Discussion Topic |
|
This thread has been locked |
yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 09:41am PT
|
the professional robotic mathematician will happen before the basketball player.
So if a machine solves one of the Millennium problems, does it win the prize?
My point is I doubt many mathematicians are expecting this to happen anytime in the near future. The reason is many of the things we do when we think don't seem to have much to do with computation. Psychologically speaking mathematicians (mentally) look for patterns and connections. Often this comes out as startling realization after the brain (or the mind) is focused on a problem for a long period of time. Maybe there are secret mysterious computer algorithms running around in my brain underneath all this psychological sensation, or maybe brains just work differently from digital computers (even when they're organized working in parallel in networks). If AI guys want to demonstrate the first option, I think an autonomous computer that got interested in one of the Millennium problems, learned the requisite background and solved it would be pretty strong evidence.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 09:43am PT
|
it seems to me that the language of probability could be the best language for rational beliefs. Has anyone (say a philosopher or scientist) ever talked about that before?
I liked the book by Stephen Unwin. He took the view that even though some questions cannot be answered by the application of reason, that does not mean that rationality should not be employed.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/mar/08/highereducation.uk1
edit:
The article linked doesn't do justice to the book.
|
|
Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
|
|
|
Topic Author's Reply - Jun 24, 2017 - 09:59am PT
|
Interesting talk.
Helaje says: Markham is a lot of things but he's not a sham. The link I just posted is to a just published paper from Markram's HBP project - focus on the work, not the hype that sold it. No one calls Kurzweil a sham and he's way the f*#k farther out there with half of what comes out of his mouth than Markram. And your tendency to latch onto relatively insignificant things like a dog on a bone and present them like they're the main attraction in an attempt to make your points is weak - all the moreso when you basically don't know what you're talking about.
How do you define a shame? When some hustler sells a project promising thinking and feeling machines in a short time, he is totally misrepresenting the end game of his brain mapping project. And Searl and others have repeatedly called Kurzweil a TOTAL sham. Mind downloading and brain wipes are nothing but silly si-fi, and emulation is also impossible for the reasons you stated - that you'd need to recreate the environmental factors that shaped the hardware (brain) in the first place, plus a bunch of other intangibles. Same goes for Christof Koch, who rhapsodizes about IIT (integrated information theory) - how it "explains" many puzzling facts about consciousness and provides a blueprint for building sentient machines. The guys is clueless.
All of these "explanations," we can easily see, are more attempts to foist the processing/computer metaphor onto the consciousness discussion, once again conflating processing with sentience, as if ipso facto, one follows the other. And Healje, what in the world is it, what fantastic insight or line of reasoning is it that you are sure that I, and others, "don't know what we are talking about?" Specifics, please. What, in your mind, are we not "gettiing?"
Going on: Let's stick with: "magia as an elemental force pervading many natural processes" which is what Largo is suggesting in terms of a fundamental and pervasive awareness. Again, which is more likely: consciousness emergent from brians or a convergence of brains and magia?
How about this: Let's consider the weak and attraction as magic. Or maybe that gravity "emerges" from falling rocks. Where does that get you? Emergence, in terms of consciousness, leaves you with the Hard Problem. No escaping it, though you can attempt to dodge it and explain it away many ways, as most all functionalists do. But again, you are simply hoping for a classical (mechanistic/causal) way to "explain" consciousness, for the objective to also be the subjective, for the syntactic to also be the semantic, the outer the inner, the experiential the atomic, for your Uncle to also be your Aunt. And everything else is "magic."
Mercy...
Did you bother to read that link to the article from Searle. He answers many of the questions that you raise.
And this one: Why did consciousness ever emerge? (assuming it did).
Healje sez: Survival pure and simple. As far as consciousness being random, I'd say you're thinking about it the wrong way. Again, looking at extant species from bacteria to humans, there is a clear progression of capabilities from basic sense/response capabilities in bacteria on up through to the stalking/hunting behavior of both Jumping Spiders and Humans. It isn't like humans randomly and suddenly mutated to have a brain, but rather billions of years of steady evolution starting with the first sense/response capabilities and steadily improving through eons of species until central nervous systems and brains emerged and hundreds of millions of years later hominids eventually followed suit. Sense/response survived because it conveyed an advantage; it continued to evolve into brains, awareness, sentience and consciousness for the same reason.
The belief that time, accrued attributes, and natural selection would, or possibly could, perforce, prompt a brain to "evolve" into being sentient relies entirely on the complexity argument with a side order of processing. But there is nothing whatsoever in the real world to suggest this ever happens.
But it's interesting to try and reckon the line of reasoning that would lead a person to ever believe as much.
I think the intuitive take is that we are evolved species and we are sentient, so it follows that evolution "created" sentience once the organism either required consciousness or reached a level of such complex processing that the combination of processing and complexity WAS, in some strange way, sentience itself. That is, the syntactic, once it reaches a certain threshold, BECOME semantic. Searl blew that belief out of the water. Read it and weep.
In fact the whole business of talking about "emergence" per consciousness is a specious bunch of nothing.
Says Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Prerequisites for "emergence" and consciousness: Belief in Belief, Fake Explanations, Fake Causality, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
The failures of phlogiston and vitalism are historical hindsight. Dare I step out on a limb, and name some current theory which I deem analogously flawed?
I name emergence or emergent phenomena—usually defined as the study of systems whose high-level behaviors arise or "emerge" from the interaction of many low-level elements. ("The way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions".)
Taken literally, that description fits every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem.
Imagine pointing to a market crash and saying "It's not a quark!" Does that feel like an explanation? No? Then neither should saying "It's an emergent phenomenon!"
It's the noun "emergence" that I protest, rather than the verb "emerges from". There's nothing wrong with saying "X emerges from Y", where Y is some specific, detailed model with internal moving parts. "Arises from" is another legitimate phrase that means exactly the same thing: Gravity arises from the curvature of spacetime, according to the specific mathematical model of General Relativity. Chemistry arises from interactions between atoms, according to the specific model of quantum electrodynamics.
Now suppose I should say that gravity is explained by "arisence" or that chemistry is an "arising phenomenon", and claim that as my explanation.
The phrase "emerges from" is acceptable, just like "arises from" or "is caused by" are acceptable, if the phrase precedes some specific model to be judged on its own merits.
However, this is not the way "emergence" is commonly used. "Emergence" is commonly used as an explanation in its own right.
I have lost track of how many times I have heard people say, "Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon!" as if that explained intelligence. This usage fits all the checklist items for a mysterious answer to a mysterious question.
What do you know, after you have said that intelligence is "emergent"? You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world minds that you did not know before. It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don't anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed.
The hypothesis has no moving parts—there's no detailed internal model to manipulate. Those who proffer the hypothesis of "emergence" confess their ignorance of the internals, and take pride in it; they contrast the science of "emergence" to other sciences merely mundane.
And even after the answer of "Why? Emergence!" is given, the phenomenon is still a mystery and possesses the same sacred impenetrability it had at the start.
A fun exercise is to eliminate the adjective "emergent" from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different:
Before: Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing.
After: Human intelligence is a product of neurons firing.
Before: The behavior of the ant colony is the emergent outcome of the interactions of many individual ants.
After: The behavior of the ant colony is the outcome of the interactions of many individual ants.
Even better: A colony is made of ants. We can successfully predict some aspects of colony behavior using models that include only individual ants, without any global colony variables, showing that we understand how those colony behaviors arise from ant behaviors.
Another fun exercise is to replace the word "emergent" with the old word, the explanation that people had to use before emergence was invented:
Before: Life is an emergent phenomenon.
After: Life is a magical phenomenon.
Before: Human intelligence is an emergent product of neurons firing.
After: Human intelligence is a magical product of neurons firing.
Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon's behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes?
"Emergence" has become very popular, just as saying "magic" used to be very popular. "Emergence" has the same deep appeal to human psychology, for the same reason. "Emergence" is such a wonderfully easy explanation, and it feels good to say it; it gives you a sacred mystery to worship. Emergence is popular because it is the junk food of curiosity. You can explain anything using emergence, and so people do just that; for it feels so wonderful to explain things. Humans are still humans, even if they've taken a few science classes in college. Once they find a way to escape the shackles of settled science, they get up to the same shenanigans as their ancestors, dressed up in the literary genre of "science" but still the same species psychology.
|
|
MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 10:44am PT
|
it gives you a sacred mystery to worship
Thank you, wizard.
But mystery can be explored, too.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 11:01am PT
|
Modern science which devolved into materialism and scientism doesn't want to use the word magic or God,
that way modern science deludes and brainwashed itself into an illusionary authoritative state including,
pseudoscientific speculations and hypotheses, which, though unproven, are hypocritically included within the realm of science,
Instead, it uses word jugglery "emergent" and thus pats itself on the back and says;
"now there is no need for God"
|
|
Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 11:28am PT
|
"In everymans heart is a great yearning for freedom, but only his own. A great love of truth and honor in all its forms, but not in its substance."
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 01:45pm PT
|
The belief that time, accrued attributes, and natural selection would, or possibly could, perforce, prompt a brain to "evolve" into being sentient relies entirely on the complexity argument with a side order of processing. But there is nothing whatsoever in the real world to suggest this ever happens
And thus one might conclude consciousness is a kind of illusion, perhaps necessary for processing memory, which I would think is vital for survival.
As our resident sorceress Sycorax might say, you do seem to have a hard on for emergence. What were its transgressions for incurring such wrath? Give it a chance to overcome its weak character and become strong.
|
|
WBraun
climber
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 01:48pm PT
|
And thus one might conclude consciousness is a kind of illusion
Is NOT an illusion.
Because the soul is present within the body, consciousness pervades the entire body.
Anyone can see this simple fact.
Except for lost scientists who spend too much time in their minds speculating and theorizing.....
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 03:52pm PT
|
Largo: What do you know, after you have said that intelligence is "emergent"? You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world minds that you did not know before. It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don't anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed.
Really nice phrasing, John.
|
|
yanqui
climber
Balcarce, Argentina
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 08:12pm PT
|
Just ran across this, which seemed relevant. Michael Jordan (not the basketball player, the computer scientist at UCB) characterizes "Deep Think chatbots" as machines that "essentially perform parlor tricks in which they respond with comments that are loosely related to a particular conversation, but they “can’t say anything true about the real world."
http://fortune.com/2017/06/23/artificial-intelligence-deep-learning-hype/
Do you disagree, Ed?
To give some authoritative air to this, Wikipedia says: "In 2016, Jordan was identified as the "most influential computer scientist" [in the world] based on an analysis of the published literature by the Semantic Scholar project." When the expert scientists in the field talk, who am I to disagree?
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 08:16pm PT
|
What do you know, after you have said that intelligence is "emergent"? You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world minds that you did not know before. It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don't anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed
Why, you are correct. This is no more productive than a thousand pages of philosophy. Or twenty years of meditation.
Best to turn to neuroscience.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 09:20pm PT
|
I don't know if the "mind" is an emergent phenomenon resulting from a large number of neurons and synapsis connected together in a very complicated manner.
But it isn't a bad hypothesis, and the way this hypothesis is being developed, and tested, is the way it has been in other emergent phenomena.
The best example is that thermodynamics emerges from the statistical mechanics of atoms. While a number of analytic calculations had been performed in the past, and much good theory connects these two, computer simulations of large number of atoms interacting with ab initio interatomic forces calculated quantum mechanically have been able to address many fundamental issues regarding precisely how thermodynamics emerges from large collections of atoms.
The very basic question, how many atoms do you need to make this happen? can be tested by computer simulation.
Other important questions like: what is a solid/liquid/gas? which are well defined states in thermodynamics are more difficult to characterize in terms of statistical mechanical quantities. Yet the large scale, high fidelity calculations can provide physical insight, and these require rather large computers.
This is perhaps the best example of how "emergence" happens in physics. There are other phenomena which are studied for which the behavior of the system happens at a different "scale" than its component parts, and that behavior is difficult to understand in terms of the component parts.
You can take BCS theory of superconductivity as an example, for which the component parts are the valence electrons in the material, but interacting with each other indirectly, causing the material to have properties that are not usual for "normal" material.
There are many other examples.
Neural networks are good candidate models simply because they are based on actual biological neural networks. So one might reasonably ask the question about scale, and test it using computers, big computers. What is the scale that these behaviors might become evident, is there some "phase change" that occurs, can it be observed can it be calculated by some as yet unknown principles?
Anyone who's played with neural networks is surprised at the results. Its not hard to think you've experienced many of the same things your simulation exhibits. But those networks are not nearly complex enough to represent central nervous systems of almost anything.
Neural network architectures have been successfully deployed in many applications with encouraging results, at least in those applications, translation between languages being one of them, natural language recognition another.
We'll see.
Certainly using "emergence" as a blanket term is not very informative, but one can see those areas where emergence has been used successfully in physical theory, or at least those things we can wrap together and call "emergent."
I believe the famous Largo carpool were advocates of the idea that gravity wasn't a force, but an emergent phenomenon... they could describe, precisely, what that meant.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 09:24pm PT
|
Do you disagree, Ed?
I don't disagree, but on the other hand, you and I have both conversed with people who 'respond with comments that are loosely related to a particular conversation, but they “can’t say anything true about the real world." '
is this only a Chatbot problem?
the difference is that our "theory of mind" leads us to believe the Chatbot cannot have one, and the vapidly responding person does.
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 09:33pm PT
|
It isn't like humans randomly and suddenly mutated to have a brain, but rather billions of years of steady evolution starting with the first sense/response capabilities and steadily improving through eons of species until central nervous systems and brains emerged and hundreds of millions of years later hominids eventually followed suit. Sense/response survived because it conveyed an advantage; it continued to evolve into brains, awareness, sentience and consciousness for the same reason.
how Lamarckian...
why just one species? We are the crown of creation? oh my!
improving? it only matters if the mutation survives... which suggests, as Helaje correctly stated, that those mutations convey a survival advantage, and even then it is more likely than not that the mutation will not survive.
the randomness isn't in the individual, it is in the entirety of the population, and the randomness of mating in that population, and all the things that can happen as a result of that mating.
it is why I like the possibility that "human intelligence" is a result of sexual selection, not natural selection.
|
|
MikeL
Social climber
Southern Arizona
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 10:04pm PT
|
John: . . . one might conclude consciousness is a kind of illusion.
You actually see this? You believe this? Come on. Are you doubting your own consciousness as well?
Ed: . . . and all the things that can happen as a result of that mating.
Unspecified. Not good science. Speculation. Who knows what this implies?
As has been pointed out elsewhere, there are an infinite number of possible interpretations / theories for what appears to occur. If we be scientists, we need data and analysis.
Until then, we are just talking.
|
|
jgill
Boulder climber
The high prairie of southern Colorado
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 10:27pm PT
|
Until then, we are just talking
And to think, this thread had such promise.
How about a good thought experiment to rattle our shackles?
;>)
|
|
Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
|
|
|
Jun 24, 2017 - 10:58pm PT
|
Unspecified. Not good science. Speculation. Who knows what this implies?
I don't think you have read the relevant science, MikeL, and maybe you should.
|
|
healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
Jun 25, 2017 - 02:58am PT
|
John, so far the only person I've said is out of their league is you when you stray into and attempt to use some aspect of computers, computing and 'machines' as a strawman. There is no collective I'm referring to in that respect.
As far as why I believe what I do? Pretty straightforward - billions of years of evolution delivering ever more sophisticated nervous systems and brains. I mean really, skip the science and philosophy - what could possibly be the point? And, coincidentally, in absolute lockstep with that increasing neural sophistication one can clearly see increasingly more sophisticated behaviors.
And then let's take a look at the physical dependencies involved with you having subjective experiences. Your ability to have subjectively experiences at all and for you to have subjectively experiences other humans relate to or might consider 'normal' is entirely dependent on a brain operating within a incredibly narrow range of operating parameters. Tweak any of those dials even a notch and what 'you' subjectively experience can go badly awry and in fact you could easily be 'subjectively experiencing' all kinds of things utterly out of 'your' control (and such states of being unable to control what you are subjectively experiencing kind of begs the question of exactly what 'you' is). And then there is the enormous catalog of brain injuries and how they impact 'your' ability to have various subjectively experiences.
Hell, three weeks and the right drug and I could turn you into either a manic, hallucinating lunatic or a uni-polar depressive locked into a nightmarish repetitive loop of subjective experiences you don't want to have. So why would the 'mind', 'you', and your subjective experiences be so utterly dependent on and so exquisitely tuned to 'normative' brain states (or what the aerospace folks would call a brain operating 'nominally'). Again, what a remarkable coincidence and for sure "don't touch that dial"! Bottom line is it isn't some imagined or vague dependency between brain and mind but a very real and inseparable one.
And recognizing the inseparable nature of brains and behavior doesn't require PhD in philosophy or science or any extensive formalism. And, in a large number of animal species, that behavior includes awareness, sentience, and consciousness. You can also look at the hierarchy of neural sophistication in extant species and more or less pinpoint where awareness 'emerges' or is present; ditto for sentience and consciousness. And then there's your quale - you can claim that the subjectively experience of the color red is independent of the brain, yet with an fMRI it's possible to tell when you are subjectively experiencing red - i.e. there is an accompanying 'red' brain activation pattern that is consistent whether you are seeing or imagining red.
So given the evolutionary cost of developing brains, along with the in-synch nature of brains and behavior, and the fact that there are brain activation patterns associated with subjective experience leads me believe consciousness is a biological function / behaviour of sufficiently sophisticated brains. It also leads me to join the critics who consider Chalmer's easy problems hard and the hard problem easily dismissed.
And John and Chalmer's panpsychic alternative to that proposition is fraught with even more problems of its own. Simply claiming the brain couldn't possibly generate consciousness while at the same time presenting no cogent alternative might be a fine exercise in philosophy, but I gotta say even my cat isn't buying it.
|
|
|
SuperTopo on the Web
|
Let us know!