ghransa (u/ghransa) - Readit News

ghransa commented on Gödel's theorem debunks the most important AI myth – Roger Penrose [video] youtube.com/watch?v=biUfM... · Posted by u/Lockal

szvsw · a year ago

Yes that’s my main point - if you accept the first one, then you should accept the second one (though some people might find the second so absurd as to reject the first).

> Imagine if instead of an LLM the billions of people instead simulated a human brain. Would that human brain experience consciousness? Of course it would, otherwise they're not simulating the whole brain.

However, I don’t really buy “of course it would,” or in another words the materialist premise - maybe yes, maybe no, but I don’t think there’s anything definitive on the matter of materialism in philosophy of mind. as much as I wish I was fully a materialist, I can never fully internalize how sentience can uh emerge from matter… in other words, to some extent I feel that my own sentience is fundamentally incompatible with everything I know about science, which uh sucks, because I definitely don’t believe in dualism!

ghransa · a year ago

It would certainly with sufficient accuracy honestly say to you that it's conscious and believes it whole heartily, but in practice it would need to a priori be able describe external sense data, as it's not separate necessarily from the experiences, which intrinsically requires you to compute in the world itself otherwise it would only be able to compute on, in a way it's like having edge compute at the skins edge. The range of qualia available at each moment will be distinct to each experiencer with the senses available, and there likely will be some overlap in interpretation based on your computing substrate.

We in a way can articulate the underlying chemputation of the universe mediated through our senses, reflection and language, turn a piece off (as it is often non continuous) and the quality of the experience changes.

ghransa commented on Gödel's theorem debunks the most important AI myth – Roger Penrose [video] youtube.com/watch?v=biUfM... · Posted by u/Lockal

katabasis · a year ago

Many philosophical traditions which incorporate a meditation practice emphasize that your consciousness is distinct from the contents of your thoughts. Meditation (even practiced casually) can provide a direct experience of this.

When it comes to the various kinds of thought-processes that humans engage in (linguistic thinking, logic, math, etc) I agree that you can describe things in terms of functions that have definite inputs and outputs. So human thinking is probably computable, and I think that LLMs can be said to be ”think” in ways that are analogous to what we do.

But human consciousness produces an experience (the experience of being conscious) as opposed to some definite output. I do not think it is computable in the same way.

I don’t necessarily think that you need to subscribe to dualism or religious beliefs to explain consciousness - it seems entirely possible (maybe even likely) that what we experience as consciousness is some kind of illusory side-effect of biological processes as opposed to something autonomous and “real”.

But I do think it’s still important to maintain a distinction between “thinking” (computable, we do it, AIs do it as well) and “consciousness” (we experience it, probably many animals experience it also, but it’s orthogonal to the linguistic or logical reasoning processes that AIs are currently capable of).

At some point this vague experience of awareness may be all that differentiates us from the machines, so we shouldn’t dismiss it.

ghransa · a year ago

To state it's a turing machine might be a bit much but there might be a map between substrates to some degree, and computers can have a form of consciousness, an inner experience, basically the hidden layers and clearly the input of senses, but it wouldn't be the same qualia as a mind, I suspect it has more to due with chemputation and is dependent on the substrate doing the computing as opposed to a facility thereof, up to some accuracy limit, we can only detect light we have receptors for after all. To have qualia distinct to another being you need to compute on a substrate that can accurately fool the computation, fake sugar instead of sugar for example.

ghransa commented on Terence Tao on O1 mathstodon.xyz/@tao/11313... · Posted by u/dselsam

ghransa · 2 years ago

I suspect, but am not certain - that if it had all of formalized mathematics in its context window it could likely extend the edges slightly further. Would be an interesting experiment irregardless.

ghransa commented on Another police raid in Germany forum.torproject.org/t/to... · Posted by u/costco

ghransa · 2 years ago

It's a tough tradeoff for society, and a lot of harm is concentrated, but in a way that's good thing - there is a way to block tor exit nodes if you need to and the defaults ports do prevent many types of abuse and since the exit nodes are public they can just be blocked for spam, clickfraud, etc. But with any duel use technology, the opposite argument would be investigations also running through TOR, or even a totalitarian state (in this case it seems non technical judicial procedure through proper channels, but that's the concern). The trouble is the routing is outside of the state control and the typical mechanism for takedowns, ultimately for the worse of the worst ultimately has a host somewhere else as tor just does the routing. Since by design the exit node wouldn't necessarily get you any further up the chain to the middle node in the connection, it would be more fruitful to chose a different investigative strategy.

ghransa commented on Global Encryption Day: Demand End-to-End Encryption in DMs blog.torproject.org/globa... · Posted by u/pabs3

100001_100011 · 3 years ago

Reproducible builds are for developers. As a user I didn't build the app on my phone.

I have a phone with Signal on it. Tell me what I should do to verify it's running the open source Signal code.

ghransa · 3 years ago

Not perfect chain of custody but could report to virustotal (virustotal.com) and compare in a sandbox:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.funnycat.v...

ghransa commented on U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord scientificamerican.com/ar... · Posted by u/rbanffy

ghransa · 5 years ago

This is a sad day in history.

ghransa commented on The Singularity is Near: How Kurzweil's Predictions Are Faring (2017) antropy.co.uk/blog/the-si... · Posted by u/segfaultbuserr

hyper_reality · 5 years ago

Summary of the article is in this paragraph:

> This is actually quite impressive! Although 9 out of 25 is only a 36% accuracy rate, I still remember when reading The Singularity is Near for the first time that almost all of the predictions seemed wildly optimistic and sort of crazy. It seemed a bit unlikely that it would be possible to have a high speed internet connection from a touchscreen super-computer everyone has in their pocket that can also act as a personal assistant that you can speak to in natural language and it will usually understand and respond appropriately, albeit unable to have a full conversation at this point.

So his best record is in making predictions about the internet and ubiquity of portable computers (smartphones), but he's been less successful in his optimistic predictions for full-immersion virtual reality, and the jury is still out on the singularity.

ghransa · 5 years ago

What he seems to get wrong are the adoption, the tech is there in niches and works reasonably well, but it's just not wide spread, people just don't see the value in using say VR or Google glass.

ghransa commented on People expect technology to suck because it sucks tonsky.me/blog/tech-sucks... · Posted by u/ivanche

ghransa · 5 years ago

I like to think about it like little minecraft characters beating on a piece of code until it works right. It's like smithing, you have to put it through it's paces and iterate as a developer, since thinking of all the complexity on large projects is infeasible. The only thing to do is to write it, test, redo it, test some more, test on a wider test bed, release, get complaints, add more tests, and finally you are at the start.

ghransa commented on Alzheimer's: 'Promising' blood test for early stage of disease bbc.co.uk/news/health-535... · Posted by u/elorant

hprotagonist · 6 years ago

The meta-problem is that early identification only matters if we have an effective therapy which can seriously slow or halt disease progression.

we do not.

ghransa · 6 years ago

For the individual yes it would still be bad news and folks likely won't want to get the screening. For the potential development of a therapy, identifying it early would let you have a pool of candidates to be tested.

ghransa commented on What if carbon removal becomes the new Big Oil? economist.com/the-world-i... · Posted by u/known

tunesmith · 6 years ago

There's this pattern of:

- We should do "X"

- But doing "X" won't solve "Y"

- But "X" will help

- But "X" won't solve

- But "X" is necessary

- But "X" isn't sufficient

And I think the unstated conclusions are whether we should actually do "X" or not. I think the answer is usually Yes, we should do X (in this case, plant as many damn trees as we can), but I also think that's me arguing from an individual perspective and not a group psychology perspective.

Like, when people argue "but focusing on trees could distract us from addressing the entire problem", I used to just be dismissive of that, but I'm starting to feel like those objections should be taken more seriously - particularly having gone through this COVID debate where people focused so much on "flattening the curve" - which was necessary, not sufficient - that too many people signed on to gradual reopening just as the (high-amplitude) curve started flattening. If we had socialized a different benchmark, maybe it would have been more effective in the long run.

(But still, even if only in parentheses, plant trees.)

ghransa · 6 years ago

It's a different lense we need, this would be the argument: we should do x,x if we do it won't have enough effects by itself, it's better than nothing to have that desired effect, it's a step in the right direction to achieve the desired results, what we need to have is other people to also have the desired effect to do the same thing independently. The question is what is the effect and how much of a piece of the whole would it mitigate. Can the people who do decide to make a change in that one goal can they compare notes to improve on that outcome.

Tldr: do what you can based on where you are at your life and hope improves in the right direction, this applies to all things.