i really think the comparison of a brain to a computer is more apt than a lot of people here would like to admit, and it isn't just some tech bro shit, like. Yeah, I know there are innumerable ways computer chips and neurons differ in how they function but ultimately it's all about sensing and sending and interpreting and responding to information. the physical nature and evolutionary development of the brain has given it so many layers of complexity and redundancy that weird shit like consciousness has come out of it as an emergent property, and while yeah computers and shit like chatgpt aren't there yet at some point (lol we'll all die first probably tho) I imagine at some point they will become so similarly complex that individual people or teams of people will no longer be able to adequately maintain and understand them any better than people currently understand the human brain and that whatever results will be so indistinguishable from actual conscious thinking life that anyone attempting to argue that computers and the human brain are totally different will end up having to dip into some really uncomfortable rhetorical arguments to maintain that biological life is like, totally different, bro
i'm high and on more caffeine than my body can handle, don't @ me arguing about this I will simply be really annoying in my responses u_u
I read an article somewhere a looong time ago which made the point that the way brains are viewed basically corresponds to the current state of technological development in society.
In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.
In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.
The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.
By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.
Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software.
It reminds me of Marx's comment about Charles Darwin looking at the biological world and only seeing bourgeois categories, but the science spoke for itself
Turns out that mental illnesses aren't due to "chemical imbalance", that's just something drug marketers made up because it's more reassuring than "we have no idea what this drug does but sixty percent of people feel better when they take it, but one in 200 times your immune system attacks your mucus membranes for no identifiable reason and your skin falls off.
Ok you're going to be one of the bio supremacists arguing with chatgpt-9000 how the infinitely and impossibly complex layers of algorithms that people no longer understand that make it up are somehow different than your biological signaling because reasons and that's why it has to work the Wendy's "self checkout" and doesn't get to go to robot heaven because it doesn't have a soul, cool story bro
Just talking about neurons shows why the comparison is severely flawed. We keep finding out that there is cognitive processing going on in your digestive system all kinds of internal and external factors effect how your brain works, and there isn't a really meaningful distinction between the brain and the rest of the body. It's so much, much more complex than a few logic gates on a rock and comparing the two is very reductive. We're not going to make a human-like mind just reproducing neuron linkages. There's a lot more to it than that, even if the people saying there are quantum processes involved in cognition turn out to be wrong.
We keep finding out that there is cognitive processing going on in your digestive system
literally just more neurons, so what, more information and sensory shit getting added to the mix but it's still basically an infinitely tangled algorithmic spaghetti that makes up your consciousness
We’re not going to make a human-like mind
you can just stop it there, I'm aware
It’s so much, much more complex than a few logic gates on a rock
A neuron is much more complex and can consequently do a lot more things, adding to the complexity of the signaling and processing and whatever else you wanna call it mix that eventually comes out as consciousness, but that doesn't mean that "a few logic gates on a rock" can't be configured to operate with a similar degree of complexity
I don't think chatgpt is alive but I do think that at some point the systems underlying things like it will grow sufficiently complex that you could call it conscious and, again, like I said, have to resort to some real questionable arguments to say that biological life is different
I would be Commander Data's friend and not allow him to be chopped up and studied just because his circuitry could be reduced in argument to "a few logic gates on a rock" :soviet-huff:
I don’t think chatgpt is alive but I do think that at some point the systems underlying things like it will grow sufficiently complex that you could call it conscious and, again, like I said, have to resort to some real questionable arguments to say that biological life is different
People are already failing the turing test against chatgpt, but as it stands it doesn't do anything like thinking. All it can do is produce series of letters based on statistical weights in it's training model. There's no awareness, no context, no abstraction, no cognitive process what so ever. It can't reflect, it can't evaluate truth values, it can't perform any cognitive processes at all. People talk about lying and hallucination, but both of those terms are deeply misleading and fundamentally misunderstand what the models are doing. It can't lie - it has no theory of mind. It has no awareness of itself, let alone anything else. It can't hallucinate either. It's not answering questions incorrectly or giving you the wrong information. It's not answering your questions at all. It's comparing the sequence of letters in your prompt to sequences of letters in it's training set and producing a statistically weighted sequence of letters based on that training set. There's no abstraction, there's no manipulation of concepts. There's no cognition. That's why the image plagiarism generators can't draw hands, or really any complex object except faces - hands come in so many different shapes that the model weighs the colors and shapes of fingers, but lacking abstraction it cannot recognize that all of those shapes represent the same conceptual object. It doesn't know that most hands have five fingers because it doesn't know what hands or fingers are. It doesn't know anything. It's a math problem that compares numerical values and produces outputs statistically similar to the input prompt.
Personally i think trying to make thinking computers is stupid bazinga stuff. We already have fully functioning self aware machines capable of all kinds of extremely complex functions we mostly don't understand yet. We should work with what we've got instead of trying to recreate one of the most complex emergent systems in observable reality when we don't even understand it's basic operating principles. Augmenting existing brains, to me at least, makes a lot more sense than fussing around stratching crude drawings on rocks.
CW: That quote about all the horrible things happening every moment
spoiler
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Tech bros will really look at the beautiful tragedy of human existence and go "yeah this is just like my sweet gaming rig"
i really think the comparison of a brain to a computer is more apt than a lot of people here would like to admit, and it isn't just some tech bro shit, like. Yeah, I know there are innumerable ways computer chips and neurons differ in how they function but ultimately it's all about sensing and sending and interpreting and responding to information. the physical nature and evolutionary development of the brain has given it so many layers of complexity and redundancy that weird shit like consciousness has come out of it as an emergent property, and while yeah computers and shit like chatgpt aren't there yet at some point (lol we'll all die first probably tho) I imagine at some point they will become so similarly complex that individual people or teams of people will no longer be able to adequately maintain and understand them any better than people currently understand the human brain and that whatever results will be so indistinguishable from actual conscious thinking life that anyone attempting to argue that computers and the human brain are totally different will end up having to dip into some really uncomfortable rhetorical arguments to maintain that biological life is like, totally different, bro
i'm high and on more caffeine than my body can handle, don't @ me arguing about this I will simply be really annoying in my responses u_u
I read an article somewhere a looong time ago which made the point that the way brains are viewed basically corresponds to the current state of technological development in society.
Found it
It reminds me of Marx's comment about Charles Darwin looking at the biological world and only seeing bourgeois categories, but the science spoke for itself
Turns out that mental illnesses aren't due to "chemical imbalance", that's just something drug marketers made up because it's more reassuring than "we have no idea what this drug does but sixty percent of people feel better when they take it, but one in 200 times your immune system attacks your mucus membranes for no identifiable reason and your skin falls off.
That’s just cognitive science
It's more that your brain does not work like a computer in any way. Like, not at all.
Ok you're going to be one of the bio supremacists arguing with chatgpt-9000 how the infinitely and impossibly complex layers of algorithms that people no longer understand that make it up are somehow different than your biological signaling because reasons and that's why it has to work the Wendy's "self checkout" and doesn't get to go to robot heaven because it doesn't have a soul, cool story bro
Yes :yes-chad:
Just talking about neurons shows why the comparison is severely flawed. We keep finding out that there is cognitive processing going on in your digestive system all kinds of internal and external factors effect how your brain works, and there isn't a really meaningful distinction between the brain and the rest of the body. It's so much, much more complex than a few logic gates on a rock and comparing the two is very reductive. We're not going to make a human-like mind just reproducing neuron linkages. There's a lot more to it than that, even if the people saying there are quantum processes involved in cognition turn out to be wrong.
literally just more neurons, so what, more information and sensory shit getting added to the mix but it's still basically an infinitely tangled algorithmic spaghetti that makes up your consciousness
you can just stop it there, I'm aware
A neuron is much more complex and can consequently do a lot more things, adding to the complexity of the signaling and processing and whatever else you wanna call it mix that eventually comes out as consciousness, but that doesn't mean that "a few logic gates on a rock" can't be configured to operate with a similar degree of complexity
I don't think chatgpt is alive but I do think that at some point the systems underlying things like it will grow sufficiently complex that you could call it conscious and, again, like I said, have to resort to some real questionable arguments to say that biological life is different
I would be Commander Data's friend and not allow him to be chopped up and studied just because his circuitry could be reduced in argument to "a few logic gates on a rock" :soviet-huff:
People are already failing the turing test against chatgpt, but as it stands it doesn't do anything like thinking. All it can do is produce series of letters based on statistical weights in it's training model. There's no awareness, no context, no abstraction, no cognitive process what so ever. It can't reflect, it can't evaluate truth values, it can't perform any cognitive processes at all. People talk about lying and hallucination, but both of those terms are deeply misleading and fundamentally misunderstand what the models are doing. It can't lie - it has no theory of mind. It has no awareness of itself, let alone anything else. It can't hallucinate either. It's not answering questions incorrectly or giving you the wrong information. It's not answering your questions at all. It's comparing the sequence of letters in your prompt to sequences of letters in it's training set and producing a statistically weighted sequence of letters based on that training set. There's no abstraction, there's no manipulation of concepts. There's no cognition. That's why the image plagiarism generators can't draw hands, or really any complex object except faces - hands come in so many different shapes that the model weighs the colors and shapes of fingers, but lacking abstraction it cannot recognize that all of those shapes represent the same conceptual object. It doesn't know that most hands have five fingers because it doesn't know what hands or fingers are. It doesn't know anything. It's a math problem that compares numerical values and produces outputs statistically similar to the input prompt.
Personally i think trying to make thinking computers is stupid bazinga stuff. We already have fully functioning self aware machines capable of all kinds of extremely complex functions we mostly don't understand yet. We should work with what we've got instead of trying to recreate one of the most complex emergent systems in observable reality when we don't even understand it's basic operating principles. Augmenting existing brains, to me at least, makes a lot more sense than fussing around stratching crude drawings on rocks.
On the flip side, you can shrug on a camelback and credibly claim you've installed water cooling on your CPU.
Turning my t-shirt into a radiator
Wildly overpriced, but not a terrible idea.
CW: That quote about all the horrible things happening every moment
spoiler
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”