https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/opinion/artificial-intelligence-ai-openai-chatgpt-overrated-hype.html
A.I. is looking less like an all-powerful being and more like an unreliable intern.
archive https://archive.ph/is57b
From Re-evaluating GPT-4’s bar exam performance (linked in the article):
First, although GPT-4’s UBE score nears the 90th percentile when examining approximate conversions from February administrations of the Illinois Bar Exam, these estimates are heavily skewed towards repeat test-takers who failed the July administration and score significantly lower than the general test-taking population.
Ohhh, that is sneaky!
What I find delightful about this is that I already wasn't impressed! Because, as the paper goes on to say
Moreover, although the UBE is a closed-book exam for humans, GPT-4’s huge training corpus largely distilled in its parameters means that it can effectively take the UBE “open-book”
And here I was thinking it not getting a perfect score on multiple-choice questions was already damning. But apparently it doesn't even get a particularly good score!
[...W]hen examining only those who passed the exam (i.e. licensed or license-pending attorneys), GPT-4’s performance is estimated to drop to 48th percentile overall, and 15th percentile on essays.
officially Not The Worst™, so clearly AI is going to take over law and governments any day now
also. what the hell is going on in that other reply thread. just a parade of people incorrecting each other going "LLM's don't work like [bad analogy], they work like [even worse analogy]". did we hit too many buzzwords?
oh is that how come I get so much popcorn around these discussions? 🤔 makes sense when you think about it!
I was considering interjecting in there but I don’t want to get it on my clothes, so I’m content just watching from the outside.
Not great, but I’m also not obligated to teach anyone anything, soooooo
Not the worst? 48th percentile is basically "average lawyer". I don't need a Supreme Court lawyer to argue my parking ticket. And if you train the LLM with specific case law and use RAG can get much better.
In a worst case scenario if my local lawyer can use AI to generate a letter and just quickly go through it to make sure it didn't hallucinate, they can process more clients, offer faster service and cheaper prices. Maybe not a revolution but still a win.
48th percentile is basically "average lawyer".
good thing all of law is just answering multiple-choice tests
I don't need a Supreme Court lawyer to argue my parking ticket.
because judges looooove reading AI garbage and will definitely be willing to work with someone who is just repeatedly stuffing legal-sounding keywords into google docs and mashing "generate"
And if you train the LLM with specific case law and use RAG can get much better.
"guys our keyword-stuffing techniques aren't working, we need a system to stuff EVEN MORE KEYWORDS into the keyword reassembler"
In a worst case scenario if my local lawyer can use AI to generate a letter
oh i would love to read those court documents
and just quickly go through it to make sure it didn't hallucinate
wow, negative time saved! okay so your lawyer has to read and parse several paragraphs of statistical word salad, scrap 80+% of it because it's legalese-flavored gobbledygook, and then try to write around and reformat the remaining 20% into something that's syntactically and legally coherent -- you know, the thing their profession is literally on the line for. good idea
what promptfondlers continuously seem to fail to understand is that verification is the hard step. literally anyone on the planet can write a legal letter if they don't care about its quality or the ramifications of sending it to a judge in their criminal defense trial. part of being a lawyer is being able to tell actual legal arguments from bullshit, and when you hire an attorney, that is the skill you are paying for. not how many paragraphs of bullshit they can spit out per minute
they can process more clients, offer faster service and cheaper prices. Maybe not a revolution but still a win.
"but the line is going up!! see?! sure we're constantly losing cases and/or getting them thrown out because we're spamming documents full of nonsense at the court clerk, but we're doing it so quickly!!"
it's funny how your first choice of insult is accusing me of not being deep enough into llm garbage. like, uh, yeah, why would i be
but also how dare you -- i'll have you know i only choose the most finely-tuned, artisinally-crafted models for my lawyering and/or furry erotic roleplaying needs
In a worst case scenario if my local lawyer can use AI to generate a letter and just quickly go through it to make sure it didn’t hallucinate
at which point it's just easier to do the right thing straight away, that is pay a lawyer to do their job https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65735769
You understand that getting a list of sources and checking them is easier than finding them on your own, right?
Of course it's even easier not checking them at all and submitting garbage, but one should have learned in 3rd grade not to submit copy-pastes from Wikipedia or any website.
This one is on human stupidity, not artifical intelligence.
Speaking as a librarian, you’re a mistaken. It is actually incredibly difficult for most people to know how to verify that a source both exists and says what your unreliable informant claims they say.
Meanwhile medium sized & large law firms have their own librarians (at least in the US), and in many places lawyers from smaller firms have access to some kind of outsourced research service. The easiest solution in the world is to ask the expert researchers whose cost is billable to the client.
so your process of getting legal advice is:
how does that simplify anything
Look it’s a really cheap and fast way of going from potential lawsuit to actual damages! That’s progress, that is!
[ed note: since I can’t markup-joke it in a way that survives lemmy: to be read in pratchett voice)
You understand that getting a list of sources and checking them is easier than finding them on your own, right?
that's one weirdass assumption. when you know what are you looking for, the opposite is true. few months back i've authored a review chapter in my (very narrow) field, and while "getting a list of sources" part took maybe a day or two with a few scopus searches, combing through them, finding out what's relevant and making a coherent story out of all of this was harder and took more time. if you don't know where even to start, maybe you should ask a professional? especially when alternative is just going in raw into the court of law, defending whatever is at stake with a few paragraphs of possibly nonsensical spicy autocomplete output
In a worst case scenario if my local lawyer can use AI to generate a letter and just quickly go through it to make sure it didn’t hallucinate, they can process more clients, offer faster service and cheaper prices.
It's a good thing people are so good at vigilance tasks and don't tend to fall onto just relying on the automation.
That’s like saying a person reading a book before a quiz is doing it open book because they have the memory of reading that book.
It's more like taking a digital copy into the test room with you and Ctrl+F'ing every question/answer.
Except it’s not, because they can’t perfectly recall everything.
It’s more like reading every book in the world, and someone asking you what comes next after “And I…”.
But the AI isn't "recalling" in the same way you do, it doesn't "remember" what it "read", it "reads" on demand and has instant access to essentially all of the information available online it was trained on (E: though it's becoming more or less the same thing, and is definitely the same when it comes to law books for example), from which it collects the necessary details if and when it needs it.
So yes, it is literally "sat" there with all the books open in front of it, and the ability to pinpoint a bit of information in any one of all the books in milliseconds.
It doesn’t read on demand, it reads once when it’s being trained, and it later recalls what it learnt from that training.
Training LLMs takes a very long time and a lot of hardware power.
If it doesn't read it on demand, how does it sometimes spill its training data verbatim then?
The trained model shouldn't have that, right? But it does?
It doesn’t read on demand
Yes, it does, from the information it was trained on (or - stored), which like you say, requires a lot of hardware power so it can be accessed on demand. It isn't just manifesting the information out of thin air, and it definitely doesn't "remember" in the same way we do (E: even the best photographic memory isn't the same as an indexable one).
I mean you still gotta understand some shit for Ctrl+F to be helpful. If you've ever taken an open book quiz without prior study you'll learn pretty quick that open book does NOT = easy A (depending on the class / prof I guess, but you get the gist).
So, open book Ctrl-F'able bar exam, I could probably get an okay score just on key word matching, not knowing jack shit about law; but it'd be far from a perfect score. Current state of machine learning appears to be in a comparable boat.
your post shows a serious lack of comprehension. just because so many of the posters in this thread are idiots didn't mean you have to participate too.
(CPU time extremely counts, and resource-wise with these things it's really quite a lot)
I'm not a big AI guy but it's really not quite like that, models do NOT contain all the data they were trained on.
Edit: I have no idea what's going on down below this comment
that's a misleading and meaningless way of putting it. if I rip a page out of my textbook and bring it into an exam room, I do not have with me all the data in my textbook. and yet
It doesn’t do that, either. LLMs retain the linguistic patterns found in textbooks, nothing more. It’s remarkable that they can do so much with this information alone, but it’s still a far cry from genuine intelligence.
And yet they can spit out copyrighted material verbatim, or near-verbatim, how strange and peculiar.
Yeah, even setting aside the intelligence claims, I know I'd be feeling a lot more positive about LLMs as a fun theoretical tool if they weren't being sold as personal assistants or search engine replacements etc, which even the apologists here admit they're really really bad at.
(Also I'd argue "linguistic patterns" is pushing it. "Textual patterns" more like, it's not supposed to have any idea about grammar or even about what "text" is.) (I say "supposed to" because who knows what sort of hacks they're running under the hood.)
Modified Thursday, May 16th, 2024 at 9:17:13 AM GMT+02:00 Edit: I have no idea what’s going on down below this comment
lol. at least you're honest about it
I'm not even going to engage in this thread cause it's a tar pit, but I do think I have the appropriate analogy.
When taking certain exams in my CS programme you were allowed to have notes but with two restrictions:
The idea was that you needed to actually put a lot of work into making it, since the entire material was obviously the size of a fucking book and not an A4 page, and you couldn't just print/copy it from somewhere. So you really needed to distill the information and make a thought map or an index for yourself.
Compare that to an ML model that is allowed to train on data however long it wants, as long as the result is a fixed-dimension matrix with parameters that helps it answer questions with high reliability.
It's not the same as an open book, but it's definitely not closed book either. And the LLMs have billions of parameters in the matrix, literal gigabytes of data on their notes. The entire text of War and Peace is ~3MB for comparison. An LLM is a library of trained notes.
My question to you is how is it different than a human in this regard? I would go to class, study the material, hope to retain it, so I could then apply that knowledge on the test.
The ai is trained on the data, "hopes" to retain it, so it can apply it on the test. It's not storing the book, so what's the actual difference?
And if you have an answer to that, my follow up would be "what's the effective difference?" If we stick an ai and a human in a closed room and give them a test, why does it matter the intricacies of how they are storing and recalling the data?
I'm not sure what you even mean by "how is it different", but for starters a human can actually get a good mark at the bar and spicy autocomplete clearly cannot.
spicy autocomplete clearly cannot.
What you are basing this "it clearly cannot" on? Because an early iteration of it was mediocre at it? The first ICE cars were slower than horses, I'm afraid this statement may be the equivalent of someone pointing at that and saying "cars can't get good at going fast."
But I specifically asked "in this regard", referring to taking a test after previously having trained yourself on the data.
What you are basing this “it clearly cannot” on?
I asked Gemini and it told me that ChatGPT can't do shit, I'm not gonna question it.
How is a human being different from running cat my\_textbook.txt? Checkmate! Give Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie billions of dollars, for they have invented artificial general intelligence, and now we may all have robot girlfriends.
Give Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie billions of dollars
I mean, if we took all net worth of Sam Altman and split it between these two guys who at least benefited humanity with their work we'd get at least a step closer to justice in the universe.
Getting a Turing award: $1M
Dropping out of Stanford to work on something unironically called "Loopt": Priceless
holy fuck you're a moron
please go read a book, and look at some art. no, marvel media doesn't count.
Me, about to suggest some actually really good, thought provoking Marvel comics that somehow got made alongside the relentless superhero soap opera: oh wait now isn't the time, we're dunking on the AI bro
I'm not even going to engage in this thread cause it's a tar pit, but I do think I have the appropriate analogy.
Proceeds to actively engage in the thread multiple times
The word parameters here must be defined. Is it the weight they are talking about or the input being used to answer the question? For the former, yeah, it's like a person was reading a book and not an open book at all. But if it were used in the input, then it is practically an open book. They have the context on the same input.
Why is that a criticism? This is how it works for humans too: we study, we learn the stuff, and then try to recall it during tests. We've been trained on the data too, for neither a human nor an ai would be able to do well on the test without learning it first.
This is part of what makes ai so "scary" that it can basically know so much.
Dont anthropomorphise. There is quite the difference between a human and an advanced lookuptable.
Well... I do agree with you but human brains are basically big prediction engines that use lookup tables, experience, to navigate around life. Obviously a super simplification, and LLMs are nowhere near humans, but it is quite a step in the direction.
@phoenixz @Soyweiser "Let's redefine what it means to be human, so we can say the LLM is human" have you bumped your head?
Well, I don't think humans are turing computable, so I disagree with you there. Which should have been clear from my initial post.
Fun fact, what you just said about how humans are just computers is also part of dianetics. Amazing how it happened in 2 different cults.
I absolutely agree. However, if you think the LLMs are just fancy LUTs, then I strongly disagree. Unless, of course, we are also just fancy LUTs.
You ever meet an ai researcher with a background in biology? I’ve discussed this stuff with one. She disagrees with Turing about machines thinking including when ai is in the picture. They process information very differently from how biology does
This is a vague non answer, although I agree it's done very differently because our process is biological and ai is not.
But as I asked elsewhere, what's the effective difference?
so to summarize, your only contributions to this thread are to go “well uh you just don’t know how LLMs work” while providing absolutely no detail of your own, and reporting our regulars for “Civility” when they rightly called you out for being a fucking idiot who’s way out of their depth
how fucking embarrassing for you
Wikipedia informs me that your diet includes squid, anchovies, mackerel, rockfish, and sardines. Yum yum!
I guess it comes down to a philosophical question as to what "know" actually means.
But from my perspective is that it certainly knows some things. It knows how to determine what I'm asking, and it clearly knows how to formulate a response by stitching together information. Is it perfect? No. But neither are humans, we mistakenly believe we know things all the time, and miscommunications are quite common.
But this is why I asked the follow up question...what's the effective difference? Don't get me wrong, they clearly have a lot of flaws right now. But my 8 year old had a lot of flaws too, and I assume both will get better with age.
i guess it comes down to a philosophical question
no, it doesn't, and it's not a philosophical question (and neither is this a question of philosophy).
the software simply has no cognitive capabilities.
I'm not sure I agree, but then it goes to my second question:
What's the effective difference?
“(…) perception, attention, thought, imagination, intelligence, comprehension, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision-making (…)”
don't know why you got downvoted, an LLM is essentially a chinese room, and whether such a room "knows" is still the question.
nearly every word of your post demonstrates a comprehensively thorough lack of understanding of how this shit works
it also demonstrates why you're lost about the "effective difference"
I don't mean this aggressively, but you really don't have any concrete idea of wtf you're talking about, and it shows
Yeah, it’s a philosophical question, which means you need a philosophical answer. Spitballing won’t help you figure shit out a priori because it turns out that learning how to think a priori effectively takes years of hard graft and is called “studying philosophy”. You should be asking people like me what “know” means in this context and what distinguishes memory in human beings from “memory” in an LLM (a great deal, as it happens!)
Nothing to do with this comment, but since c/sneerclub literally bans anyone who doesn't agree with the mods' opinions, I just wanted to respond to your comment there. You say I'm a weirdo for thinking that llms will help teachers grade homework. Khan from Khan Academy has talked extensively about how this already happening. It isn't some weird fantasy it is modern-day reality.
Because a machine that "forgets" stuff it reads seems rather useless... considering it was a multiple choice style exam and, as a machine, Chat GPT had the book entirely memorized, it should have scored perfect almost all the time.
Chat GPT had the book entirely memorized, it should have scored perfect almost all the time.
The types of multiple choice questions aren't simple recall of learned facts. It requires application of abstract concepts to new facts, with a lot of red herrings. Here's a real question:
A father lived with his son, who was an alcoholic. When drunk, the son often became violent and physically abused his father. As a result, the father always lived in fear. One night, the father heard his son on the front stoop making loud obscene remarks. The father was certain that his son was drunk and was terrified that he would be physically beaten again. In his fear, he bolted the front door and took out a revolver. When the son discovered that the door was bolted, he kicked it down. As the son burst through the front door, his father shot him four times in the chest, killing him. In fact, the son was not under the influence of alcohol or any drug and did not intend to harm his father.
At trial, the father presented the above facts and asked the judge to instruct the jury on self-defense.
How should the judge instruct the jury with respect to self-defense?
(A) Give the self-defense instruction, because it expresses the defense’s theory of the case.
(B) Give the self-defense instruction, because the evidence is sufficient to raise the defense.
(C) Deny the self-defense instruction, because the father was not in imminent danger from his son.
(D) Deny the self-defense instruction, because the father used excessive force.
Studying for the bar exam starts with memorizing a bunch of rules, but actually getting out and applying them is a separate skill.
Chat GPT had the book entirely memorized
I feel like this exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs are trained.
They're auto complete machines. All they fundamentally do is match words together. If it was trained on the answers and still couldn't reproduce the correct word matches, it failed.
You have the energy to spread misinformation and spam downvotes, how about an intelligent response instead?
They aren't auto complete machines, they are neural networks. Why are you trying to explain it when you clearly don't have the first idea of how things work?
the very funny thing is, all of the garden variety free text autocomplete systems I’ve worked with have been implemented using neural nets. it’s not like it’s a particularly new or novel approach. but surely the AI bros coming into this thread know that and they’re not just regurgitating buzzwords, right?
Don't worry friend, you are correct.
Edit: Lets see some intelligent responses rather than downvotes. Bunch off teens majoring in "AI".
I don't think you understand the type of multiple choice questions involved. Here's a real question:
A father lived with his son, who was an alcoholic. When drunk, the son often became violent and physically abused his father. As a result, the father always lived in fear. One night, the father heard his son on the front stoop making loud obscene remarks. The father was certain that his son was drunk and was terrified that he would be physically beaten again. In his fear, he bolted the front door and took out a revolver. When the son discovered that the door was bolted, he kicked it down. As the son burst through the front door, his father shot him four times in the chest, killing him. In fact, the son was not under the influence of alcohol or any drug and did not intend to harm his father.
At trial, the father presented the above facts and asked the judge to instruct the jury on self-defense.
How should the judge instruct the jury with respect to self-defense?
(A) Give the self-defense instruction, because it expresses the defense’s theory of the case.
(B) Give the self-defense instruction, because the evidence is sufficient to raise the defense.
(C) Deny the self-defense instruction, because the father was not in imminent danger from his son.
(D) Deny the self-defense instruction, because the father used excessive force.
Memorizing the book itself doesn't teach how to answer this type of question. It requires actual application of concepts to the new facts being given.
Yes that is indeed the sort of question I was expecting. But anyway good thing the LLM didn't have just one book, but oodles of books and expert opinion and past exam data at its disposal! Oh wait it didn't help and the machine especially made to give correct answers failed to give correct answers :(
Lol, it literally takes 5s to search for this, come up with the book and read
The defendant has offered evidence of having acted in self-defense.
as the first sentence. How could you claim having that memorised wouldn't help?
90th percentile means it performed equal or better than 90% of the comparisons, no? Not that it got 90% score.
I mean, it’s not shit at everything; it can be quite useful in the right context (GitHub Copilot is a prime example). Still, it doesn’t surprise me that these first-party LLM benchmarks are full of smoke and mirrors.
Not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot, which I have yet to find a use for. Do you not like GH Copilot either?
it’s always fucking “boilerplate” with these assholes, isn’t it? I don’t know how so many people got into this field and didn’t figure out the template, snippet, or macro engines in their editors
"hey copilot buddy please write me a http server for a guestbook application I can demo on my blog"
That GitHub Copilot and friends are useful? I would argue that their utility is rather subjective, but there are indications that it improves developer productivity.
I’m unsure if you’ve used tools like GH Copilot before, but it primarily operates through “completions” (“spicy autocorrect” in its truest form) rather than a chatbot-like interface. It’s mostly good for filling out boilerplate and code that has a single obvious solution; not game-changing intelligence by any means, but useful in relieving the programmer of various menial tasks.
May I ask, what evidence are you hoping to see in particular?
https://awful.systems/comment/1286383
I look forward to the money that I'll make cleaning up the mess you provide people with
all in all: underwhelming. I remain promptdubious.
I know I'm six months late to the party but how do you like "promptcritical"?
prompt critical is already a term of art in nuclear energy and it's a state that you'd very, very much avoid (unless that was the intention of course)
yar I thought of that at the time too but with "gendercritical" having been used by ghouls I felt like the well might've been poisoned. still don't really have a good one :|
I too want a taxi driver that doesn't know how to drive a car but can adjust the little TV content in the back.
Psh I mean all he has to do is step on the gas pedal and the car does all the work anyways right? I'm glad he doesn't have to think to much about so he has more time to get the thermostat just right.
The moral equivalent of "peril-sensitive shades" will be the killer app for augmented reality headsets.
I mean....yea? That's kind of the point. It's not driving, it's the copilot. You're the one driving, and it will get the thermostat right because you're busy operating the vehicle and want to keep your attention on the road. That seems useful to me.
If you already have an idea of the code you want to write and start typing it, Copilot can help auto complete so you can focus on actually solving whatever problem you're working on instead of searching for the correct syntax online. I understand shitting on AI is fun and there's plenty of valid criticisms to be made, but this is actually kind of useful.
how could we possibly be critical of the technology that at best replicates basic editor functionality (templating, syntax completion), outputs wildly incorrect code, and burns rainforests?
“Ah but see, there is no agency, there is merely emergent behaviour! It is none of our choices that drive this, but merely the ideas some have had that drive this engine of our doom. Alas, we can do nothing about this outcome!”
And devs wonder why people think they are hostile shut-ins that have no social skills...
SMFH
You’re a man of the people, david
(Sorry I can’t tag you appropriately ritenao, because of reasons jank)
((Also yes the italic is all overtone meanings))
I asked AI to summarize the article since it's paywalled. It didn't say anything about lying, should I trust it?
It's almost like we can't make a machine conscious until we know what makes a human conscious, and it's obvious Emergentism is bullshit because making machines smarter doesn't make them conscious
Time to start listening to Roger Penrose's Orch-OR theory as the evidence piles up - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
The given link contains exactly zero evidence in favor of Orchestrated Objective Reduction — "something interesting observed in vitro using UV spectroscopy" is a far cry from anything having biological relevance, let alone significance for understanding consciousness. And it's not like Orch-OR deserves the lofty label of theory, anyway; it's an ill-defined, under-specified, ad hoc proposal to throw out quantum mechanics and replace it with something else.
The fact that programs built to do spicy autocomplete turn out to do spicy autocomplete has, as far as I can tell, zero implications for any theory of consciousness one way or the other.
Bro the main objection to Orch-OR is that the brain is too warm for Quatnum stuff to happen there, and then they found Quantum stuff in the brain.... So... not sure how it's not suggestive of the reality of Orch-OR
Edit: Btw, I don't know where you're getting the idea that Orch-OR is "Trying to throw out Quantum Mechanics and replace it with something else", considering that it's dependent upon Quantum Mechanics, and we have demonstrated that "Quantum Biology" is a thing in plants - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-it-comes-to-photosynthesis-plants-perform-quantum-computation/ and in birds - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01725-1
So why not the brain?
it’s very important to me that you don’t type the words “Blake Stacey” into a search engine while explaining quote unquote Quatnum stuff to them
it’s very important to me that you don’t type the words “Blake Stacey” into a search engine while explaining quote unquote Quatnum stuff to them
randoms from /all wandering into the vale of sneers: https://www.buttersafe.com/2008/10/23/the-detour/
I don't know anything about a Blake Stacey, but from context clues I'm assuming she's one of those Quantum Mysticism nut jobs. Naw I don't go for that sort of thing, and neither should anybody with even a single crumb of common sense.
Free Advice: If anyone says they're going to heal you with "Quantum Healing", it's code for "I have no medical training, and if you listen to me, you're going to die horribly."
I get claims about Quantum Mechanics being involved with consciousness are a little sus, but given Penrose's pedigree, history, and reputation and how much the science seems to check out I trust him. I know many have their doubts about the Orch-OR theory, but after doing a lot of reading up on it I think it reasonable to conclude that the reason it hasn't been more widely embraced is due to quacks like Deepak Chopra and his ilk poisoning the well with his talk of "Quantum Consciousness"
If it helps, I know who you are and will still happily tell you incorrect information about yourself and your profession if asked to!
Oh I see... I didn't realize you were trying to tell me I was talking to Blake Stacey or that he was respected in Quantum Mechanics. I completely misinterpreted what you were trying to tell me. I blame it on the inability of text to properly convey sarcasm.
Kludging an "objective reduction" process into the dynamics is throwing out quantum mechanics and replacing it with something else. And because Orch-OR is not quantum mechanics, every observation that a quantum effect might be biologically important somewhere is irrelevant. Orch-OR isn't "quantum biology", it's pixie-dust biology.
Orch-OR
Never heard of this thing but just reading through the wiki
An essential feature of Penrose's theory is that the choice of states when objective reduction occurs is selected neither randomly (as are choices following wave function collapse) nor algorithmically. Rather, states are selected by a "non-computable" influence embedded in the Planck scale of spacetime geometry.
Neither randomly nor alorithmically, rather magically. Like really, what the fuck else could you mean by "non-computable" in there that would be distinguishable from magic?
Penrose claimed that such information is Platonic, representing pure mathematical truths, which relates to Penrose's ideas concerning the three worlds: the physical, the mental, and the Platonic mathematical world. In Shadows of the Mind (1994), Penrose briefly indicates that this Platonic world could also include aesthetic and ethical values, but he does not commit to this further hypothesis.
And this is just crankery with absolutely no mathematical meaning. Also pure mathematical truths are not outside of the physical world, what the fuck would that even mean bro.
I thought Penrose was a smart physicist, the hell is he doing peddling this.
it's well outside of his ballpark somehow, it's like how Linus Pauling started all that megadose vitamin horseshit (starting with vit C), it sorta, kinda made a vibe-based shred of sense when you ignore all actual details, but he was hopelessly lost because he was not a biologist. what he had was nobel prize so he had enough cred for people to fall for it. many such cases!
I thought Penrose was a smart physicist, the hell is he doing peddling this.
and it’s obvious Emergentism is bullshit because making machines smarter doesn’t make them conscious
This is like 101 of bad logic, "this sentence is false because I failed to prove it just now".
Throwing out emergentism because some linear algebra failed to replicate it is a pretty bad take.
You're right that consciousness and intelligence are not the same. Our language tends to conflate the two.
However, evolution created consciousness over billions of years by emergent factors and no source of specific direction besides being more successful at reproduction. We can likely get there orders of magnitude faster than evolution could. The big problem would be recognizing it for what it is when it's here.
> We can likely get there orders of magnitude faster than evolution could
[Citation needed]
I mean, assuming it is at all possible (or rather that the problem even means anything), I suppose four billion years is a rather generous deadline.
If I practice trying to shoot hoops every day I’m going to get one in a lot sooner than you will just kicking at the ball every time you walk by.
@WolfLink so you're saying there's a measurable correlation between practicing a skill and getting better at it? Amazing
What's this got to do with the Big Averaging Machine?
We go orders of magnitude faster than evolution on tons of things. It's not that big of a claim.
Penrose can't even define consciousness. He started with the assumption that consciousness is incomputable and has spent years trying to prove that. This man does not weild the scientific method.
this thread enters the pantheon of things I'll occasionally return to when I need a laugh, joining the likes of bash.org (rip) and other qdbs
