[HN Gopher] Generative AI space and the mental imagery of alien ...
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Generative AI space and the mental imagery of alien minds
Author : RafelMri
Score : 225 points
Date : 2023-07-18 04:34 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
| cmilton wrote:
| This is such a fascinating evolution of technology for me. It
| reminds me a lot of my experience with psychedelics. The ability
| to see things in a much different way. To visualize the many
| possible ways an image may truly present to our brains without
| our learned constraints. Adjusting our model weights. Its
| beautiful. :)
| jacknews wrote:
| Always fascinating from Stephen Wolfram.
|
| In fact I didn't realise it to start with, but after I'd scrolled
| for half an eternity, and saw there was still an eternity of
| content to go (I guess that's how eternity works), I thought
| 'huh, it's really long, is this a Stephen Wolfram piece?'. I
| don't know how he does it, he must type in his sleep.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > I don't know how he does it, he must type in his sleep.
|
| You are close. He writes while he goes on walks and has had a
| number of writing on the go hardware setups over the years.
|
| https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I like to imagine him wandering in the Sahara desert typing
| away madly not realizing where he has gone while I sip my
| coffee.
| sdwr wrote:
| Can see Wolfram's approach here - interesting how he's coming to
| generative AI with a beginner's mind, from first principles. He
| makes a lot of interesting points, but I can't help and think
| that he would save a lot of time talking to someone who knows the
| field better, instead of figuring it all out on his own.
|
| The stuff about attractors and dimensions in model space is
| missing the architectural understanding (layers representing
| features, backprop)
| thrashh wrote:
| Sometimes it's nice starting from scratch because once you
| learn something, your thinking is "corrupted" and your take
| isn't very fresh anymore.
| jojobas wrote:
| That's weird. A cat is a cat is a cat, any alien with a visual
| organ and a perfect ability to paint, would reproduce the same
| thing. Inside his mind he might have completely different
| associations with the image, and this weight manipulation
| trickery doesn't get us closer to those hypothetical
| associations.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| If you asked me to draw a cat in a party hat, I would get the
| number if ears legs and eyes correct, but my fur would be non-
| existent and there's no way my cat eyes would glow in a
| reflection. The AI is thinking differently than humans.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| An infrared image of a cat an an X-ray image of a cat are
| drastically different to an optical one, so it's not a given
| that they'd all draw the same thing.
| jojobas wrote:
| Fair enough, still it's not what the authors impute at all.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If the alien is blasting the cat with soft x-rays constantly
| to perceive it, then it's mostly different because it killed
| the cat with radiation poisoning.
|
| Shapes and proportions remain the same regardless. And even
| human artists can be... "inventive", with coloration or
| emphasis of some features over others.
|
| It seems improbable that they'd draw anything we haven't
| drawn ourselves.
| nuclearsugar wrote:
| On the topic of exploring the innards of machine learning models,
| here are some visualizations I created of the hidden internal
| representation layers within the StyleGAN3 FFHQ1024 model.
|
| https://youtu.be/2aDeS_RFqHs
|
| https://www.jasonfletcher.info/vjloops/index.html#internal-r...
| sdwr wrote:
| Incredible! You should make music videos
| ShamelessC wrote:
| All of your posts are fantastic. I'm amazed you have the
| patience for the data cleanup required for the plants finetune.
|
| I remember wanting to do a Pokemon finetune (before such things
| were commonplace) and the dataset cleanup was the worst part.
| Stability issues and lack of decent multi-GPU setup being a
| close second.
| nuclearsugar wrote:
| Thanks! Indeed the cleanup required for the 'Nature
| Artificial' dataset was intense and forced me to consider
| other techniques. It was around that time that I realized
| that I could use Stable Diffusion to output 10,000 to 50,000
| images, which has proved to be a useful dataset creation tool
| for training StyleGAN2 or StyleGAN3. Yet nailing down a SD
| text prompt that will continuously output images in a
| specific style and context can be challenging.
|
| StyleGAN2/3 is quite sensitive to fine-tuning models with a
| dataset that contains lots of variation, such as the Pokemon
| dataset. But it will converge much better with a dataset of
| just Pikachu images in tons of different poses. It seemingly
| wants to find the most common pattern in the dataset and
| interpolate within that space. From there nailing down the
| ideal value for the gamma attribute is difficult, but luckily
| can be reduced every 1000 to 2000kimg until the model no
| longer trains favorably. Currently my typical gamma strategy
| is: 80 > 10 > 5 > 2
| keepamovin wrote:
| Interesting how some of these is very similar to 20th C art
| movements like Cubism, Impressionism, Pointillism and
| Constructivism. Picasso et al
|
| Many of which were very much actively practicing altering,
| expanding or engaging with different aspects or modes of
| perception.
|
| ( _edit_ : also funny how art has its own type of elaborate
| legalese-type language to (deliberately im-)precisely capture its
| diverse and expansive meanings)
| Legend2440 wrote:
| Keep in mind that this is all about diffusion models.
|
| The latent space of GANs is known to be structured differently -
| much smoother and more disentanglement of concepts. Very likely
| each type of model has a unique latent space.
| gwern wrote:
| Yes, you wouldn't get anything like what he shows in all these
| pictures if you were walking a BigGAN or StyleGAN latent space
| rather than the 'latent space' of Stable Diffusion 1 (which
| isn't really a latent space to begin with). So that rather
| undermines any connections he might want to draw to grander
| things than just SD1.
| tracnlf wrote:
| Is this "Ruliad" concept accepted anywhere else? I have a hard
| time reading Wolfram's expositions, which seem like GEB mysticism
| (everything is recursion), except here everything is a "Ruliad"
| (whatever that may be).
| tanepiper wrote:
| "accepted" is maybe hard to push here, but the Ruliad isn't
| that different to the Vedic concept of Indra's Net -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra%27s_net
| Thorentis wrote:
| Meh? I don't really see this as anything special, or anything
| close to being an "alien mind". An alien mind would have been
| trained on its own environment with perhaps wildly different
| inputs. This is nothing more than a broken human mind. A mind
| trained on the same inputs as humans, but then altered
| haphazardly. This teaches us nothing and appears to be purely a
| gimmick.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| > we can progressively increase the numerical values of the
| weights--eventually in some sense "blowing the mind" of the
| network (and going a bit "psychedelic" in the process)
|
| I wonder if there's a more exact analog of the action of
| psychedelics on the brain that could be performed on generative
| models?
|
| Andrew Gallimore's online course on psychedelic neurochemistry[1]
| argues that psychedelics disrupt something like a constant fine-
| tuning cycle taking place in normal perceptual activity, causing
| new activations between cortical structures where connections had
| previously been dormant (see [2] for an in-at-the-deep-end
| account), causing the generative model in the higher layers of
| the cortex[3] to adjust in an effort to regain predictive
| efficacy.
|
| I wonder if some such kind of "dynamic" generative mechanism
| might be needed to perturb an artificial model analogously?
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqdD4EM-
| aEfmLvbWu8GQ...
|
| 2:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L45A6XlPRM0&list=PLbqdD4EM-a...
|
| 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
| [deleted]
| netbioserror wrote:
| Unsure why he needs to adopt the unnecessary axiom of calling
| existing models "human-aligned". If they were trained from random
| noise, fresh deep neural nets are the closest things we have to
| blank slates, which are utterly alien to us and the animal world.
| Every neural net in nature comes with a bevy of pre-baked
| patterns that form in the womb and, for humans, continue forming
| outside of it.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| I think the reason Stephen Wolfram is using "human-aligned" is
| because that is the only feedback loop that is training the
| models. If you haven't read "What is it like to be a bat?" by
| Thomas Nagel, I highly recommend it.
| Mizza wrote:
| I'm a Wolfram-skeptic, but I liked this article.
|
| I'd never considered the islands-surrounded-by-fuzz before, but
| it makes me wonder a few questions - is there a programmatic way
| to identify the "islands" (without using a separate NN
| classifier)? Is trimming the "fuzz" a potential method of
| compression for models?
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The dimensionally of these islands must be insane. Every 2D
| representation is one of thousands upon thousands of possible
| slices through the weighting space.
|
| Exploring these will be like trying to find the edge of
| fractals.
| m12k wrote:
| Any attempt at visibility into the inner workings of ML models
| should be welcomed IMO. It's going to be essential in the
| coming years, if we're going to reason about or regulate them.
| E.g. how would we hardcode Asimov's laws of robotics into some
| future deep learning AGI, if it's still just one big black box
| for us?
| DougBTX wrote:
| The dimensionality is a challenge here - these are 2D islands
| in a, what, 2000D space? Imagine a cross section of a cylinder,
| that would look like an island if it went through the cylinder,
| but not along it.
|
| I wonder what it would look like if the cross-section plane was
| aligned with a line between two recognisable points.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| When discussing "n parameters," such as 6B parameters or in
| the case of GPT4 around 1.7T is the rumored parameters size,
| each parameter is a dimension. So, yeah, that's a lot more
| than 2d or even 2000d. More like 1,700,000,000,000D.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I don't think it's impossible for these images to have some
| resonance with human dreams and altered states of consciousness.
| However, the phrase "mental imagery of alien minds" seems to
| carry unjustified conceptual baggage.
|
| The usual implication of "mind" is something like a process that
| includes intentions, meta-understandings and etc (varying
| depending on one's conceptions but usually having these). The
| processes that generate things could be described as purely
| algorithmic - or they might have further implications. But the
| thing there's no proof or even strong indicator of the further
| implications.
| Attummm wrote:
| Is generative AI a alien mind when it's build synthetic neurons
| and the images and videos look akin to dreams?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I always find it interesting how a hero dose of LSD gives similar
| visuals to what these image AI's do to achieve a coherent image.
|
| on top of that the associated Hallucinogen Persisting Perception
| Disorder (HPPD) clinical condition seems to be more like an image
| processing issue, somewhere between the rods and cones (sensor)
| and memory (persistent storage). like an unwanted configuration
| change in a program or development environment.
|
| I feel like the more we get AI to act like humans, and the more
| those engineers and others use LSD, the more convergence we are
| going to have with curiosity and breakthroughs about how we
| function. More akin to biological machines without such unique
| mental faculties, just the illusion or _hallucination_ of such.
| robblbobbl wrote:
| Similar to a DMT Breakthrough:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RONAjJYB5bE
|
| This is how our mind perceive or forms reality, ourselves and
| the objects around us in a huge floating chaos of elements.
| That's what we call order. Pretty fascinating and overwhelming.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > I call it the ruliad. Think of it as the entangled limit of
| everything that is computationally possible: the result of
| following all possible computational rules in all possible ways.
|
| Quote from his link to ruliad.
|
| I think maybe what he is talking about is equivalent to what we
| usually call "mathematics".
|
| Since mathematics actually only instantiates computable things.
|
| (It can represent uncomputable things as abstractions, but only
| at a level that is actually computable. I.e. everything we know
| about uncomputable reals, or higher order infinities, is a
| computable statement. So those concept representations are as
| computationally rule defined as anything else.)
| civilitty wrote:
| _> I think maybe what he is talking about is equivalent to what
| we usually called "mathematics"._
|
| And as we all know, "mathematics" was invented in its entirety
| by Stephen Wolfram, so sayeth Wolfram Alpha's new science
| history DLC.
|
| The FTC has required that I disclose that this endorsement is
| paid for by the Wolfram Supervillain Support Program.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Trust Stephen Wolfram to get the idea behind this. I agree
| completely.
|
| My own work in Stable Diffusion is way less about prompt
| engineering or approximating 'human art' and much more in
| exploring its capacity for vivid and plausible hallucination,
| likewise the beginnings of my experiments with LLAMA.
|
| There is a kind of meaning to these spaces when you can
| compellingly imply something with purpose and integrity, but it's
| not prescriptive, or it's not a human thought. I'm looking for
| the evocative, but I'm willing to be a lot more collaborative
| about what it evokes... people's explorations into negative
| prompting are fascinating to me, even though I think it's
| something of a false path.
|
| Telling AIs to replace human artists and follow instructions
| while aping their styles is not useful behavior (except
| economically, and even then it's degenerative). Using AI to do
| what you'd have to inflict brain damage on an artist to do, is
| more interesting and ethical :)
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I think these tools are much more like a calculator for what is
| the mechanical part of the human arts - writing, visualization,
| and others (beyond that I think those use cases are not that
| interesting, there's a whole non linear optimization angle I
| think gets lost in the LLM noise). The "art" they produce on
| their own with minimal ingenuity is boring. But they also
| democratize the mechanical skill of rendering images and
| language, and the intent and manipulation of the semantic space
| through language, inpainting, LORA, etc - that's all human
| induced and human creativity. I think we will find in our
| future we will be awash in brilliant human arts, assisted by
| machines, being used to amplify the creativity of people who
| were before hindered by their skill at the craft of art or the
| mechanics of writing, much as many brilliant mathematicians and
| physicists are poor at arithmetic and are greatly assisted by
| machines in their day to day work.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| He says coherent spots are tiny specs, surrounded by bizarre
| patterns and eventually vast space of noise and dots. Reminds me
| of the Universe itself. So much empty space full of fine quantum
| vacuum noise, and planets and stars... small coherent dots in
| giant space.
|
| I pay attention to these coincidences, for good or bad.
| tomohelix wrote:
| The first time I saw an AI creating images in like 2018 or so, I
| remembered the scientists called it "dreams" and I thought it was
| so appropriate. The constantly morphing landscape and how things
| blend together to form new things and how almost everything is
| wrong when look at closely. It was an interesting description,
| and I didn't care much more than that.
|
| Then the AI got better, and still the dreamlike things never go
| away. The constant problem with the hands, words never properly
| formed, clocks always look wrong, etc. But now it is more
| cohesive, more "solid" but still malleable. Like a lucid dream.
| Still straddling the border between consciousness and
| unconsciousness but there is a hint of control and direction now.
|
| As someone who lucid dream, I think the AI images and the LLMs
| are just like a person dreaming right now. They sort of have
| control, but actually not really. Kinda hard to explain but even
| when I lucid dream, I know it is a dream and I can bend it to my
| will but at the same time, it isn't possible to control my
| thoughts. Trying too hard to assert control and I wake up. So it
| is still a state of unconsciousness for me and not at all
| comparable to the "me" when I am fully awake.
|
| Of course, the AIs can't wake up if we use that analogy. They are
| not capable of anything more than this state right now. But to
| me, lucid dreaming is already a step above the total
| unconsciousness of just dreaming, or just nothing at all. And
| wakefulness always follows shortly after I lucid dream.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >Then the AI got better, and still the dreamlike things never
| go away. The constant problem with the hands, words never
| properly formed, clocks always look wrong, etc.
|
| Might be a bit behind the times, Midjourney seems to have
| completely solved the hand issue from what I can tell.
| p1esk wrote:
| Read the next sentence after your quote.
| yard2010 wrote:
| As I see it, Stable Diffusion is a camera you can tune to take
| pictures from alternate realities. The images it creates are of
| real people and subjects, just in some parallel universes.
| krapp wrote:
| Photo-surrealism is one of the most interesting facets of AI
| artwork in my opinion, and the closest thing to legitimate
| artistic expression since by definition you're trying _not_
| to replicate something. It 's a shame all anyone wants to do
| is anime porn.
| Greenpants wrote:
| The dream-like appearance of AI generations is really
| interesting. Humans, when creating art, use our representations
| for objects to control muscles to move a brush or pencil across
| (digital) paper. What we see from AI is what you get when you
| remove the "muscle module", and directly apply the
| representations onto the paper. There's no considering of how
| to fill in a pixel; there's just a filling of the pixel
| directly from the latent space.
|
| It's intriguing. Also makes me wonder if we need to add a
| module in between the representational output and the pixel
| output. Something that mimics how we actually use a brush. How
| we consider what to paint where.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| I did notice that AI 'art' basically got less interesting as it
| got 'better' (read: higher fidelity). The collages of
| conceptual spaces in the article are infinitely more
| interesting than any of the prompt-driven attempts from the
| popular models. They actually communicate something about the
| thing they're depicting by showing the ways in which the model
| deviates from it. That's a real artistic expression.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Less interesting, yes.
|
| Less appealing and useful, absolutely no. Look at how the
| midjourney sub grew. It was ultra niche when it was v3 'dream
| scenary'. Its mega popular with v5 'ultra-realism'. Art
| involves technical execution, significantly so, not just
| 'artistic expression'.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| > Less appealing and useful
|
| Further instrumentalization of art to produce a median
| state of being appealing is IMO not a laudable goal.
| Everything Adorno predicted about the general course of the
| culture industry in Capitalist economies was more or less
| correct and AI art is just accelerating these trends.
|
| Map this same logic to how we use language in creative
| works: would it ever be desirable to reduce all of
| language's diversity and variability to a similar state?
| How is that distinguishable from the kind of Orwellian
| horrors that Americans love to decry?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The explosion in popularity of AI imagery isn't because the
| results became more artistic, but because they made it
| easier for people to mimic technical execution without
| understanding or caring about making art.
|
| Put differently, it made it possible for them to have the
| technical execution without being able to understand or
| change why certain things are appealing to them. That's why
| most of it looks the same and why the vast majority of the
| results don't have any appeal beyond satisfying the ego of
| the person who generated it.
|
| In a way, the appeal of 'modern' AI generated imagery to
| its users is similar to someone who thinks chess is cool,
| doesn't care enough to understand it, but wants to play
| anyway, so they use a mediocre chess engine to generate
| their moves against other players and rely on playing a
| massive number of games to make their win count look good.
| krapp wrote:
| To play devil's advocate though, there's nothing wrong
| with creating something just to satisfy your own tastes.
| The problem comes with trying to pass yourself off as a
| professional artist using these tools.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with that, nothing wrong with people
| generating images for their own satisfaction and even
| sharing them as long as they're clearly tagged as AI
| generated. Just like how computer assisted chess is
| allowed to be its own competitive thing called 'Advanced
| Chess'.
|
| However, just yesterday I came across someone trying
| really hard to play at being a pro artist, trying to show
| recordings of their drawing and painting process when
| they were obviously using AI (by roughly tracing over the
| AI image, masking the AI image underneath, then recording
| themselves erasing the mask, revealing the AI image
| underneath).
|
| In certain artistic sub-fields I'm interested in, like
| with anime art, I've seen a lot of vitriol thrown around
| by AI 'artists' because they haven't been through the
| learning process through which they could empathize with
| actual artists and the basic courtesies that exist in the
| community. This has been largely responsible for my
| negative opinion on the social value of recent
| developments in AI generated content.
|
| To give some examples, there was an incident where an
| artist had been streaming themselves drawing something,
| only for someone to take the incomplete image from the
| stream, have an AI 'finish' it and post it as their own
| before the stream even finished. Then there was a more
| serious incident where someone finetuned a model on a
| specific popular artist's work and started to sell
| generated images under the original artist's name. This
| one ended with the site hosting the content having to
| change their rules to ban monetization of AI art.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > The explosion in popularity of AI imagery isn't because
| the results became more artistic, but because they made
| it easier for people to mimic technical execution without
| understanding or caring about making art.
|
| It's _almost_ like when people first started buying
| really fancy DSLRs with no other training, and took a lot
| of magazine-quality amateur photos.
|
| SD raises the bar a little though-- it trained on a large
| body of professional images, so generating _anything_
| non-fantastic is probably going to be framed and composed
| half-decently.
|
| ...which is the problem. It 's all too perfect. Wabi-sabi
| is dead; everybody can impersonate a professional
| artist/photographer now, so everything they're producing
| is the equivalent of photorealistic, award-winning, 8k
| motel art [...by Greg Rutkowski].
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I disagree on the "all too perfect" part. It's pretty
| much exactly like when people first started buying fancy
| DSLRs and so they took a lot of photos that were
| technically great but weren't interesting content wise.
|
| The images generated by SD etc are technically great, but
| the content is all 'same-y' with no individuality, to the
| point that people used to seeing images of that kind of
| art can very easily recognize when they're looking at AI
| generated images, even if they don't have any of the
| telltale technical errors (like poorly defined fingers).
|
| The difference is just that getting a fancy DSLR was
| still on the path to potentially developing photography
| skills, while using image generators isn't. So while
| those interested enough in photography might've
| eventually developed their skills further, those using
| image generators just become abusive and disrespectful
| towards actual artists for not 'acknowledging' them as
| artists.
| krapp wrote:
| It's perfect until you want something _specific,_ then it
| 's a pain in the ass. Even with LoRA models and
| ControlNet and everything else, the lack of any essential
| control is always going to be limiting.
| lancesells wrote:
| > Art involves technical execution
|
| I think it's a stretch to call Midjourney output art and
| technical execution. I think it's more "content" and
| "regurgitation". And most, not all, of what trends on the
| subreddit is pop culture mashups. It grew because people
| love Star Wars and Disney and Game of Thrones and so on and
| so forth.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| A more conservative, but less entertaining and less poetic
| model is:
|
| You lucid dream when your "explainers" and "predictors" are
| operating on the random feedback and subtle noise that's
| present while your mind is defragging and moving data from
| short term to long term memory.
|
| Random noise, with low signal, fed into something that is
| trained to fill in details kinda explains how Gen AI works, up
| to a decent approximation.
|
| Your mind has a _lot_ of these predictors and detail fillers.
| All those are trained on your experience. I think dreaming is
| either tweaking those predictors and you get to watch, or it 's
| in fact a junk signal you're not supposed to be able to see,
| but you happen to be kinda awake enough to form memories from
| it.
|
| Using words like "wake up" imply deeper and darker depths to
| these networks that I doubt exist.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Descriptions of psychological phenomena organized around made
| up nouns are not necessarily more grounded in reality than
| ones that make creative use of existing verbs.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You'll notice we're all in lala land here. You can have a
| meaningful conversation at a speculative level.
|
| But the nouns _are_ analogies for regular old predictors
| and detail fillers we know exist. For examples, point to
| your visual blind spot quick. Or go watch your eyes move
| with a mirror. Or do any of the really neat experiments in
| the Coursera course "Buddhism and modern psychology".
|
| I'm extrapolating, and yeah, landing right in the middle of
| "who knows".
| cwkoss wrote:
| > Of course, the AIs can't wake up if we use that analogy.
|
| One day in the next decade or two, they will. And it will be
| terrifying and glorious.
| arketyp wrote:
| I feel like lucid dreaming is in a way the baseline and that
| when we're awake, reality constantly knocks us back into
| groundedness. In a lucid dream there is no error correcting
| signal to keep our fabulations in check. Things tend to drift
| away like the silhouettes of an infinity mirror. Reality is
| like the flash of solid pixels when switching away from the
| hysteresis stream in a shared window Zoom call.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| As someone who lucid dreams frequently, and has done a good
| deal of experimentation in that state, the fundamental
| difference between your sleeping state and your awake state
| is that some of your brain is just 'off'.
|
| The parts of your brain that are on do their best to match
| your experiences (or just replay experience), but for things
| that concern the off parts (counting, reading, reasoning...)
| those elements are just missing. When you look at a clock it
| doesn't look like nonsense, it doesn't look like anything, as
| the part of your brain that interprets that information, and
| would therefore be necessary to simulate it, just isn't
| present. You 'see' all of the visual qualities of a clock
| kind of jumbled together the same way a lot of generative AI
| produces them.
|
| The feeling I get from messing around in those states a lot
| is that there is no 'baseline', just some things that are on,
| and some that are off. When you dream, it's the visual cortex
| that is on, so things concerning light and shape and texture
| exist and you experience a slimmed down consciousness
| composed of those pieces. When memory turns on, you
| experience references to other things, and chain thoughts
| together (I think this is what separates normal and lucid
| dreams).
|
| So far, those are the only two things I can turn on without
| waking up. Anything that uses reason and bam I'm awake. If I
| count, read, or recognize inconsistency, it's over.
|
| Consistency is possible, but only forward facing. Like you
| can string together thoughts and events with purpose, and a
| lot of them will be consistent, but the moment you look
| backward and try to ask "did y follow x" the lights come on.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Wow, absence of error correction explains why dreams are the
| way they are... No wonder my dreams always start out normal
| and mundane, but end up with extremely exotic events in the
| end (even though I don't realize it during the dream).
| [deleted]
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Ohhhh I fear this one has lost the plot.
|
| Our models have the be the furthest thing from an alien mind.
| Almost mathematically. A trained model with no hallucination is
| essentially an average of all training data. Which comes from us.
| Who are not aliens.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Do not focus so much on the world alien.
| Sosh101 wrote:
| Alien as in "other".
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| There are a bunch of extensions in the Automatic1111 eco-system
| which can be used for doing this sort of analysis, or related
| types of analysis.
|
| One of my favorites is this: https://github.com/ljleb/prompt-
| fusion-extension
| avereveard wrote:
| There is a logic jump in the concept of the ruliad.
|
| First it goes:
|
| > the entangled limit of everything that is computationally
| possible: the result of following all possible computational
| rules in all possible ways
|
| And then
|
| > it encapsulates not only all formal possibilities but also
| everything about our physical universe
|
| The assumption that everything about our physical universe is
| described by computational rules is not a given, and is never
| explored nor justified. Even the assumption that our perception
| follows computational rules is not really explored, just given.
|
| There is this old idea that with an universal computer that knew
| everything, one could predict anything. But that has been
| challenged by uncertainty principles, observer effect and all
| that.
|
| So it seems this castle has sand foundations.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| > But that has been challenged by uncertainty principles,
| observer effect and all that.
|
| Any system which allows universal computation necessarily has
| subsystems that cannot make perfect predictions about the full
| system. This doesn't even require quantum mechanics; humans
| would run up against this problem in a fully classical
| universe. Loosely put, since we're part of the system
| ourselves, we can't gather all of the information necessary for
| perfect prediction without interfering with whatever we're
| trying to predict.
|
| However, as far as I'm aware, we haven't yet closed all the
| loopholes related to superdeterminism, meaning quantum
| randomness might not be truly random in the sense that an
| observer completely outside of our universe could in theory
| procure an algorithm that predicts the exact eigenvalues for
| every quantum measurement we make. Since we're inside the
| system, no luck for us though. But I like to make a subtle
| distinction between "unpredictable random" (max Kolmogorov
| complexity) and "truly random" (ungenerated via any Turing
| computable algorithm and unpredictable with infinite
| knowledge). The latter is a bit philosophically difficult to
| prove exists. The former is quite easy to prove exists; think
| about how a one time pad has max Kolmogorov complexity
| (assuming a good source of random noise) but it's conditional
| Kolmogorov complexity with the key is much smaller.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| > assumption that everything about our physical universe is
| described by computational rules
|
| If you understand "physical" to mean "stuff that physics
| studies" then the assumption is not so surprising - physics
| itself is the discovery and application of models to correctly
| predict or retrodict (i.e. _compute_ ) the simple measurable
| behavior of matter, so it is intrinsically unable to study
| anything unamenable to computation.
|
| In fact Wolfram is engaged in an attempt (as he sees it) to
| enlarge the computational paradigm of physics from models
| consisting largely of differential equations to a
| "multicomputational" paradigm (see [1]).
|
| I think your statement is much more defensible if you drop the
| word "physical": _The assumption that everything about our
| universe is described by computational rules is not a given_. A
| classic example might be our inability to sufficiently specify
| "qualia". If our experiences were fully describable by
| computational rules I suspect we would by now have discovered
| how to specify them so that we could agree (or disagree) that
| 'the red I see' looks like 'the red you see', but our inability
| to do this is notorious. Nonetheless my (and your) experience
| of red is part of the universe.
|
| 1:
| https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/09/multicomputation...
| bangkoksbest wrote:
| There are physical models are not computable (in the sense of
| producing number values in a finite algorithm), particularly
| in quantum physics, e.g. the wave function.
| ttctciyf wrote:
| As a _physical model_ , as opposed to a purely mathematical
| entity, don't you need to add operators to the wave
| function in order to have applicability to observable
| phenomena? I'm no physicist, but applying operators to the
| wave function seems like a computation to me?
| bangkoksbest wrote:
| I mean, theoretical physics models are still physics
| models. Functional analysis is still a valid mathematical
| tool for physics modeling even if it doesn't (usually)
| produce finitely calculable solutions. Physicists assign
| physical interpretation to certain parameters, even if
| they are not (yet) observable.
|
| I suppose there's probably a higher mathematical
| representation going on here that is finitely computable
| though. Something like a symbolic representation of the
| solution functions for the wave function are calculable
| even if the parameter values are not.
| jprete wrote:
| He also snuck in the claim that alignment means "AI that thinks
| like a human" which is not at all what people mean by the word.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| This is a well-known conjecture called the Physical Church-
| Turing Thesis.
|
| It is just a conjecture, but emperically it has held true to
| the limits of our knowledge of physics. It also still works
| even if the universe is probabilistic.
| p-e-w wrote:
| > but emperically it has held true to the limits of our
| knowledge of physics
|
| Considering that our entire knowledge of physics is encoded
| as computational rules, because that's all we really know how
| to do, this statement is basically a tautology.
| Legend2440 wrote:
| We do physics this way exactly because it works so well -
| it is "unreasonably effective", as the saying goes.
| p-e-w wrote:
| No, we do physics this way because we don't know any
| other way. When this way fails (e.g. quantum gravity,
| turbulence), we assume that the problem is that we
| haven't tried hard enough yet. Which may be true, but
| it's also possible that the computational approach simply
| doesn't work for those phenomena.
| andybak wrote:
| I'm not clear what you mean about turbulence? Quantum
| gravity involves as-yet unknown physics but turbulence is
| surely just a case of "the number of calculations we need
| to simulate it grows quicker than we can reasonably keep
| up with"? i.e. simple toy simulations work fine but we
| don't have a planet-sized computer to do something more
| extensive.
|
| (Just to clarify - this isn't a "classical vs quantum"
| thing - it's a "we know the equations vs we don't" thing.
| I'm sure QED simulations are fairly similar within a
| known domain)
| Sharlin wrote:
| Presumably the GP refers to turbulence being infamously
| difficult to model analytically. But we _have_ a great
| model for turbulent flow, the Navier-Stokes differential
| equations, it's just that we can only solve them
| numerically in all but the simplest of cases. But when we
| do we get good results, so it's not like turbulence is
| some mystical phenomenon beyond the reach of our standard
| mathematical tools!
| andybak wrote:
| My knowledge is a bit weak but aren't there non-analytic
| ways to model turbulence? "Analytical" isn't the whole of
| maths.
|
| (I _might_ not have a clear understanding of what
| "analytic" means so please correct me if I'm talking
| hogwash)
| Sharlin wrote:
| The alternative is numerical approximation, as I
| mentioned. Like always in physics, any analytic (ie.
| "closed form") solutions would also necessarily have to
| be special-cases, approximations, and simplifications.
| The problem with turbulence is that it's so chaotic and
| complex that it doesn't seem to be reducible to simpler
| models while still retaining some predictive power. But
| that's not very surprising; we're talking about the
| chaotic motion of molecules at the Avogadro scale! After
| all, we can't even write closed-form solutions (or even
| approximations) to the motion of merely _three_ bodies
| under gravity, never mind ten to the power of twenty-
| three.
|
| But what _is_ fascinating about turbulence, though, is
| the "edge of chaos" - the boundary conditions at which
| laminar (non-turbulent) flow suddenly turns turbulent. On
| one side of the boundary analytic treatment is possible,
| on the other it is not.
| perihelions wrote:
| This sounds an awful lot like "God of the gaps"
| argumentation with "non-Turing hypercomputation"
| substituting for "God". If the computational approach
| doesn't work -- that's _all_ of human reason, to
| emphasize: any symbols you can scribble on paper and
| reason about over coffee, that 's a finite algorithmic
| process -- then there's no humanly-achievable endeavor
| that can solve the problem. It's forever hiding in the
| gaps, the shadows; it's definitionally unknowable.
|
| So what field of science are we discussing right now? One
| of the more frivolous branches of philosophy: talking
| about something that we can't define, can't reason about,
| won't _ever be able_ to reason about; something which
| marks no experimental evidence in our human sciences.
| Therefore: it doesn 't exist. Apply your favorite razor.
| Something we can't possibly talk about, let's not talk
| about. Something whose existence or non-existence are
| indistinguishable, which leaves no shadow in the
| observable universe: it does not exist.
| p-e-w wrote:
| It's not a "God of the gaps" argument because I'm not
| claiming that "God" (that is, incomputable physics)
| exists. I'm simply pointing out that the fact that our
| entire understanding of physics is built on a
| computational framework doesn't actually say anything
| about the Universe, merely about the way we do physics.
| There is a priori _no reason_ to expect that the Universe
| would be in any way amenable to human understanding. We
| have just found that in some cases, it is.
|
| And non-computability doesn't make something
| philosophical or mystical. We have encountered phenomena
| beyond the reach of any computation in mathematics and
| computer science many times. They exist, no matter which
| "razor" you apply.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" We have encountered phenomena beyond the reach of
| any computation in mathematics and computer science many
| times. They exist, no matter which "razor" you apply."_
|
| The razor applies as to whether the _physical universe_
| runs on laws that don 't fit in Turing machines. It
| applies because it's an unfalsifiable proposition. You
| can't embed a Turing machine in a super-Turing universe,
| ask it "what is the nature of your cosmos?", and have it
| determine (within finite computation) there are more
| things in heaven and earth than it can compute.
|
| (This is the ordinary Church-Turing thesis: if some
| finite interaction between Turing observer and super-
| Turing universe convinces the Turing observer of the
| super-Turingness of its universe, within finite time...
| then an ordinary Turing machine can _also_ do exactly the
| same thing, by simulating the first Turing machine, and
| brute-force enumerating every possible interaction within
| that finite bound. The nature of super-Turing machines is
| _incomprehensible_ to Turing machines; there 's nothing a
| super-Turing machine can do to prove it exists to a mere
| Turing machine).
| altruios wrote:
| um... actually...
|
| The halting problem?
|
| you know... the entire point of conceptualizing a hyper-
| Turing machine in the first place, the key difference
| between a hyper-Turing machine and a Turing machine is
| the solvability of the Turing machine halting problem.
|
| So shouldn't a Turing machine be able to determine if a
| hyper-Turing machine exists by presenting that very
| problem? I.E. problems that take O(n!||n^x) to solve but
| O(log(n)) or less to verify.
|
| The Church-Turing thesis as you describe it seems to miss
| this idea, that things can be verified in a different
| time than it is solved. Is that your interpretation or as
| it is written?
|
| It does not follow that if a hyper-Turing machine can
| convince a Turing machine of it's hyper-ness, then the
| non-hyper-Turing machine is actually hyper to begin with.
| For reasons stated above. A hyper-turning machine should
| be able to give proofs to problems verifiable by a
| turning machine, but that are not solvable within a given
| step-count/time-frame by that Turing machine.
|
| The interactions between a hyper-Turing machine would be
| as follows.
|
| ```
|
| T:"Yo, solve this!" - some O(n!) "for 10 million inputs"
|
| HT:"done, is x"
|
| T: _checks notes_ "that's right, did you have that saved,
| that was very fast."
|
| HT:"nope, from your perspective, I might be guessing the
| answers, you saw me take no steps"
|
| T:"How do I know you aren't just guessing?"
|
| HT:"I'm always right"
|
| T:"How do I know you aren't just always guessing the
| right answer"
|
| HT:"That's the neat part, you don't."
|
| T:"So I'm going to make a detect-halting program, put it
| in itself and run it, will it halt"
|
| HT:"It will do " x
|
| detect-halting program does x.
|
| T:"That's pretty strong evidence there... I could never
| say that"
|
| ```
|
| I'm thinking and writing at the same time, so my final
| thoughts are... if a Hyper-Turing machine is inexplicable
| to a Turing machine, shouldn't the Turing machine observe
| the Hyper-Turing machine do inexplicable things, thus
| revealing itself to the Turing machine?
| perihelions wrote:
| You're conflating computability with computational
| complexity; that seems to the source of most of your
| confusion.
|
| I don't remember the name of the complexity-theory analog
| of the Church-Turing thesis; but it's an open problem
| what types of computers physics can support the existence
| of, how they relate to classical Turing machines in
| complexity theory. See for example: quantum complexity
| theory.
|
| About halting: there is _provably no way_ to verify an
| oracle for the Halting Problem, even if you had one. You
| can 't even ask a hypercomputer to write a proof for you:
| in general there exist no finite-length proofs.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| As someone who works in a custom fabrication shop and who
| has been research job shop scheduling for over a decade
| as an attempt to get better at it, it's a computationally
| impossible task. There are huge numbers of "optimal" ways
| to schedule the shop and all of them require enormous
| amounts of computation. Genetic algorithms are offering
| the most promise right now, but the schedule has to be
| constantly updated because things never take as long as
| you think they will.
|
| This is primarily because, unlike manufacturing, the
| basic unit of our system is a person, with all of their
| chaotic outputs. You start stacking those up and you end
| up with "long, fat tails" in every analysis you do. Your
| probabilities are spread almost flat over a broad range
| of outcomes.
|
| It's fascinating and definitely falls into the category
| of uncomputable.
| colordrops wrote:
| But physics isn't a full description of reality. It certainly
| hasn't conquered consciousness and qualia and subjective
| experience.
| kaibee wrote:
| > It certainly hasn't conquered consciousness and qualia
| and subjective experience.
|
| I'm not sure how you're so certain of this. It is entirely
| possible that all we need to do to create a conscious mind
| is run a full molecular dynamics simulation of a detailed
| enough human brain scan. We know the equations to do this,
| we just don't have nearly enough computational power.
| jchanimal wrote:
| That would only be possible if qualia has no causation.
| In the case where our experiences have real effects they
| cannot be fully described by a Turing architecture.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Already you've sneaked in the presupposition that
| consciousness is only a result of your brain activity.
| Have you ever not eaten for two days? Or not slept for
| more than 24 hours? Have you ever had an itch under a
| cast that you couldn't itch, and been constantly
| distracted by it? You think that doesn't affect your
| consciousness?
| kaibee wrote:
| > Already you've sneaked in the presupposition that
| consciousness is only a result of your brain activity.
|
| What else could it be? The interesting question is how
| and why.
|
| > Have you ever not eaten for two days? Or not slept for
| more than 24 hours? Have you ever had an itch under a
| cast that you couldn't itch, and been constantly
| distracted by it?
|
| Sure, I've done all of those things, but they all cause
| physical changes in the brain. These physical changes
| then directly affect your qualia-type experience of
| reality.
| colordrops wrote:
| How are you certain? Has someone published a paper that
| I'm not aware of that settles this?
|
| You are missing a dimension here by the way. Even if we
| could find a physical location of the brain that lights
| up when the color red is experienced, that doesn't have
| any explanatory power for the nature of _subjective_
| experience. How can it be possible to experience being a
| brain, being a brain itself? Not just observing another
| brain and correlating brain activity with reported
| experiences.
|
| Experience and consciousness are axiomatic and precede
| theory about the physical world. You started with sensory
| experience and perception, and built models of how your
| brain works on top of that, not the other way around.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > Experience and consciousness are axiomatic and precede
| theory about the physical world.
|
| Actually, they seem unnecessary to any theory about the
| physical world. They likely don't exist, but if they do,
| it's just bad psychology that wasn't quite debilitating
| enough for evolutionary pressure to weed them out.
|
| I don't even think I'm conscious myself in the way you
| imagine yourself to be. "Consciousness" probably belongs
| in poetry, it definitely doesn't belong in philosophy and
| that goes double for real science.
| kaibee wrote:
| > How are you certain? Has someone published a paper that
| I'm not aware of that settles this?
|
| That's kinda the point. I'm not certain at all, but given
| the available information, it is the simplest
| explanation.
|
| > How can it be possible to experience being a brain,
| being a brain itself?
|
| I'm not really sure what you're asking here. A clock can
| tell time, but if it was _like something_ to be a clock,
| it would feel like knowing what time it is, it would not
| (and pretty much couldn't) involve awareness of all that
| goes into producing that feeling (because then you'd need
| a mechanism for awareness of that, and then a mechanism
| for awareness of that mechanism, and etc). The difference
| with the brain is that we're pretty sure it is _like
| something_ to be a brain in a body, and we also know it
| doesn't include perfect awareness of what goes into
| producing that feeling. So when you ask 'how can it be
| possible to experience being a brain, being a brain
| itself' I would say that it isn't? because your awareness
| is limited to the qualia that bubbles up out of the
| mechanics in the brain, and your experience of being a
| brain is similar in fidelity to the clock's experience of
| being able to tell the time.
|
| > Experience and consciousness are axiomatic and precede
| theory about the physical world. You started with sensory
| experience and perception, and built models of how your
| brain works on top of that, not the other way around.
|
| This is just solipsism. Sure, it is entirely possible all
| of the experiences and perceptions I've experienced have
| misled me into thinking that the brain is all there is,
| but that seems kind of contrived? I'm just as confused as
| you about why we aren't all p-zombies, but, well... the
| history of all knowledge has basically been "yeah it
| turns out to just be physics", so my guess is that qualia
| is also just physics.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| It hasn't conquered beauty and comedy and love either. The
| things you mention will turn out to be folk human notions
| without satisfying scientific descriptions. They are no
| less real for it, but we simply don't ask physics to
| describe love. I suspect consciousness will turn out to be
| an idea that is not amenable to physics or computational
| explanation as a coherent single phenomenon.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| As a joke, evolution adapted humans to have
| malfunctioning brains.
| wnkrshm wrote:
| Even in a perfectly deterministic universe, the accessibility
| of that determinism to models hinges on knowledge of the state
| of the universe.
|
| We're surrounded by highly nonlinear interactions that we just
| approximate as linear - if we want to truly predict anything,
| in general, we'd need infinite precision on the variables that
| describe the state of these systems, because an infinitely
| small perturbation in the initial conditions can cause an
| almost (limited by conservation laws) arbitrary deviation in
| the predicted state.
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