in particular. I read Bostrum’s Superintelligence last year.
The “control problem” aka the “alignment problem” is interesting. The basic idea / concern: Any misalignment between human values (criteria for success) and machine values (criteria for success) could be disasterous. For us humans. Esp as machines become “super human intelligent.”
Really your post is chock-full of many great points and concerns. It’s nice to see you’ve clearly given the subject some thought. I am curious if you’ve seen the recent Sam Harris TED talk on AI or heard his recent podcast episode with Stuart Russell re AI and also the episode with Neil deGrasse Tyson who touches on it? Imo, they’re worth listening to and they touch on many points and issues you did. Some here on this thread, btw, eagerly diss S Harris but I have continuously and reliably found him an excellent conduit to these very interesting AI subjects and also to many others.
RE (1) “emotionally stunted scientists who overcompensate with their analytical side” (2) “another scientist plagued by narrow scope and vision” So I get what you mean I think. Some of this probably goes with the territory, after all they are specialists in the field. Further, as you know, there is always the dilemma that speakers have. Just how superficial or deep to tailor a talk or a response as a function of audience, aims and available time. I think a major aim of the conference and also this line-up was just to continue to raise public awareness concerning these developments and potential downsides and further just to get out some general and salient points for a wider audience. I haven’t had time to watch any of the singular talks from this AI conference. They are probably more specific and detailed. Maybe at some point I’ll have time and I’ll get around to it.
So regarding superintelligent AI growth and its dangers, a mental exercise: If tomorrow you were King of America (case I) or King of the World (case II) and knowing what you know what if anything might you do? What if as KOA, you knew the King of China or the King of Iran was working feverishly toward human level or super AI? In case II, as KotW, could you see yourself passing an executive order, a Royal Order I guess, outlawing all AI R&D above certain limits (at least till economic political ideological systems were more favorable? more mature? Human maturity levels as well)?
It is an interesting thought isn’t it? that conceivably at some point or in a counterfactual world we could have different economic, political, ideological systems in place – perhaps more egalitarian-minded and mature ones - that might better and more equitably serve humanity when human level AI or super AI emerges. And that present ones, owing to their basic natures or degrees of development, are considered by many worrisome because of their perceived inadequacies.
I don’t know to what extent if any you’ve watched Humans, Westworld or seen the films Her, Ex Machina, Transcendence but they highlight and dramatize very effectively, imo, each in their own way albeit amongst some silly parts, many of these points and concerns.
The big question I gathered from somewhere I can’t remember where I heard it articulated so well: How to prepare future generations for a workplace bristling full of AI, so-called Narrow AI for starters and then later General AI.
I just re-read your post, I really can’t disagree with any of your major points. It’s obvious you get it and you’re paying attention to what’s going on. Again, if you have any time, you might find the Stuart Russell episode on the Harris podcast of some value and insight. I really liked the way they articulated the dangers associated with this possible “asymmetrical distribution” you mentioned and its effects.
And then there's Virtual Reality (Simulated Worlds) to consider too in the not so distant future. It's going to become increasingly powerful stuff. The 64 million dollar question: Will humans be able to adapt to it without getting thoroughly immersed in it, and addicted to it? Maybe this explains the Fermi Paradox?
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MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
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Largo: . . . the seemingly transcendental aspects of the origin of the math was never touched upon . . . .
We could find transcendental aspects in a good cabernet. My teacher tells me there’s nothing but.
Jstan: . . . the challenge of having no ego while facing a grizzly.
Dude, haven’t you ever watched a good Kung Fu movie? The hero trains mind and body to react to adversity automatically. Mind is gone. Just action!
Supposedly, it's happening all the time. It’s just that you’re unpracticed at the things that you think threaten you. #1: there is no real threat. Not really. (I can hear the line coming now.) #2: Instinct and inherent wisdom are wonderful. Just tap into it. #3: Don’t go looking for trouble; leave grizzlies alone.
Of course you have an ego. It’s just not what you think it is.
This is small potatoes. Let’s get to what’s happening now.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 1, 2017 - 09:35pm PT
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Hard AI is mistaken on two fronts. First, they misunderstand what consciousness is, rarely if ever having studied it in any substantive or direct way, and second their typical analogies to a computer model often misrepresents computers. An excellent look at the later gaff is presented in this article.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-minds-are-not-like-computers
The singularity is one of the biggest circle jerks going, but there are a lot of would-be Frankensteins out there, and plenty of folks who dream of immortality. What I believe confuses people is that consciousness involves both machine like functioning that is governed by physical laws, and phenomenon that impossible to wrangle with metaphorical or even symbolic language because it is not "like" any other phenomenon in reality.
More on this shortly.
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