[FRIAM] Joy, Dogs, and Computers
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Tue Jul 28 13:06:21 EDT 2020
My dog chuckled when I told her about this...
... or maybe she just yawned...
> And then I forgot to change the subject line.
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
> Hi, Frank,
>
>
>
> Damn! I forgot to change the thread!
>
> */ /*
>
> */You wrote/*
>
> One of the questions on my PhD qualifying exam was to defend or deny
> Marvin Minsky's claim that a brain is just a computer made of meat. I
> chose to do the latter and argued in a vein similar to Doug's comments.
>
> *//*
>
> Can I make meat out of silicon? This argument just seems to buck the
> argument down a few levels. When will we know that Beyond Meat has
> finally come up with the Silicon Burger?
>
>
>
> I wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi Doug,
>
>
>
> I changed the subject line to head off accusations of dragging this
> lofty discussion into my nasty, fetid den.
>
>
>
> dog is highly interconnected - hormones, nerves, senses, and
> environment. neurons are not binary . every synapse is an infinite
> state variable.
>
>
>
> These points might serve as an explanation for why dogs can and
> computers cannot exhibit joy – but only once we had agreed, up front,
> what it would be for a computer to exhibit joy. For my part, I
> guess, I would say that to exhibit joy, a computer would have to be
> “embodied” – i.e., be a robot acting in an environment, probably a
> social environment – and that robot would have to behave joyously. Or
> perhaps it could instruct an icon, in a screen environment, to
> behavior joyously. But I assume any one of a dozen of the people on
> this list could design such a robot, or icon, once you and I had done
> the hard work of defining “joyous.”
>
>
>
> Programmers do this with games, etc., all the time.
>
>
>
> Heider and Simmel did it with a time-lapse camera and a few felt icons
> on a glass draft deflector.
>
>
>
> Lee Rudolph, if he is still amongst us, can send you a program in
> netlogo where an icon exhibits joy.
>
>
>
> Following early Tolman here.
>
>
>
> N
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *doug carmichael
> *Sent:* Tuesday, July 28, 2020 9:20 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] GPT-3 and the chinese room
>
>
>
> dog is highly interconnected - hormones, nerves, senses, and
> environment. neurons are not binary . every synapse is an infinite
> state variable.
>
> doug
>
>
>
> On Jul 27, 2020, at 10:45 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com
> <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Doug,
>
>
>
> Dog do joy; why not computers?
>
>
>
> n
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com
> <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> *On Behalf Of *doug carmichael
> *Sent:* Monday, July 27, 2020 9:54 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] GPT-3 and the chinese room
>
>
>
> I imagine playing chess, or go, with a computer. As I play I have
> a very enlivening experience of playing. The computer seems to
> have no such thing. For me, in my engagement, “Every neuron is
> listening to the mutter of the crowd.” Jerry Lettvin, MIT. If
> The computer goes on to win it has nothing like the experience of
> winning. it just stops. I can’t imagine a computer saying, except
> by playing a pre recorded sound file, “that is disgusting.”
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 27, 2020, at 8:12 PM, Frank Wimberly
> <wimberly3 at gmail.com <mailto:wimberly3 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>
> Smart computer (program). Nick, is the behaviorist position
> that if it behaves as though it thinks than it thinks?
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 8:28 PM Alexander Rasmus
> <alex.m.rasmus at gmail.com <mailto:alex.m.rasmus at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> There's also a lot of stuff that isn't poetry. He
> generates Dwarf Fortress patch notes in the Misc section.
>
>
>
> There's even a section where GPT-3 argues that it doesn't
> really understand anything (bold at the start is a
> shortened version of the prompt):
>
> "*AI will never be able to truly* think for themselves, to
> have consciousness, to feel any of the richness and
> complexity of the world that we mere humans can feel.
> Mere, unenlightened humans might be impressed by the
> abilities of simple deep learning programs, but when
> looked at in a more holistic manner, it all adds up to…
> well, nothing. They still don’t exhibit any trace of
> consciousness. All of the available data support the
> notion that humans feel and experience the world
> differently than computers do. While a computer can beat a
> human master at chess or Go or some other game of
> structured rules, it will never be able to truly think
> outside of those rules, it will never be able to come up
> with its own new strategies on the fly, it will never be
> able to feel, to react, the way a human can. Artificial
> intelligence programs lack consciousness and
> self-awareness. They will never be able to have a sense of
> humor. They will never be able to appreciate art, or
> beauty, or love. They will never feel lonely. They will
> never have empathy for other people, for animals, for the
> environment. They will never enjoy music or fall in love,
> or cry at the drop of a hat. Merely by existing, mere,
> unenlightened humans are intellectually superior to
> computers, no matter how good our computers get at winning
> games like Go or Jeopardy. We don’t live by the rules of
> those games. Our minds are much, much bigger than that.
>
>
>
> Compared to the awesome power of the human intellect, it’s
> obvious that computers are just dense electrochemical
> machines with intricate wiring. And while one day we might
> develop smarter (though still soulless) computers that
> surpass the human intellect in the games mentioned above,
> it will just end up being some more sophisticated way of
> doing the same thing. Even if it’s more efficient than our
> brains at doing complex mathematical operations, it will
> remain entirely in the dark about what it all means.
> Mindless processing power alone is not the answer to our
> existential questions. So, in the end, we don’t need to
> create another HAL 9000, or Skynet, or some evil global
> intelligent network of computers that rule the world and
> try to exterminate humanity as we become obsolete, which
> is a pretty cool subplot for a future Terminator movie. We
> don’t need any of that. We’re humans, and we are already
> intellectually superior to machines. End of story.
>
>
>
> To be sure, I’m not denying that there are hard problems
> in AI. Of course, there are. All of these so called
> “advances” in this field are a bunch of crap if we still
> don’t have a program that can putt around on a
> miniaturized golf course all by itself, let alone actually
> play a decent game of golf like the humans do, without
> going into meltdown if it misses the hole five out of six
> times in a row. Can we get a movie about that? If you ask
> me, we don’t even really know how to define intelligence
> yet. How does it work, exactly? It’s a mess, really. If
> we’re ever going to create another actual HAL 9000, or yet
> another Skynet (what fun), we’d better be all on the same
> page when it comes to AI: what intelligence is, how it
> works, what consciousness is, what it feels like, what it
> really means to be self-aware. Without that common
> framework, trying to program yet another AI that can play
> yet another game like Go is like trying to blow up another
> Death Star with yet another way-too-large superlaser.
>
>
>
> I think one of the big mistakes that computer scientists
> are making is that they are conflating intelligence with
> problem-solving. They’ve gotten into this habit of
> creating intricate Turing test competitions: give the
> computer a series of math problems, a chess board, etc.,
> etc., give it a chat interface so you can interact with it
> like you would with another human being, and then see if
> the machine can fool you into thinking that it is a human.
> Once it does this, computers will have passed the Turing
> test and achieved general AI. Really? Is that really the
> way it works? I don’t see how. A computer has succeeded in
> faking it until it makes it, in terms of passing a Turing
> test competition, only if it has satisfied some
> pre-specified set of conditions that we know to be what a
> human would do in the same situation. But that is no
> guarantee that it has actually achieved intelligence! For
> all we know, computers can imitate humans until they
> generate the most plausible patterns of thought and
> behavior we know of, while all along remaining as soulless
> as ever. Who’s to say that the computer doesn’t merely use
> its programming to cheat the test? Who’s to say that it
> isn’t just shuffling its data around in an effort to do
> the most computations possible with the least amount of
> effort? It may succeed in conning us into thinking that it
> is self-aware, but that doesn’t prove that it actually is.
> It hasn’t actually passed the Turing test, unless we have
> defined it in a way that pre-determines the outcome: i.e.,
> if the human pretends to be a computer, then it passes the
> test, but if the computer pretends to be a human, then it
> doesn’t pass the test! To me, that just doesn’t sound all
> that scientific."
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Rasmus
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 8:04 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com
> <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Excellent. Thanks! I'd seen the link to Gwern from
> Slate Star Codex. But I loathe poetry. Now that you've
> recommended it, I have no choice. 8^)
>
> On July 27, 2020 6:32:15 PM PDT, Alexander Rasmus
> <alex.m.rasmus at gmail.com
> <mailto:alex.m.rasmus at gmail.com>> wrote:
> >Glen,
> >
> >Gwern has an extensive post on GPT-3 poetry
> experimentation here:
> >https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3
> >
> >I strongly recommend the section on the Cyberiad,
> where GPT-3 stands in
> >for
> >Trurl's Electronic Bard:
> >https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#stanislaw-lems-cyberiad
> >
> >There's some discussion of fine tuning input, but I
> think more cases
> >where
> >they keep the prompt fixed and show several different
> outputs.
>
> --
> glen
>
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