Nonetheless, this approach of taking a fairly complex writing prompt and simply regurgitating contextually similar text from the internet often yields 100% meaningful results. This suggests that our intelligence is a lot more mimetic than we'd like to believe, which is perhaps an even more unpopular opinion.
Even if a sentence is meaningful standalone in vacuum, no communication between humans ever happens in such a way. It always matters who said it and why; we never take the substance independently from the agenda and the mind behind it, the context in which that mind existed and its relationship with our own, and so on.
This strikes me as a crucial part of what intelligence (whether in humans or other creatures) means.
In case of an algorithm, there is no intent of its own—except the intent and the minds of humans who trained it, ran it and supplied inputs.
IMO the onus is on AGI believers to prove that material world is somehow the source of consciousness or intelligence (it wouldn’t hurt defining the terms first either). Otherwise it’s a philosophical position, and while one is entitled to hold their own one is not entitled to force it onto others.
>Even if a sentence is meaningful standalone in vacuum, no communication between humans ever happens in such a way.
True, although much less so for (pseudo)anonymous online communication, as we’re having here.
>It always matters who said it and why; we never take the substance independently from the agenda and the mind behind it, the context in which that mind existed and its relationship with our own, and so on.
I have no idea who you are, what your agenda is, or anything about how your mind operates. There is essentially zero relationship between your mind and my own. The only context I have about you is the text of your post.
>This strikes me as a crucial part of what intelligence (whether in humans or other creatures) means.
Totally agreed. This is why GPT-3 can do a fairly good job emulating anonymous online discourse, but cannot convincingly emulate a person we actually know.
Personally, the fact that we are on HN of all places supplies a lot of context and agenda and to me is a meta-filter of sorts (pardon the pun). Perhaps one relationship between our minds is that we both have found our way here. I think there is a shared motive in trying to locate truth with a hint of procrastination[0].
Let’s imagine a slightly more down-to-earth exchange and raise the stakes in a way. For example, say it is still mostly a philosophical discussion here on HN, but in which someone is pushing a position on how much potential a certain company or store of value has; would you not question (at least to yourself) whether that person is invested and seeking to profit from it in short term, which would taint the motive? Or say someone was arguing in support of a controversial policy of a particular government known for its strong control over access to information and freedom of expression; would you not wonder whether the person is in fact a citizen of that country being misled by own government (and/or motivated to support it rather than seek truth)?
Yes, the substance of what they say may or may not be true independently of that context, but if we want to function socially and exhaustively validating every claim being made is not an option we have to take shortcuts, and I think we do it all the time even without realizing it. (I’m not writing that lightly since it seems similar to profiling which is ethically icky, but it is my conclusion upon introspection.)
In these cases we can at least imagine possible motive mismatch (known unknowns); in case of a GPT3-like thing instead of a motive you get a scary abyss or much more obscured motives of its human creators. I can’t imagine it having no impact on how I participate in an exchange.
[0] Even still, you can see how elsewhere in the thread there are warranted accusations of the motive being tainted by human exceptionality bias.
High-energy physicists are about as serious as it gets, but they’re still dragging their feet around many worlds because it has uncomfortable implications for consciousness and free will.
Homo Sapiens has a serious agenda around being something other than the smartest chimpanzee.
And because if every outcome happens the probabilities of those outcomes are meaningless, and those probabilities are the predictive content of a quantum mechanical theory. It's an "interpretation" that requires you to ditch the entire value of the thing you're "interpreting". You don't need to know anything about QM other than that it has been empirically tested and is probabilistic in nature to reject the many worlds interpretation on this basis.
Each time I mention this online I state it more confidently, in the hope that some day someone will Cunningham's law me and change my mind. If I haven't committed some gross misunderstanding it's disappointing that so many physicists fall for such obvious bunk. I've already seen the attempted arguments listed at [1] and none of them are remotely convincing.
Hey if you’ve got David Deutsch dead to rights you should book a meeting and have him hand you his Fellowship in the Royal Society.
I’m not a physicist but I am an interested layman, I’m pretty sure I’ll catch wind of the Nobel Prize you’d win for proving him wrong about everything.
This isn't some unique insight of mine. There's a section about it in the wikipedia page for MWI, which I linked in my comment. Everett himself referenced the problem and attempted, unconvincingly, to argue around it in his original paper.
The mystery to me is why the obvious flaw in the idea hasn't killed it dead for so many smart people, such as David Deutsch. Instead they engage in bizarre logical contortions to try and recover the Born probabilities and some shadow of a meaning for them. If you think there's some actual merit in their attempts, listed at the wiki link I pasted, I'm all ears.
Right, it’s well known that if you’re committed to getting probabilities out of amplitudes things go off the rails. Everett himself couldn’t go the full way.
Fully deterministic, you see the part of the wave function that you see. You’re entangled with the apparatus.
Deutsch, and his protege Marletto go the whole way: no free will, no arrow of time, no subjective human experience at all.
Now? No measurement problem. No interpretations of collapse.
These people have decided that the subjective experience of observing an experiment is of secondary importance to clean math.
I appreciate that “you and I don’t exist in any way we’d recognize it” is a big pill to swallow, but I find the idea that humans looking in microscopes mutates the universe a bigger pill.
Superdeterminism (a bad name for ordinary determinism plus a ridiculous unspecified mechanism that links the very thoughts and intentions of an oberver to the system being observed) is even worse. MWI having thrown the baby out with the bathwater, superdeterminism then discards the entire building and everyone living in it. You can "explain" anything with a theory of this nature just as you can with intelligent design. It has no value as an intepretation of a perfectly well functioning mathematical framework like QM.
And the question here is one of interpretation. You say that MWI gives you "clean math" but this isn't about the maths. The maths of quantum mechanics is what it is regardless of how you interpret it. Whether the Schrödinger equation describes the evolution of the system state and observation is a state vector collapse, or the Schrödinger equation describes the evolution of a multiverse and the apparent state vector collapse is an artifact of distinct outcomes decohering, the maths is exactly the same. MWI's claim that it's somehow "mathematically cleaner" or "just what the maths is saying" is nonsense. It's there in the name. It's an interpretation.
QM is a highly effective theory (or rather framework for theories) that has been tested to the umpteenth degree. The question of intepretation is a philosophical one more that a mathematical one, and certainly fascinating. To my mind a "good" interpretation would have to give some actual meaning to the functional components of the theory. If QM predicts something will happen 30% of the time and I test it and it happens 30% of the time, an interpretation that fails to give a meaning to that predictable, observed fact is no use to me.
You seem to think the problem others have with your preferred interpretations is that they are too small-minded to accept that reality is the way these ideas imply. This isn't the case at all. I don't find "free will" an interesting concept and I'm perfectly happy to contemplate a multiverse, deterministic or otherwise, if that's what the scientific method leads us to. What I'm not happy to do is to launch off into a world of wacky, unfalsifiable notions that remove meaning from our existing theories rather than adding it.
I could equally well make claims about the psychology of MWI's adherents, suggesting emotional explanations for why they seem bound to make ever more absurd claims in defence of their idea rather than accepting that it's flawed. I won't, though, because doing that is arrogant and presumptuous.
I’m a seriously interested layman at best, so I could be failing to understand some of the subtleties, if so I apologize.
I’ve got no agenda around Everett’s initial idea and monograph being the end state. To your point, there are some known flaws with his initial formulation.
I find the idea that QM needs an interpretation absurd, MWI was a step on the path to that way of thinking. At a high level, the notion that all possible outcomes of an observable-producing operator on the wave function are equally “real” is clarifying.
I tend to agree with Deutsch and Marletto that “that which is admissible is admitted”.
It’s possible we’re in violent agreement.
QM, and more specifically QEM and QCD make wildly accurate predictions. As long as no one is talking about a causal structure unique to “consciousness” or some ridiculous narcissism like that, I’m very satisfied to rely on the falsifiable and well-tested laws.
Experiments justify 'predictions' of certain mathematical models, not 'interpretations'. As for a belief in interpretations, it's more of a philsophy, and Feynman said just 'shut up and calculate'.
I agree that interpretations of QM are currently in the realm of philosophy, but (and, at the risk of being a fool in saying this) I disagree with Feynman when he says “shut up and calculate” [1].
I tend to lean towards Sean Carrol’s approach of the interpretation is important and we should spend real effort thinking about the different impacts of different interpretations. After all, Einstein didn’t get to general relativity just by calculating. It first required deep thought and consideration to decide what to calculate. And I’m not convinced that the interpretations will forever remain in the realm of philosophy (though, I accept I could be totally wrong about this).
[1] I don’t really disagree with Feynman on this. I think it’s perfect advice for people getting started in really learning QM (which is beyond where I am!). Being very familiar with the mechanics and being able to calculate fluently are probably a good starting point for people learning QM. But I do think that it’s worth experts in the field spending some time beyond the mathematical fundamentals.
I think of humans as a lens, mirror or piece of turbulence in a high dimensional space that information about the universe flows through. Maybe the smartest chimp, but not any more or less alive than anything else. Somewhat fortunate in the ways that we get to experience existence.
What this experiment shows is that making stuff up off the top of your head, using memory alone, isn't as hard as it looks.
But when doing actual research, we check our work against the real world. For example, that's how you get a list of real references rather than fake ones.
Suppose we played a guessing game: given a title, does the Wikipedia article exist or not? You could fairly confidently say that "Apple" exists and "wjifdvq" does not, but given a plausible-looking name of a person or place that you don't recognize, you'd have a harder time. It's not a problem in practice though, because you can look it up.
As a bird owner, they are not “just parrots”. There is clear intent to communicate. Even species who can’t say human words use distinct vocalizations for specific purposes and situations.
I didn’t say that fine-tuned language models have enlightened opinions about living things, just that they produce comments indistinguishable to me from the GP :)
Nonetheless, this approach of taking a fairly complex writing prompt and simply regurgitating contextually similar text from the internet often yields 100% meaningful results. This suggests that our intelligence is a lot more mimetic than we'd like to believe, which is perhaps an even more unpopular opinion.