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Author Topic: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc  (Read 240080 times)

Helgoland

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1095 on: December 10, 2017, 02:48:30 pm »

What youtube autoplayed while I was reading that.
I felt a strong urge to find more songs like that and go around singing them.
Welcome to the club. 'Go Summon Up The Dead Ones' is just too catchy. So people in my town now have the pleasure of encountering a huge, ill-shaven, lanky dude silently muttering to himself a sing-song about the Ancient Ones returning and killing all of humanity.
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Arguably he's already a progressive, just one in the style of an enlightened Kaiser.
I'm going to do the smart thing here and disengage. This isn't a hill I paticularly care to die on.

Reelya

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1096 on: December 10, 2017, 08:34:32 pm »

I was thinking about Searle's argument a little, and a kind of big flaw jumped out at me.

Searle says that we can't even truly define what a digital computer is, the interpretation is one we layer on our understanding of the system, it's not intrinsically "true" in any scientific sense. Therefore, how can we say that the brain is comparable to a digital computer.

However, that exact same argument can be used to say "anything" isn't any "anything". e.g. which atoms "belong" to a mountain? Where the mountain starts and stops is purely human interpretation. Therefore who can truly say that Mount Everest is a mountain? Or which atoms are part of a cat? Objective nature doesn't define that either, it's conscious beings who make that interpretation. So who is to say your cat in your house is "really" a cat.

That seems to be the big problem here: when someone is trying to prove that something is or isn't true in a practical sense, and they end up resorting to an argument that basically boils down to "but fundamentally, nothing is knowable" then they clearly have a bit of an issue with finding more straight-forward evidence, or they just wouldn't be going there.

The brain does process signals, and it does so according to rules (the laws of physics and the current state of the brain). The rules are complex however only because we lack complete knowledge of the state of anyone's brains, and perhaps our understanding of sub-atomic physics needs to improve too. However, to argue from that that "there are no rules" for how the brain processes inputs seems like "Argument from Personal Incredulity". e.g. Searle doesn't know what the exact rules by which inpurs are processed are, neither do you or I, therefore there are no rules is Searle's argument. That seems like a huge assumption.
« Last Edit: December 10, 2017, 08:43:39 pm by Reelya »
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MrRoboto75

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1097 on: December 10, 2017, 08:39:18 pm »

how can brains be real if our eyes aren't real
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Reelya

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1098 on: December 10, 2017, 08:54:30 pm »

Quote
We are blinded to this difference by the fact that the same sentence, "I see a car coming toward me", can be used to record both the visual intentionality and the output of the computational model of vision. But this should not obscure from us the fact that the visual experience is a concrete event and is produced in the brain by specific electro-chemical biological processes. To confuse these events and processes with formal symbol manipulation is to confuse the reality with the model. The upshot of this part of the discussion is that in the sense of "information" used in cognitive science it is simply false to say that the brain is an information processing device.

It seems like this assertion is questionable too. Processes in a silicon computer propagate by physical electrical signals too, e.g. actual physical processes. So Searle's argument that brains aren't computers because they are "physical" seems to be fairly baseless. How are electrons, protons and neutrons actually conscious? This almost seems like voodoo science from Searle.

What the fuck is a "biological process" and why is it special and separate to chemistry and physics? It's this sort of unscientific bullshit that Searle's argument devolve into. He prioritizes things being "biological" as if that makes them special, which is vitalism.This unsubstantiated exaltation of things for being "biological" is a major flaw - since his basic argument is that biological brains have a special status compared to ones made of silicon, then saying that they are special because they are "biological" is the classical fallacy of circular reasoning. In fact, it's a long stretch to say that we couldn't work out an equivalent set of symbol manipulations that each neuron is in fact carrying out. Neurons aren't conscious: the "physicality" is a red herring. It's the patterns and relationships that matter between neurons. Searle's argument is basically that consciousness is embedded in biological matter, therefore it's "real" vs one in silicon which is "not real", and that because we can't work out a "symbol table" for what a neuron is doing, therefore no such table could exist. All of those things are questionable assertions.

It also fails because it uses the exact same logical fallacies he calls out in this very paper. e.g. he calls out "syntax and symbols" as being purely human constructs layered on to of the real physics, yet here he is claiming some special unique properties and concrete reality for "biological processes" a term which is completely meaningless if we're talking at the level Searle claims to be talking.

Another core Searle's argument is that a simulations aren't "real" therefore they don't have the properties of "real" things. However, the question is whether e.g. a simulated heat "beats" or not. If you have simulation of an animal, with a simulated heart, then the simulated heart keeps them alive in the simulation. Without the heart, you simulate the animal dying. Whether the heart "really" kept the simulated animal alive or not is not a valid point of view: because what matters is how the elements of the simulation relate to one another, not how they related to things outside the simulation. The property of hearts that they beat and keep animals alive are higher-order properties that only make sense to talk about in relation to the simulation's internal relationships. Arguing that it didn't "really" keep the animal alive misses the point completely. it was real enough for the purposes of the simulation. It's no different to brain processes vs heart processes.

Personally, my view, is that a simulated brain with simulated processes doing advanced "brain stuff" identical to a conscious human would in all likelihood actually be conscious. This is an opinion however, because I strongly believe that conscious evolved because it's necessary to the correct operation of the brain. Conscious brains evolved because they are the most efficient use of the resources to achieve the task of controlling animal bodies. If you could build a correctly simulated brain in a computer that learns the same, and does the same functions as a human does, yet wasn't "conscious" then that would imply that conscious was unnecessary in the first place and would lead you to question why we humans evolved to be conscious when a perfectly functional "philosophical zombie" would be a more efficient use of the available resources. I don't believe "philosophical zombies" would actually work. That's my gut feeling for reasoning that a correct simulation of the brain would also be conscious.

This is something that we might actually have to grapple with because of advances in computing power decades from now. e.g. would a brain-scale neural network that grows the way real brains grow,  that swears it is conscious actually be conscious or would it just be a "philosophical zombie? This might be the equivalent of Catholics who back in the 1960s were warning people that children born from IVF would "lack souls" because they didn't have "original conception" which is where souls come from in Catholic dogma. However, the problem of people who "lack souls" walking around, falling in love and having their own children, would of course be a huge problem to explain in Catholic dogma, so it was dropped pretty early on. The idea of simulated brains "lacking consciousness" because they're bereft of the "biological spark" seems to be an argument born from the same cloth.
« Last Edit: December 10, 2017, 09:36:31 pm by Reelya »
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smjjames

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1099 on: December 10, 2017, 10:39:03 pm »

/boot philosophy.dat (I inserted that in after I started typing as I thought it'd be funny)

I don't see why artificial consciousness can't be a thing. We only think consciousness needs a biological spark because the biological example of consciousness is the only example we have.

It comes right down to the philosophical question, "What is consciousness?" It's not a tangible thing, is a worm 'conscious'? a fish? a single cell amoeba? Is an insect hive a form of consciousness?

If consciousness is simply reacting to changes in the environment without thinking about them, then the simplest organisms are conscious. Is it planning and thinking ahead and strategizing, that is, thinking instead of pure instinct, then we've got octopi, some of the smarter arthropods, probably some fish, and the rest of the vertebrates.

At the same time, we'd have to ask ourselves what is sapience because you can't have sapience without consciousness, or can you?
« Last Edit: December 10, 2017, 10:41:45 pm by smjjames »
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Reelya

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1100 on: December 10, 2017, 10:42:43 pm »

However, any biological thinking system is constrained to be finite, Ipsil, so properties which are posited on problems with infinite turing machines might not apply.

Quote
At the same time, we'd have to ask ourselves what is sapience because you can't have sapience without consciousness, or can you?

We'll need new terminology as this develops. Because things like "awareness" are currently inextricably tied in with our human experience but really covers multiple things. e.g. if a computer is programmed for face recognition and responds, in one sense it's "aware" of you, in that it can detect and react. However, it lacks any sort of "inner life" that enables it to reflect on that fact, which is another, quite separate thing we mean when we say "aware". It will require untangling all these associations we have that aren't necessarily true associations, but are tangled up in human experience.

EDIT:

It's actually possible that some of our systems already have a crude sensory awareness around the insect level. e.g. one NN was built based off studies of the navigation system in a bee's brain which was around 1 million neurons in size originally:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnjk34/this-drone-has-artificial-intelligence-modelled-on-honey-bee-brains

Quote
Launched in 2012, the Green​ Brain Project aims to create the first accurate computer model of a honey bee brain, and transplant that onto a UAV.

The project, based out of the University of Sheffield and University of Sussex, seeks to raise awareness of the declining population of honey bees worldwide, as well as to advance our knowledge of AI and honey bee cognition.

e.g. they're modeling a bee's brain, sticking that into a drone, now they have something that can fly around like a bee. If bee's brains only work because there's some spark of consciousness in there, then how does the drone brain work if it isn't conscious?
« Last Edit: December 10, 2017, 10:59:57 pm by Reelya »
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smjjames

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1101 on: December 10, 2017, 10:51:48 pm »

I thought you were talking about the turing test, not sure what a turing machine (which is a totally different thing) has to do with consciousness, or the turing test.
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smjjames

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1102 on: December 10, 2017, 11:03:31 pm »

If the wiki page is anything to go by, the turing-equivalence of consciousness assumes consciousness operates in a binary system. On/off states are certainly part of consciousness (because death), but the brain can't possibly be operating only on a binary system.

We have an understanding of how neurons work, but one neuron doesn't equal consciousness and we don't have a full understanding of the deeper aspects.
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smjjames

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1103 on: December 10, 2017, 11:14:40 pm »

How does that collection of neurons that make up the brain create consciousness though? That's the question behind the question really. As far as we know, you can't have consciousness without a brain (or central proccessing center, if you will) of some kind.

Can a decentralized network of nerves with no central point or maybe multiple nodes be conscious? we don't know because there isn't a biological example like that which we know of.
« Last Edit: December 10, 2017, 11:16:54 pm by smjjames »
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Strife26

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1104 on: December 11, 2017, 01:53:22 am »

The question behind all of these questions, though, is "what is consciousness," which lacks a rigorous definition.

EDIT: A thought on my above idea of adding and removing states. A possible formulation would be thus:

For our "Turing-like" machine, we have M=〈Q,Γ,b,Σ,δ,q0,F〉, where all but δ have the traditional formulation under the usual definition of a Turing machine. δ, however, is unique. It consists of the following:
  • write symbol
  • move tape
  • next state
  • state rewrite index i
  • state rewrite size n
  • action table to write over states of index i to i+n, of size m
A variation exists for every possible read symbol.

Any state reference to a state of index x+i is replaced with a reference of a state of index x+i-n+m; that is, x1=x0-n+m, for all x≥1 Still attempting to formulate the exact specifications. This is done to prevent going to a state that does not exist. Turing completeness is trivial- simply replace everything past the next state value of the action table with 0's. I am not sure of whether this system is Turing-equivalent or not.

Yeah, it's turing equivalent. It'd be a really huge increase in the size of the machine, but you could do all of that with an extended tape alphabet and a ton of extra nodes.
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smjjames

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1105 on: December 11, 2017, 02:15:04 am »

Why limit to just latin and greek alphabet? Lets include cyrillic, cunieform, egyptian heiroglyphs, and every written script ever invented, both still in use and lost to history.

At that point, you'd probably want to ditch the tape for some other method.
« Last Edit: December 11, 2017, 02:17:12 am by smjjames »
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1106 on: December 11, 2017, 03:16:57 am »

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martinuzz

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1107 on: December 12, 2017, 05:27:27 am »

Dutch national consumer service, Consumentenbond, warns people that want to buy a new phone not to buy the Samsung Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, or J3 2016.

From march 2018 onwards, Samsung will stop providing updates for these models, which will make their software age fast, and make the phones less secure.

The director of Consumentenbond, Bart Combée says it's "absurd".
"Samsung terminates support of 3 of it's phones less than 2 years after they were put on the market, and won't look back, while those phones are expected to be sold on the market way beyond their support termination date.
As far as we are concerned, Samsung has an obligation here that they can't just walk away from.


So yeah. Don't buy Samsung unless they change their crazy ways.
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redwallzyl

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1108 on: December 12, 2017, 01:48:47 pm »

Dutch national consumer service, Consumentenbond, warns people that want to buy a new phone not to buy the Samsung Galaxy S7, S7 Edge, or J3 2016.

From march 2018 onwards, Samsung will stop providing updates for these models, which will make their software age fast, and make the phones less secure.

The director of Consumentenbond, Bart Combée says it's "absurd".
"Samsung terminates support of 3 of it's phones less than 2 years after they were put on the market, and won't look back, while those phones are expected to be sold on the market way beyond their support termination date.
As far as we are concerned, Samsung has an obligation here that they can't just walk away from.


So yeah. Don't buy Samsung unless they change their crazy ways.
Forget planned obsolescence, just say fuck it.
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Max™

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Re: Tech News. Automation, Engineering, Environment Etc
« Reply #1109 on: December 13, 2017, 06:30:06 pm »

You know, I just saw that commercial with the insufferable little hipster brat talking about "what's a computer" and it hit me: we now get to say Apple is hostile to homosexuals!

Alan Fucking Turing, prosecuted and chemically castrated for being homosexual is responsible for the concepts behind the computer I am typing this on, and which you are reading this on, so fuck Apple entirely.
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