☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

  • 18.2K Posts
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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: January 18th, 2020

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  • Have some humility and willingness to learn.

    I have plenty of willingness to learn from people who have a clue on the subject.

    I didn’t say it was the primary function.

    You literally tried to argue that evolution doesn’t create complexity if there’s a more efficient path.th.

    Then what about Darwin who literally said, “Natural selection is continually trying to economize every part of the organization.” Now please go and read some introductory texts on biology before trying to explain to me why Darwin is wrong. There’s so much going on when it comes to the thermodynamics of living systems and you’re clearly not ready to have a conversation about it.

    Again, you’re showing a superficial understanding of the subject here. Natural selection selects for overall fitness, and efficiency is only a small part of equation. For example, plants don’t use the most efficient wavelength for producing energy, they use the one that’s most reliably available. Similarly, living organisms have all kinds of redundancies that allow them to continue to function when they’re damaged. Evolution optimizes for survival over efficiency.

    You’re baseless assuming that hydrocephalus causes the brain to lose a substantial amount of its complexity.

    Maybe read the actual paper linked there?

    But hey neuroscience hasn’t really advanced at all since 1980 right? The brain is totally redundant right? There’s no possible way a critical and discerning person such as yourself could have been taken in by junk science, right?!!

    What I linked you is a case study of an actual living person who was missing large parts of their brain and had a relatively normal life. But hey why focus on the actual facts when you can just write more word salad right?

    I took issue with specific statements you made that stand apart from the rest of your comment.

    You took issue with made up straw man arguments that you yourself made and have fuck all with what I actually said. Then you proceeded to demonstrate that you don’t actually understand the subject you’re debating. You might as well start believing in the astrology, crystals, and energy healing. At least those interests will make you seem fun and quirky instead of just a sad debate bro.









  • Im simply stating that you’re way off base when you claim that they appear to operate using the same principles or that all evidence suggests the human mind is nothing more than a probability machine.

    I literally said these things, and you never gave any actual counter argument to either of them.

    You’re betraying your own ignorance about neuroscience. The complexity of the brain is absolutely linked with its ability to reason and we have plenty of evidence to show that. The evolutionary process does not just create needless complexity if there is a more efficient path.

    You’re betraying your ignorance of how biology works and illustrating that you have absolutely no business debating this subject. Efficiency is not the primary fitness function for evolution, it’s survivability. And that means having a lot of redundancy baked into the system. Here’s a concrete example for you of just how much of the brain isn’t actually essential for normal day to day function. https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

    This is such a silly statement especially when you’ve been claiming that both the brain and AI appear to work using the same principles.

    There’s nothing silly in stating that the underlying principles are similar, but we don’t understand a lot of the mechanics of the brain. If you truly can’t understand such basic things there’s little point trying to have a meaningful discussion.

    I don’t really care about your arguments concerning embodiment because they’re so beside the point when you just blowing right by the most basic principles of neuroscience.

    That’s literally the whole context for this thread, it just doesn’t fit with the straw man you want to argue about.

    A ruthless criticism of that exists includes the very researchers whose work you’re taking at face value.

    Whose work am I taking at face value specifically? You’re just spewing nonsense here without engaging with anything I’m saying.









  • I suspect that something like LLMs is part of our toolkit, but I agree that this can’t be the whole picture. Ideas like neurosymbolic AI might be on the right track here. The idea here is to leverage LLMs at parsing and classifying noisy input data, which they’re good at, then use a symbolic logic engine to operate on the classified data. Something along these lines is much more likely to produce genuine intelligence. We’re still in very early stages of both understanding how the brain works and figuring out how to implement artificial reasoning.



  • LLMs and the human mind operate on categorically different principles.

    A bold statement given that we don’t actually understand how the brain operates exactly and what algorithms that would translate into.

    Where the straw man?

    The straw man is you continuing to argue against equating LLMs with the functioning of the brain, something I never said here.

    All the verbiage used to describe neural network models has little to do with how the brain actually works.

    You appear to be conflating the implementation details of how the brain works with the what it’s doing in a semantic sense. There is zero evidence that all the complexity of the brain is inherent to the way our reasoning functions. Again, we don’t have a full understanding of how the brain accomplishes tasks like reasoning. It may be a lot more complex than what LLMs do, or it may not be. We do not know.

    Finally, none of this has anything to do with the point I was actually making which is regarding embodiment. You decided to ignore that to focus on braying about tech companies and LLMs instead.







  • This completely understates the gulf between what we call AI and how the human brain actually works.

    Way to completely misrepresent what I was actually saying. Nowhere was I suggesting that there isn’t a huge difference between the two. What I pointed out is that, while undeniably more complex, our brains appear to work on similar principles.

    My only point was that the feedback loop from embodiment creates the basis for volition, and that what we call intelligence is our ability to create internal models of the world that we use for decision making. So, this is likely a prerequisite for any artificial system that has any meaningful intelligence.

    Maybe try engaging with that instead of writing a wall of text arguing with a straw man.



  • I’ll do one better and have the last chief of NATO explain it for you:

    The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.

    The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

    So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

    https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_218172.htm

    Hope that clears things up for you.


  • All the evidence suggests that our own minds are also nothing more than probability engines. The reason we consider humans to be intelligent is because our brains learn to model the events in the physical world that are fed into our brains by the nervous system. The whole purpose of a brain is to try and keep the body in a state of homeostasis. That’s the basis for our volition. The brain gets data about about the state of the organism, and interprets it as hunger, pain, fear, and so on. Then it uses its internal world model to figure out actions that will put the body into a more desirable state. From this perspective, embodiment would indeed be a necessary component of human style intelligence.

    While LLMs on their own are unlikely to provide a sufficient basis for a reasoning system, its not strictly impossible that a model trained on sensory data from a robot body it inhabits wouldn’t be able to build a representation of the world and its body that could be used as the basis for decision making and volition.