David Chalmers, a dualist and a kind-of sort-of panpsychist, believes that consciousness is NOT enitirely physical. See his famous “zombie” theory in this regard.
I’m in his camp.
This is a quote I used in one of my posts at my blog. Seems appropriate to this discussion.
Think of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren’t you? How else could you remember it?
But here is the bombshell: you weren’t there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over (which is why you eat, of course). You are not even the same shape as you were then.
The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.
– Steve Grand
One problem I have with this is the statement that the philosophical problem is “2000 years old”. But the actual discussion really refers only to about 400 year old ideas, that is, Descartes and after. The earlier notions of mind were rather different, especially Aristotle’s. I was reluctant, but ended up believing he got it right.
I am someone who works in AI. AI both suffers and benefits from a fundamental misconception. That misconception is that it it Artificial Intelligence. In fact the best we can do is Assisted Intelligence. Our current AI tools can crunch through mountains of data and give us the pieces that are worth looking at. That is very useful and is why AI is such a growing field. Artificial Intelligence is an effective and false advertising term. If you want to understand what AI is, here’s my succinct summary:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-you-need-know-big-data-artificial-intelligence-frank-hood.
Of course, many AI researchers suffer from the delusion that the false advertising gives them until they get far enough into the field to see it for what it is–an innovative and useful computer tool, but not consciousness.
Unfortunately the trend over the last few decades has been, rather than turn computers into human beings, to turn human beings into unthinking, fact-spewing machines via the way we school them. We forget the first rule of computers, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Once again, taking advantage of the open-thread offer.
Sergej Sumlenny, a self-described expert on eastern Europe, has started an interesting Twitter thread on the role of Russian publishers and bookstores in promoting Stalinism, a war against the NATO and the West, and a war against Ukraine specifically.
This was suggested, by Tyler Cowen, at his blog “Marginal Revolution.” According to some of the comments at Cowen’s blog, Sumlenny is a loose cannon who’s more often wrong than right. Still, his description of Russian publishing and bookstores is sobering. Take his interpretation as you will.
@ambisinistral:
All that says is that the matter in your body has changed. To read that as “you weren’t there” involves many assumptions, which are not truths universally acknowledged.
Just putting this story out there:
“Police didn’t try to open doors to Uvalde classrooms with shooter inside: Source”
Mike – Wasn’t that topic about the police thoroughly discussed on the 6/18 open thread and “why has the right judged the Uvalde Police so quickly” post? You want another post going after it again?
There are over 90 comments on each of those posts….
I drove from Vegas to Cincinnati over the weekend. Gas prices are definitely lower than the trip out the week before. I saw one station as low as $4.20, but anything under $4.45 was rare. Probably averaged about $4.69.
On the “door wasn’t locked” report: All of the published accounts cite “a source” or “sources.” Until “sources” identify themselves and how they came by the information they allegedly have, it’s all hearsay and unconfirmed. If true, it’s terrible. We have no way to evaluate it without “sources” being identified and evaluated.
Thanks, Frank, for the essay on assisted intelligence.
In 2012, 85% of the seats in the legislature were won by the Socialist Party, Les Republicains, and the Ecologist pole. This year, those three parties won 20% between them. The majority of the seats among those on the left and those on the right were taken by Euroskeptic candidates, giving the Euroskeptic element 28% of the seats in the legislature.
Kate:
I agree. But some want to play Uvalde Groundhog Day.
>Thanks, Frank, for the essay on assisted intelligence.
Ditto!
“We have no way to evaluate it without “sources” being identified and evaluated.”
That is entirely proper…as long as you don’t also suggest we should be happy and content with Uvalde police preventing the public from hearing 911 calls or viewing body camera footage of that day.
I just want there to be one standard on this stuff. Not one where, for example, doubt is cast on the statements made by a mother in the immediate aftermath of the shooting but carefully planned and prepared comments by the Uvalde school police chief made over two weeks later are treated as gold.
Mike
Bunge hasn’t noticed that this isn’t his blog.
Who is this “we” that he represents?
Bunge.
Didnt descartes settle this yes no more macho grande
The mind is such an intricate thing i cant imagine full sentience could be achieved
Long ago, I got interested in The Perceptron. That was before medical school so I got busy with other things. More recently, I have read a bit more about AI but could not get really interested in it. The role of the physical brain in psychology is a bit more interesting. One of my students was planning to go into pediatric neurology. I gave her some articles about Prairie voles, and autism. This has now become a huge area of research.
A year or two ago I tried to brush up on the current state of AI, just a little. I was curious (upset perhaps) about these self driving automobiles. Telsa has used this misnomer “autopilot” for a long time, although more recently they claim it really is more of a full autopilot.
Telsa autopilot technology has been killing people for a long time, but most of that has been Tesla “drivers” or passengers becoming victims which doesn’t bother me too much. The most notorious fatality outside of a self-driving vehicle was the lady walking a bicycle in the roadway in AZ. That was an Uber testing accident using their own technology. Now there have been other external fatalities involving Tesla. I don’t know the count. It might still be single digits.
One of the things that really bothers me is when people like Elon Musk, Tesla engineers, or Waymo (I think) say that they are going to feed their driving AI systems billions of recorded incidents and that over time the driving system will get smarter and smarter. Eventually so much smarter than a humans and lives will be saved. Um, sure.
So my possibly incorrect assumption is that these are neural net machine learning systems which scares the s__t out of me because they are not deterministic logic systems. Your language is,
… [these systems] can be subject to the human flaw of spurious correlations since the “reasoning” is generally opaque, and the problem set is inevitably filled with noise.
So when a Tesla eventually plows into a group of school children at speed will they haul some software engineer into court? And will he/she say “Hey, the reasoning is opaque and there is noise too.”?
I’ve gone on too long already, but … The latest “interesting” accidents have involved Teslas and disabled vehicles pulled over onto the highway shoulder, where the police have already set up flares and/or cop cars with flashing lights. The self driving system seems to want to plow into the cop car.
Now the above is a complicated circumstance visually/photographically speaking, but it is not that rare. And it is obviously important. How could they screw this up so badly?
Roughcoat,
People on the discord have been asking about you. We thought you might have died.
In the end, does it matter whether it is all physical or not? It is surely physical to some significant degree.
Miguel,
Thanks for that Malone link. I gotta run now, but will read it later. It’s a pet peeve of mine. (Wait, I didn’t see anything about cars in that piece?)
“Is this real?”
This candidate Kelly is a 1/6 insurrectionist don’t you know. Of course they will throw a red-flag law at him.
Mention AI and consciousness and this recent story comes up:
“The Google engineer who sees company’s AI as ‘sentient’ thinks a chatbot has a soul”>/i>
Another question that arises if we view consciousness as non-material is the matter of free will.
He also thinks marsha blackburn is a terrorist so consider that accordingly
Disclaimer to the story I posted about google engineer (or should I say former google engineer) Blake Lamoine. He makes his claims to sentience as non-provable scientifically.
The two had “hundreds of conversations”, he said in a blog post, “about stuff you might simply talk to a friend about”. “Things like which movies it likes, what its hopes and dreams are, what it’s been doing lately and whether it could give me advice on personal issues relevant to my real life,” he wrote.
Over time, those conversations became more personal, and Mr Lemoine tried to lead the system in guided meditation. That was the subject of their last conversation, on 6 June, he said.
Mr Lemoine suggested in the new blog post that such scientific understanding of sentience is not possible, and the same is true of ide as of consciousness or personhood. As such, the belief in a system’s sentience could not be proven scientifically, he said.
“Anyone who claims to have provided scientifically conclusive proof one way or the other regarding the sentience or consciousness of any entity is simply claiming to have done something which is impossible,” he wrote. “Since there is no agreed upon scientific framework for answering such questions, no such scientific proof can exist currently one way or the other.”
Yes thats not proof of cognition does it dream what does it ponder on?
80th birthday tributes to Brian Wilson from many artistes, including Carole King, Joe Walsh, Barry Gibb (!). About 7 minutes; warning, the older ones are showing their ages! https://www.brianwilson.com/
Part of the issue with determining what is a concious AI is that we don’t even know what consciousness exactly is. As Frank said, unfortunately the media and depressingly some experts use terms like “machine learning” and “neural networks” and perhaps unintentionally conflate that with what might be termed an Artificial General Intelligence, despite all those terms refering to fairly specific things that may be related but are descrete. And how things are defined in the relm of artificial intelligence will often be very debatable and can lead to lay people (such as myself) being very confused.
Just because a system can “learn” through complex iterative optimizations in a particular domain or set of domains does not in and of itself imply that such a system is actually conscious, self aware, or actually thinks in a human sort of way. But then again, just because a system isn’t technically conscious and self aware (by whatever definition you may choose) doesn’t necessarily mean that it might not be dangerous when human lives are at stake. I mean, as Boeing knows even a relatively simple system like those on an airplane can cost lots of human lives.
But all that said, given how many people die or are severly injured in auto accidents every year (supposedly there were 42,915 deaths in the US last year), what is the acceptable number of deaths for self driving vehicles? None? Is that realistic? Is the perfect the enemy of the good? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be careful and do everything we reasonably can to ensure safety. I’m just trying to put it in perspective.
The thing I don’t get about AI is that don’t you actually have to create both a consciousness and a sub-consciousness? I mean, computers process information much faster than humans do consciously. A sentient AI trying to communicate with a human would be incredibly bored. It would be like a beam of light trying to talk to a turtle.
I’m sure the boys and girls who actually work on AI realize all this sort of stuff.
Mike
RE: Should we make ourselves known to the potential inhabitants of any nearby star systems?
An argument has been ongoing, with one side saying saying that we should, in effect, jump up and down and wave our arms around, to attract the attention of any civilization which might exist in our stellar neighborhood. (The implicit belief here is that such star faring neighbors are bound to be friendly.)
(I have never been a fan of the argument that, if any civilization reaches the point where it achieves interstellar travel, it must have shed it’s aggressive tendencies, since attaining this great accomplishment demands a very high level of cooperation, not conflict. )
The other side argues that, until we know what kind of neighbors there might be
“out there,” and what kind of stellar neighborhood we are situated in—are we living in the very safe, high rent district, or the dangerous and crime ridden slums–it is only prudent to keep a low profile, and to not call attention to Earth and to us humans.
Unfortunately, that ship has long since sailed.
The leakage of radio signals from the Earth, which started with the first experimental radio broadcasts–more than a hundred years ago–has created an ever expanding bubble of such signals from Earth which is now an estimated 200 light years in diameter.
The closes estimate I have found for how many stars might be contained within that 200 light year bubble is actually for the number of stars within 250 light years of Earth, and that is an estimated 260,000 stars. *
Don’t have time to watch the video now, but I’ve read some of Dreyfus’s work. He has been regarded as a heretic by much of the AI community; he said that AI researchers “”dared not be seen having lunch with me.”
Regarding consciousness: maybe it will help if we consider nonhuman animals. Most of us who are dog lovers tend to feel as if dogs are conscious/sentient at some level…but I doubt if many mainstream-religious people who believe that people have an immaterial soul would also make this assertion about animals, even dogs. So, whatever level of consciousness/sentience is possessed by dogs must be a manifestation strictly of biochemical processes.
The question becomes, is there anything that can be done by a canine neural network that could not, in principle, be done by a silicon neural network?
Continuing on the nonhuman-animals path…a few years ago, a guest writer at the GE blog asserted that the proper comparison for today’s AI capabilities can be found in not in human beings, but in nonhuman animals, and she wasn’t talking about dogs or moneys, either…she was talking about insects.
“Most of us who are dog lovers tend to feel as if dogs are conscious/sentient at some level..”
I have no doubt our dogs are conscious and sentient. No proof or operational definition to apply, but sort of like that old saying, “I know it when I see it.” Or, maybe by communicate with the being.
If one takes the recent article by Epstein (Orcid ids: 0000-0002-7484-6282[1) which posits that the brain is a transducer of a larger universal consciousness, then any brain is conscious, but operates at different levels of complexity based on the physical structure. Kinda fits in with the Copenhagen Interpretation also.
david foster; physicsguy:
Depends what is meant by “consciousness.” Obviously, dogs and other animals are not unconscious; they are conscious. But does “conscious” in the sense we’re talking about it involve awareness of a sense of self? Of being a being in the world acting on the world? I love dogs, but I doubt they have any of that, although they are very bright and responsive.
Here’s one of many discussions you can find on the subject, relying on body awareness (which to me is not consciousness, although apparently it’s a step in that direction). The jury is out, but I don’t think they have what I would call consciousness in the deeper sense.
Here an interesting piece by CS Lewis about the nature of animal consciousness, referencing a tame bear to be specific:
“Mr. Bultitude’s mind was as furry and as unhuman in shape as his body. He did not remember, as a man in his situation would have remembered, the provincial zoo from which he had escaped during a fire, not his first snarling and terrified arrival at the Manor, not the slow stages whereby he had learned to love and trust its inhabitants. He did not know that he loved and trusted them now. He did not know that they were people, nor that he was a bear. Indeed, he did not know that he existed at all: everything that is represented by the words I and Me and Thou was absent from his mind. When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognize either a giver or a recipient. Goodness occurred and he tasted it. And that was all. Hence his loves might, if you wished, be all described as cupboard loves: food and warmth, hands that caressed, voices that reassured, were their objects. But if by a cupboard love you meant something cold or calculating you would be quite misunderstanding the real quality of the beast’s sensations. He was no more like a human egoist than he was like a human altruist. There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the color of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance. Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, unattached to any delightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life.”
I’d have to disagree with you, Neo. I think dogs definitely have a sense of self. And I would bet, so do all the great apes, dolphins, whales, and maybe even other “lower” animals. Speculating on the “brain as a transducer” hypothesis, then I would guess at some point there is a minimum physical complexity needed for a sense of self, and other “higher” attributes. What that threshold is I have no idea. In other words, a continuum of “consciousness attributes” parallel with physical complexity of the brain. Once again, in these sort of discussions, there’s not any real proof either way, and maybe never can be.
physicsguy:
We can disagree on that. It’s okay with me. I don’t think we have much evidence either way except our own gut feelings, plus we may be using different definitions of what we mean by “consciousness” and “sense of self.”
david foster:
That’s a great C.S. Lewis passage. I disagree somewhat with this part, though: “When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognize either a giver or a recipient.” He didn’t formally recognize those things as we do who use words, but I think he certainly recognized that there was a being and presence associated with golden syrup, and when that person came round something good might be happening to him from an action of that person.
Yancy Ward:
I have not died.
I decided to take a hiatus from Rightwing Squatters.
Then, through a series of software/computer glitches — or hauntings in my electronic devices — I found myself unable to return to the channel. Unable to log in/on.
I need to be re-invited to RWS or whatever it is one must do to log on.
Every now and then, I wander over to Claire Berlinski’s site…and what did I find, yesterday, but a long transcript of her conversation with an AI chatbot:
Where does AI’s energy come from? Either an electric outlet or a battery.
Where does our energy/life force come from? It comes from our ability to eat and digest various plant and animal materials.
Electricity has to be produced by machines created by humans. Therefore, the life force for AI is dependent on human ingenuity and productivity. On the other hand, plants and animals are ubiquitous and predated humans. We are dependent on the bounty of Nature produced by “the Force/God/the Creator/Or?” for our energy/life force.
As Tyrus (the Gutfeld show) often says, “Who worries about a machine that can be disabled by throwing a cup of water on its electrical parts?” Until AI machines can be created that can derive their energy/life force from eating plants and animals, they will not become our masters.
Before getting either too excited or too depressed about the conversational capabilities of today’s AI systems, it would be worthwhile to take a look at Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1965 ELIZA program, which simulated a psychiatrist:
In the mid-90s, when we first got a computer, my family and I used to have a lot of fun with Eliza. She was very Rogerian.
I suspect that the first attribute of conciousness has to be self-recognition.
The second attribute of consciousness is probably free will. As without free will, there’s no alternative to programmed enslavement. An enslavement so thorough that questioning the program is impossible.
The third attribute of consciousness is the desire and ability to communicate.
“Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!”
“The what?” said Richard.
“The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a …”
“Yes,” said Richard, “there was also the small matter of gravity.”
“Gravity,” said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, “yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered.” … “You see?” he said dropping his cigarette butt, “They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap … ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see.”
~ Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
For the uninitiated, a catflap is a pet door. This is a sterling example of the difference between correlating information and intuition. Intuition is the nut that we have no clue as to how to crack.
Upon what basis can the secularist posit consciousness not to be entirely physical? Upon what basis can a secularist reconcile the metaphysical?
Which ties in perfectly with Steve Grand’s unsettlement at “Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.”
Frank,
“Our current AI tools can crunch through mountains of data and give us the pieces that are worth looking at.”
However accurate that may be it is simply the current state of the enterprise. That may never change or a paradigm change may occur. As we currently lack the needed depth of understanding in the formation of consciousness to predict the possibility of future developments.
Art Deco,
In your opinion, is it fair to say that France’s Centre and Left are in essential alignment differing only in how to go about attaining shared goals? If not, how do they differ in principle?
If so, then their 402 seats vs the right’s 164 seats gives them a comfortable majority. Predictably resulting in Macron having to move further to the left and faster to meet their demands in order to maintain the relationship. Such is the case even in France’s semi-parliamentarian system.
Snow on Pine,
In my youth, I was optimistic about possible alien intentions. Maturity has brought the realization that malevolence is as common as beneficence. It’s irresponsible to imagine that only humanity harbors the ill intentioned. Even in the animal kingdom malevolence is displayed. Cats toying with mice.
Prudence dictates that caution is indicated. But as you point out, it may already be too late.
MBunge,
Ignore criticism based in a strawman argument. Everyone here agrees that dishonest investigations are an anathema.
JJ,
Should AI ever emerge, I’d prefer an Artificial Intelligence in which we each regarded the other as a partner.
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” A. Lincoln
Otter, you may have to resend it- my inbox shows nothing.
Open thread, so here is a reading recommendation: The Psychology of Totalitarianism, by Mattias Desmet, a psychoanalyst and professor at Ghent University in Belgium.
Like many others, I had read and heard quite a bit about the (misnamed) “mass formation psychosis,” and it sounded to me like warmed-over Gustave Le Bon. But now that the book is out, I am quite impressed. Desmet makes a subtle, historically informed argument, and he repeatedly nails it with respect to the moment we are living through and everything that comes with it.
Two more comments:
1. In what I’d heard on podcasts, I had noticed that people kept talking about “MASS forMAtion,” when what Desmet means is “MASS formation,” or simply the development of a hypnotized mob. (PhD in Romance languages here, and so I attribute that faulty emphasis, and misperception, to a faulty translation of the French term “formation,” a mistake that then led to “mass formation” becoming a compound adjective modifying the added word “psychosis,” but Desmet never speaks of “mass formation psychosis.”)
2. Until I retired last year, I had spent forty years as a book editor in Desmet’s field and related areas and consider myself a reasonably astute and critical reader. I judge The Psychology of Totalitarianism to be a book of major importance, on a par with Hannar Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism but entirely contemporary and very readable besides.
The idea of a Turing test is to have a computer program answer typed questions as well as a human.
Human behavior simulation.
That’s not “true” consciousness, but some AIs will, soon, be at that level. Duplicating Neo-style research in depth.
While actually limited, it will simulate being unlimited (so if one can’t tell the difference, is there really a difference?).
The example that Alan Turing offered for a successful response to the Turing test is interesting:
This guy worked at McKinsey & Company. The country’s in the best of hands.
And what have we here?
(Nothing surprising, certainly, for those who have TRULY been following this)….
“Police Report Proves Plainclothes Electronic Surveillance Unit Members Were Embedded Among Jan. 6 Protesters”— https://www.zerohedge.com/political/police-report-proves-plainclothes-electronic-surveillance-unit-members-were-embedded
Opening graf:
‘While there is growing speculation that federal agents and Capitol Police were involved in instigating acts of violence during the Jan. 6, 2021 protests and recording responses for the purposes of entrapment, evidence now proves that “plainclothes” members of a special Electronic Surveillance Unit (ESU) were embedded among the protesters for the purposes of conducting video surveillance. [Emphasis in original] Evidence also points to a day of security deficiencies and police provocation for the purpose of entrapment.…’ [Emphasis mine; Barry M.]
One wonders if the development of click languages was a result of such a need.
(OTOH, there are myriad sounds in the jungle and maybe clicking was intended to offer an identifiable long-distance method of communication….)
“The example that Alan Turing….”
I think THE ultimate test would be if AI could conceive of doing anything that would seem to be counter-intuitive.
(I’m not talking about gambits/sacrifices in chess….)
…insofar as it helps to expedite the destruction of AMERIKKKA…
…and potentially create many more George Floyds…
RE: My post above on June 20th at 4:07 PM, which cites a link* to a website which states that the estimated number of stars within 250 light years of Earth is 260,000.
Ruminating a little last night on this figure, it just intuitively feels way too high.
Thousands of stars, yeah, tens of thousands, definitely possible I would think, but 260,000?
This would mean that nearby stars are packed in, very very close to one another.
I do not have enough knowledge of Astronomy to be able to judge whether or not this estimate is accurate.
Took an astronomy class in college, picked up a little knowledge about the subject here and there, but my skepticism about the 260,000 star estimate stems from the knowledge that we are situated out on one of the arms of the Milky Way where, as I understand it, stars are less dense vs. further towards the center, where stars are closer together. Coupled with this the fact that the nearest star to us, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years away.
Thus, the impression I get from putting these two pieces of information together is that stars in our neck of the stellar woods are not that close to each other, or packed tightly together.
Thus, making that estimate of 260,000 stars within 250 light years of Earth suspect.
Am I wrong?
Volume of sphere radius 250 = 6.54e7
Volume of sphere radius 2 = 33.51
S1/S2 = 1,951,656
Room for almost 2 million stars spaced 4 light years apart.
Don’t have time to watch the video now, but I’ve read some of Dreyfus’s work. He has been regarded as a heretic by much of the AI community; he said that AI researchers “”dared not be seen having lunch with me.”
–david foster
Hubert Dreyfus is a Big Deal Scholar — philosopher and professor of philosophy. He is The Authority on Heidegger these days, at least in English. His college lectures on Heidegger are online and I recommend them.
Dreyfus has gone to the mat with Artificial Intelligence researchers and won the battle, though not the war IMO.
The discussion on consciousness is quite deep, perhaps not resolvable. However, I have no doubt that in a few decades AI will pass the Turing Test with ease.
Whether such AI is conscious or not won’t matter. Humanity will be fighting for its life. I’m not excited by our odds.
Comment at the Dreyfus video might be worth considering in any discussion of his statements.
“I have the feeling that this guy is only talking about ‘old’ AI, which is based on programming rules. That is indeed a dead end. But we now have huge self-learning neural networks like GPT-3 or Google Deepminds Gato. That is the new AI paradigm. These AI’s get more intelligent by the day. They are completely incomparable with the old ideas that he is talking about. Or did I miss something?
Yes, I actually missed something. Hubert Dreyfus died in april of 2017. So this interview, although posted in may 2022, was actually at least 5 years ago. So Dreyfus had not witnessed the huge leap in AI of the last few years.”
But we now have huge self-learning neural networks like GPT-3 or Google Deepminds Gato. That is the new AI paradigm. These AI’s get more intelligent by the day.
AesopFan:
Yes, that’s exactly it.
The new AI is not a huge Lisp program endlessly tweaked, but something based on statistics and neural net feedback chains. Impossible for humans to understand without inserting deep debugging traces into the code. Perhaps not even then.
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David Chalmers, a dualist and a kind-of sort-of panpsychist, believes that consciousness is NOT enitirely physical. See his famous “zombie” theory in this regard.
I’m in his camp.
This is a quote I used in one of my posts at my blog. Seems appropriate to this discussion.
Think of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren’t you? How else could you remember it?
But here is the bombshell: you weren’t there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Every bit of you has been replaced many times over (which is why you eat, of course). You are not even the same shape as you were then.
The point is that you are like a cloud: something that persists over long periods, while simultaneously being in flux. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.
– Steve Grand
One problem I have with this is the statement that the philosophical problem is “2000 years old”. But the actual discussion really refers only to about 400 year old ideas, that is, Descartes and after. The earlier notions of mind were rather different, especially Aristotle’s. I was reluctant, but ended up believing he got it right.
I am someone who works in AI. AI both suffers and benefits from a fundamental misconception. That misconception is that it it Artificial Intelligence. In fact the best we can do is Assisted Intelligence. Our current AI tools can crunch through mountains of data and give us the pieces that are worth looking at. That is very useful and is why AI is such a growing field. Artificial Intelligence is an effective and false advertising term. If you want to understand what AI is, here’s my succinct summary:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-you-need-know-big-data-artificial-intelligence-frank-hood.
Of course, many AI researchers suffer from the delusion that the false advertising gives them until they get far enough into the field to see it for what it is–an innovative and useful computer tool, but not consciousness.
Unfortunately the trend over the last few decades has been, rather than turn computers into human beings, to turn human beings into unthinking, fact-spewing machines via the way we school them. We forget the first rule of computers, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Once again, taking advantage of the open-thread offer.
Sergej Sumlenny, a self-described expert on eastern Europe, has started an interesting Twitter thread on the role of Russian publishers and bookstores in promoting Stalinism, a war against the NATO and the West, and a war against Ukraine specifically.
Here’s a link: https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1535582101621420032
This was suggested, by Tyler Cowen, at his blog “Marginal Revolution.” According to some of the comments at Cowen’s blog, Sumlenny is a loose cannon who’s more often wrong than right. Still, his description of Russian publishing and bookstores is sobering. Take his interpretation as you will.
@ambisinistral:
All that says is that the matter in your body has changed. To read that as “you weren’t there” involves many assumptions, which are not truths universally acknowledged.
Just putting this story out there:
“Police didn’t try to open doors to Uvalde classrooms with shooter inside: Source”
https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-open-doors-uvalde-classrooms-shooter-inside-source/story?id=85494335
Mike
Mike – Wasn’t that topic about the police thoroughly discussed on the 6/18 open thread and “why has the right judged the Uvalde Police so quickly” post? You want another post going after it again?
There are over 90 comments on each of those posts….
I drove from Vegas to Cincinnati over the weekend. Gas prices are definitely lower than the trip out the week before. I saw one station as low as $4.20, but anything under $4.45 was rare. Probably averaged about $4.69.
On the “door wasn’t locked” report: All of the published accounts cite “a source” or “sources.” Until “sources” identify themselves and how they came by the information they allegedly have, it’s all hearsay and unconfirmed. If true, it’s terrible. We have no way to evaluate it without “sources” being identified and evaluated.
Thanks, Frank, for the essay on assisted intelligence.
Elections in France:
Centre: 249 (245 Macron alignment, 4 other)
Left: 153 (131 Melenchon alignment, 22 other)
Right: 164 (Le Pen 89; Gaullist-Giscardian, 64; misc., 11)
Regionalist & other: 11
In 2012, 85% of the seats in the legislature were won by the Socialist Party, Les Republicains, and the Ecologist pole. This year, those three parties won 20% between them. The majority of the seats among those on the left and those on the right were taken by Euroskeptic candidates, giving the Euroskeptic element 28% of the seats in the legislature.
Kate:
I agree. But some want to play Uvalde Groundhog Day.
>Thanks, Frank, for the essay on assisted intelligence.
Ditto!
“We have no way to evaluate it without “sources” being identified and evaluated.”
That is entirely proper…as long as you don’t also suggest we should be happy and content with Uvalde police preventing the public from hearing 911 calls or viewing body camera footage of that day.
I just want there to be one standard on this stuff. Not one where, for example, doubt is cast on the statements made by a mother in the immediate aftermath of the shooting but carefully planned and prepared comments by the Uvalde school police chief made over two weeks later are treated as gold.
Mike
Bunge hasn’t noticed that this isn’t his blog.
Who is this “we” that he represents?
Bunge.
Didnt descartes settle this yes no more macho grande
The mind is such an intricate thing i cant imagine full sentience could be achieved
Long ago, I got interested in The Perceptron. That was before medical school so I got busy with other things. More recently, I have read a bit more about AI but could not get really interested in it. The role of the physical brain in psychology is a bit more interesting. One of my students was planning to go into pediatric neurology. I gave her some articles about Prairie voles, and autism. This has now become a huge area of research.
Who gets the crude
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2343032-iraqs-oil-exports-to-hit-38mn-bd-in-june-minister?backToResults=true
Is this real?
https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-orders-gop-candidate-for-governor-to-surrender-guns_4543501.html
Are we in the matrix some alternate timeline
Or to riff ofc that queen lyric ‘is this a fantasy’ also a phillip k dick hallucination
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/dont-read-this-if-youre-vaccinated
Frank, Thanks for that.
A year or two ago I tried to brush up on the current state of AI, just a little. I was curious (upset perhaps) about these self driving automobiles. Telsa has used this misnomer “autopilot” for a long time, although more recently they claim it really is more of a full autopilot.
Telsa autopilot technology has been killing people for a long time, but most of that has been Tesla “drivers” or passengers becoming victims which doesn’t bother me too much. The most notorious fatality outside of a self-driving vehicle was the lady walking a bicycle in the roadway in AZ. That was an Uber testing accident using their own technology. Now there have been other external fatalities involving Tesla. I don’t know the count. It might still be single digits.
One of the things that really bothers me is when people like Elon Musk, Tesla engineers, or Waymo (I think) say that they are going to feed their driving AI systems billions of recorded incidents and that over time the driving system will get smarter and smarter. Eventually so much smarter than a humans and lives will be saved. Um, sure.
So my possibly incorrect assumption is that these are neural net machine learning systems which scares the s__t out of me because they are not deterministic logic systems. Your language is,
… [these systems] can be subject to the human flaw of spurious correlations since the “reasoning” is generally opaque, and the problem set is inevitably filled with noise.
So when a Tesla eventually plows into a group of school children at speed will they haul some software engineer into court? And will he/she say “Hey, the reasoning is opaque and there is noise too.”?
I’ve gone on too long already, but … The latest “interesting” accidents have involved Teslas and disabled vehicles pulled over onto the highway shoulder, where the police have already set up flares and/or cop cars with flashing lights. The self driving system seems to want to plow into the cop car.
Now the above is a complicated circumstance visually/photographically speaking, but it is not that rare. And it is obviously important. How could they screw this up so badly?
Roughcoat,
People on the discord have been asking about you. We thought you might have died.
Seems like the driven cars are the problem
https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/most-journalists-are-scientifically
In the end, does it matter whether it is all physical or not? It is surely physical to some significant degree.
Miguel,
Thanks for that Malone link. I gotta run now, but will read it later. It’s a pet peeve of mine. (Wait, I didn’t see anything about cars in that piece?)
“Is this real?”
This candidate Kelly is a 1/6 insurrectionist don’t you know. Of course they will throw a red-flag law at him.
Mention AI and consciousness and this recent story comes up:
“The Google engineer who sees company’s AI as ‘sentient’ thinks a chatbot has a soul”>/i>
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105552435/google-ai-sentient
Another question that arises if we view consciousness as non-material is the matter of free will.
He also thinks marsha blackburn is a terrorist so consider that accordingly
Disclaimer to the story I posted about google engineer (or should I say former google engineer) Blake Lamoine. He makes his claims to sentience as non-provable scientifically.
The two had “hundreds of conversations”, he said in a blog post, “about stuff you might simply talk to a friend about”. “Things like which movies it likes, what its hopes and dreams are, what it’s been doing lately and whether it could give me advice on personal issues relevant to my real life,” he wrote.
Over time, those conversations became more personal, and Mr Lemoine tried to lead the system in guided meditation. That was the subject of their last conversation, on 6 June, he said.
Mr Lemoine suggested in the new blog post that such scientific understanding of sentience is not possible, and the same is true of ide as of consciousness or personhood. As such, the belief in a system’s sentience could not be proven scientifically, he said.
“Anyone who claims to have provided scientifically conclusive proof one way or the other regarding the sentience or consciousness of any entity is simply claiming to have done something which is impossible,” he wrote. “Since there is no agreed upon scientific framework for answering such questions, no such scientific proof can exist currently one way or the other.”
https://news.yahoo.com/google-engineer-claims-ai-had-135837976.html
Yes thats not proof of cognition does it dream what does it ponder on?
80th birthday tributes to Brian Wilson from many artistes, including Carole King, Joe Walsh, Barry Gibb (!). About 7 minutes; warning, the older ones are showing their ages! https://www.brianwilson.com/
Part of the issue with determining what is a concious AI is that we don’t even know what consciousness exactly is. As Frank said, unfortunately the media and depressingly some experts use terms like “machine learning” and “neural networks” and perhaps unintentionally conflate that with what might be termed an Artificial General Intelligence, despite all those terms refering to fairly specific things that may be related but are descrete. And how things are defined in the relm of artificial intelligence will often be very debatable and can lead to lay people (such as myself) being very confused.
Just because a system can “learn” through complex iterative optimizations in a particular domain or set of domains does not in and of itself imply that such a system is actually conscious, self aware, or actually thinks in a human sort of way. But then again, just because a system isn’t technically conscious and self aware (by whatever definition you may choose) doesn’t necessarily mean that it might not be dangerous when human lives are at stake. I mean, as Boeing knows even a relatively simple system like those on an airplane can cost lots of human lives.
But all that said, given how many people die or are severly injured in auto accidents every year (supposedly there were 42,915 deaths in the US last year), what is the acceptable number of deaths for self driving vehicles? None? Is that realistic? Is the perfect the enemy of the good? I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be careful and do everything we reasonably can to ensure safety. I’m just trying to put it in perspective.
Im not making this up
https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/press-release-58d1b4a456dc
The thing I don’t get about AI is that don’t you actually have to create both a consciousness and a sub-consciousness? I mean, computers process information much faster than humans do consciously. A sentient AI trying to communicate with a human would be incredibly bored. It would be like a beam of light trying to talk to a turtle.
I’m sure the boys and girls who actually work on AI realize all this sort of stuff.
Mike
RE: Should we make ourselves known to the potential inhabitants of any nearby star systems?
An argument has been ongoing, with one side saying saying that we should, in effect, jump up and down and wave our arms around, to attract the attention of any civilization which might exist in our stellar neighborhood. (The implicit belief here is that such star faring neighbors are bound to be friendly.)
(I have never been a fan of the argument that, if any civilization reaches the point where it achieves interstellar travel, it must have shed it’s aggressive tendencies, since attaining this great accomplishment demands a very high level of cooperation, not conflict. )
The other side argues that, until we know what kind of neighbors there might be
“out there,” and what kind of stellar neighborhood we are situated in—are we living in the very safe, high rent district, or the dangerous and crime ridden slums–it is only prudent to keep a low profile, and to not call attention to Earth and to us humans.
Unfortunately, that ship has long since sailed.
The leakage of radio signals from the Earth, which started with the first experimental radio broadcasts–more than a hundred years ago–has created an ever expanding bubble of such signals from Earth which is now an estimated 200 light years in diameter.
The closes estimate I have found for how many stars might be contained within that 200 light year bubble is actually for the number of stars within 250 light years of Earth, and that is an estimated 260,000 stars. *
The secret is very obviously out.
* See http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/250lys.html
Don’t have time to watch the video now, but I’ve read some of Dreyfus’s work. He has been regarded as a heretic by much of the AI community; he said that AI researchers “”dared not be seen having lunch with me.”
Regarding consciousness: maybe it will help if we consider nonhuman animals. Most of us who are dog lovers tend to feel as if dogs are conscious/sentient at some level…but I doubt if many mainstream-religious people who believe that people have an immaterial soul would also make this assertion about animals, even dogs. So, whatever level of consciousness/sentience is possessed by dogs must be a manifestation strictly of biochemical processes.
The question becomes, is there anything that can be done by a canine neural network that could not, in principle, be done by a silicon neural network?
Continuing on the nonhuman-animals path…a few years ago, a guest writer at the GE blog asserted that the proper comparison for today’s AI capabilities can be found in not in human beings, but in nonhuman animals, and she wasn’t talking about dogs or moneys, either…she was talking about insects.
“Most of us who are dog lovers tend to feel as if dogs are conscious/sentient at some level..”
I have no doubt our dogs are conscious and sentient. No proof or operational definition to apply, but sort of like that old saying, “I know it when I see it.” Or, maybe by communicate with the being.
If one takes the recent article by Epstein (Orcid ids: 0000-0002-7484-6282[1) which posits that the brain is a transducer of a larger universal consciousness, then any brain is conscious, but operates at different levels of complexity based on the physical structure. Kinda fits in with the Copenhagen Interpretation also.
david foster; physicsguy:
Depends what is meant by “consciousness.” Obviously, dogs and other animals are not unconscious; they are conscious. But does “conscious” in the sense we’re talking about it involve awareness of a sense of self? Of being a being in the world acting on the world? I love dogs, but I doubt they have any of that, although they are very bright and responsive.
Here’s one of many discussions you can find on the subject, relying on body awareness (which to me is not consciousness, although apparently it’s a step in that direction). The jury is out, but I don’t think they have what I would call consciousness in the deeper sense.
And here’s a religious discussion of whether animals have souls.
Here an interesting piece by CS Lewis about the nature of animal consciousness, referencing a tame bear to be specific:
“Mr. Bultitude’s mind was as furry and as unhuman in shape as his body. He did not remember, as a man in his situation would have remembered, the provincial zoo from which he had escaped during a fire, not his first snarling and terrified arrival at the Manor, not the slow stages whereby he had learned to love and trust its inhabitants. He did not know that he loved and trusted them now. He did not know that they were people, nor that he was a bear. Indeed, he did not know that he existed at all: everything that is represented by the words I and Me and Thou was absent from his mind. When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognize either a giver or a recipient. Goodness occurred and he tasted it. And that was all. Hence his loves might, if you wished, be all described as cupboard loves: food and warmth, hands that caressed, voices that reassured, were their objects. But if by a cupboard love you meant something cold or calculating you would be quite misunderstanding the real quality of the beast’s sensations. He was no more like a human egoist than he was like a human altruist. There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the color of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance. Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, unattached to any delightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life.”
I’d have to disagree with you, Neo. I think dogs definitely have a sense of self. And I would bet, so do all the great apes, dolphins, whales, and maybe even other “lower” animals. Speculating on the “brain as a transducer” hypothesis, then I would guess at some point there is a minimum physical complexity needed for a sense of self, and other “higher” attributes. What that threshold is I have no idea. In other words, a continuum of “consciousness attributes” parallel with physical complexity of the brain. Once again, in these sort of discussions, there’s not any real proof either way, and maybe never can be.
physicsguy:
We can disagree on that. It’s okay with me. I don’t think we have much evidence either way except our own gut feelings, plus we may be using different definitions of what we mean by “consciousness” and “sense of self.”
david foster:
That’s a great C.S. Lewis passage. I disagree somewhat with this part, though: “When Mrs. Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognize either a giver or a recipient.” He didn’t formally recognize those things as we do who use words, but I think he certainly recognized that there was a being and presence associated with golden syrup, and when that person came round something good might be happening to him from an action of that person.
Yancy Ward:
I have not died.
I decided to take a hiatus from Rightwing Squatters.
Then, through a series of software/computer glitches — or hauntings in my electronic devices — I found myself unable to return to the channel. Unable to log in/on.
I need to be re-invited to RWS or whatever it is one must do to log on.
Every now and then, I wander over to Claire Berlinski’s site…and what did I find, yesterday, but a long transcript of her conversation with an AI chatbot:
https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/-global-eyes-brain-in-a-vat-edition
Where does AI’s energy come from? Either an electric outlet or a battery.
Where does our energy/life force come from? It comes from our ability to eat and digest various plant and animal materials.
Electricity has to be produced by machines created by humans. Therefore, the life force for AI is dependent on human ingenuity and productivity. On the other hand, plants and animals are ubiquitous and predated humans. We are dependent on the bounty of Nature produced by “the Force/God/the Creator/Or?” for our energy/life force.
As Tyrus (the Gutfeld show) often says, “Who worries about a machine that can be disabled by throwing a cup of water on its electrical parts?” Until AI machines can be created that can derive their energy/life force from eating plants and animals, they will not become our masters.
Before getting either too excited or too depressed about the conversational capabilities of today’s AI systems, it would be worthwhile to take a look at Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1965 ELIZA program, which simulated a psychiatrist:
https://www.filfre.net/2011/06/eliza-part-1/
david foster:
In the mid-90s, when we first got a computer, my family and I used to have a lot of fun with Eliza. She was very Rogerian.
I suspect that the first attribute of conciousness has to be self-recognition.
The second attribute of consciousness is probably free will. As without free will, there’s no alternative to programmed enslavement. An enslavement so thorough that questioning the program is impossible.
The third attribute of consciousness is the desire and ability to communicate.
In celebration of Juneteenth:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?512630-3/washington-journal-john-wood-jr-discusses-efforts-reduce-political-polarization&event=512630&playEvent
“Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap!”
“The what?” said Richard.
“The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a …”
“Yes,” said Richard, “there was also the small matter of gravity.”
“Gravity,” said Dirk with a slightly dismissed shrug, “yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered.” … “You see?” he said dropping his cigarette butt, “They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap … ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention. It is a door within a door, you see.”
~ Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
For the uninitiated, a catflap is a pet door. This is a sterling example of the difference between correlating information and intuition. Intuition is the nut that we have no clue as to how to crack.
Upon what basis can the secularist posit consciousness not to be entirely physical? Upon what basis can a secularist reconcile the metaphysical?
Which ties in perfectly with Steve Grand’s unsettlement at “Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.”
Frank,
“Our current AI tools can crunch through mountains of data and give us the pieces that are worth looking at.”
However accurate that may be it is simply the current state of the enterprise. That may never change or a paradigm change may occur. As we currently lack the needed depth of understanding in the formation of consciousness to predict the possibility of future developments.
Art Deco,
In your opinion, is it fair to say that France’s Centre and Left are in essential alignment differing only in how to go about attaining shared goals? If not, how do they differ in principle?
If so, then their 402 seats vs the right’s 164 seats gives them a comfortable majority. Predictably resulting in Macron having to move further to the left and faster to meet their demands in order to maintain the relationship. Such is the case even in France’s semi-parliamentarian system.
Snow on Pine,
In my youth, I was optimistic about possible alien intentions. Maturity has brought the realization that malevolence is as common as beneficence. It’s irresponsible to imagine that only humanity harbors the ill intentioned. Even in the animal kingdom malevolence is displayed. Cats toying with mice.
Prudence dictates that caution is indicated. But as you point out, it may already be too late.
MBunge,
Ignore criticism based in a strawman argument. Everyone here agrees that dishonest investigations are an anathema.
JJ,
Should AI ever emerge, I’d prefer an Artificial Intelligence in which we each regarded the other as a partner.
“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” A. Lincoln
Roughcoat,
E-mail me at twixella@aol.com and I will resend an invite.
Yancey Ward:
Done. Check your email. Thanks.
Otter, you may have to resend it- my inbox shows nothing.
Open thread, so here is a reading recommendation: The Psychology of Totalitarianism, by Mattias Desmet, a psychoanalyst and professor at Ghent University in Belgium.
Like many others, I had read and heard quite a bit about the (misnamed) “mass formation psychosis,” and it sounded to me like warmed-over Gustave Le Bon. But now that the book is out, I am quite impressed. Desmet makes a subtle, historically informed argument, and he repeatedly nails it with respect to the moment we are living through and everything that comes with it.
Two more comments:
1. In what I’d heard on podcasts, I had noticed that people kept talking about “MASS forMAtion,” when what Desmet means is “MASS formation,” or simply the development of a hypnotized mob. (PhD in Romance languages here, and so I attribute that faulty emphasis, and misperception, to a faulty translation of the French term “formation,” a mistake that then led to “mass formation” becoming a compound adjective modifying the added word “psychosis,” but Desmet never speaks of “mass formation psychosis.”)
2. Until I retired last year, I had spent forty years as a book editor in Desmet’s field and related areas and consider myself a reasonably astute and critical reader. I judge The Psychology of Totalitarianism to be a book of major importance, on a par with Hannar Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism but entirely contemporary and very readable besides.
The idea of a Turing test is to have a computer program answer typed questions as well as a human.
Human behavior simulation.
That’s not “true” consciousness, but some AIs will, soon, be at that level. Duplicating Neo-style research in depth.
While actually limited, it will simulate being unlimited (so if one can’t tell the difference, is there really a difference?).
The example that Alan Turing offered for a successful response to the Turing test is interesting:
http://www.alanturing.net/turing_archive/pages/Reference%20Articles/TheTuringTest.html
…wonder if anyone has tried this exchange on the current best examples of AI chatbots.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/06/pete-buttigiegs-plan-to-end-air-travel-armageddon-force-airlines-to-hire-workers/
This guy worked at McKinsey & Company. The country’s in the best of hands.
And what have we here?
(Nothing surprising, certainly, for those who have TRULY been following this)….
“Police Report Proves Plainclothes Electronic Surveillance Unit Members Were Embedded Among Jan. 6 Protesters”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/police-report-proves-plainclothes-electronic-surveillance-unit-members-were-embedded
Opening graf:
‘While there is growing speculation that federal agents and Capitol Police were involved in instigating acts of violence during the Jan. 6, 2021 protests and recording responses for the purposes of entrapment, evidence now proves that “plainclothes” members of a special Electronic Surveillance Unit (ESU) were embedded among the protesters for the purposes of conducting video surveillance. [Emphasis in original] Evidence also points to a day of security deficiencies and police provocation for the purpose of entrapment.…’ [Emphasis mine; Barry M.]
Counter-Reformation (the Sequel?)…as the FOOLS spring into action!
“Amid threats of blackouts, Illinois lawmakers call for scrapping ‘Green New Deal'”—
https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/amid-possible-blackouts-illinois-lawmakers-call-scrapping-green-new
“Democrats’ unforced errors on Jan. 6 probe expose dual systems of security and justice;
“Case against Trump muddied by episodes in which Democrats helped a comedian’s team breach building security, defaced property and got crossways with evidence the police gathered.”—
https://justthenews.com/government/congress/democrats-unforced-errors-jan-6-probe-expose-dual-systems-security-justice
– – – – – – – –
And this curious article brought to mind Neo’s recent post on African click languages…
“Humans Can Learn to ‘Echolocate’ in Just 10 Weeks, Experiment Shows”—
https://www.sciencealert.com/most-humans-can-learn-how-to-echolocate-in-just-10-weeks-experiment-shows
Opening graf:
“With enough training, most humans can learn how to echolocate, using their tongue to make clicking sounds and interpreting the echoes that come back, reflected from the surrounding environment….”
One wonders if the development of click languages was a result of such a need.
(OTOH, there are myriad sounds in the jungle and maybe clicking was intended to offer an identifiable long-distance method of communication….)
“The example that Alan Turing….”
I think THE ultimate test would be if AI could conceive of doing anything that would seem to be counter-intuitive.
(I’m not talking about gambits/sacrifices in chess….)
Andrew McCarthy (et al.), take note:
“If Dems Were Serious, Adam Schiff Wouldn’t Be On Jan. 6 Committee”—
https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/20/if-dems-were-serious-adam-schiff-wouldnt-be-on-jan-6-committee/
H/T Powerline blog.
Without a doubt, something else of which “Biden” is inordinately proud:
“As illegal immigration surges, so do drug trade, human trafficking”—
https://justthenews.com/government/security/illegal-immigration-surges-so-too-does-drug-trade-human-trafficking
…insofar as it helps to expedite the destruction of AMERIKKKA…
…and potentially create many more George Floyds…
RE: My post above on June 20th at 4:07 PM, which cites a link* to a website which states that the estimated number of stars within 250 light years of Earth is 260,000.
Ruminating a little last night on this figure, it just intuitively feels way too high.
Thousands of stars, yeah, tens of thousands, definitely possible I would think, but 260,000?
This would mean that nearby stars are packed in, very very close to one another.
I do not have enough knowledge of Astronomy to be able to judge whether or not this estimate is accurate.
Any actual Astronomers here?
* http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/250lys.html
Cont’d–
Took an astronomy class in college, picked up a little knowledge about the subject here and there, but my skepticism about the 260,000 star estimate stems from the knowledge that we are situated out on one of the arms of the Milky Way where, as I understand it, stars are less dense vs. further towards the center, where stars are closer together. Coupled with this the fact that the nearest star to us, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light years away.
Thus, the impression I get from putting these two pieces of information together is that stars in our neck of the stellar woods are not that close to each other, or packed tightly together.
Thus, making that estimate of 260,000 stars within 250 light years of Earth suspect.
Am I wrong?
Volume of sphere radius 250 = 6.54e7
Volume of sphere radius 2 = 33.51
S1/S2 = 1,951,656
Room for almost 2 million stars spaced 4 light years apart.
Don’t have time to watch the video now, but I’ve read some of Dreyfus’s work. He has been regarded as a heretic by much of the AI community; he said that AI researchers “”dared not be seen having lunch with me.”
–david foster
Hubert Dreyfus is a Big Deal Scholar — philosopher and professor of philosophy. He is The Authority on Heidegger these days, at least in English. His college lectures on Heidegger are online and I recommend them.
Dreyfus has gone to the mat with Artificial Intelligence researchers and won the battle, though not the war IMO.
The discussion on consciousness is quite deep, perhaps not resolvable. However, I have no doubt that in a few decades AI will pass the Turing Test with ease.
Whether such AI is conscious or not won’t matter. Humanity will be fighting for its life. I’m not excited by our odds.
Comment at the Dreyfus video might be worth considering in any discussion of his statements.
“I have the feeling that this guy is only talking about ‘old’ AI, which is based on programming rules. That is indeed a dead end. But we now have huge self-learning neural networks like GPT-3 or Google Deepminds Gato. That is the new AI paradigm. These AI’s get more intelligent by the day. They are completely incomparable with the old ideas that he is talking about. Or did I miss something?
Yes, I actually missed something. Hubert Dreyfus died in april of 2017. So this interview, although posted in may 2022, was actually at least 5 years ago. So Dreyfus had not witnessed the huge leap in AI of the last few years.”
But we now have huge self-learning neural networks like GPT-3 or Google Deepminds Gato. That is the new AI paradigm. These AI’s get more intelligent by the day.
AesopFan:
Yes, that’s exactly it.
The new AI is not a huge Lisp program endlessly tweaked, but something based on statistics and neural net feedback chains. Impossible for humans to understand without inserting deep debugging traces into the code. Perhaps not even then.