[HN Gopher] What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond...
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What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 192 points
Date : 2025-05-25 13:46 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
| mrfinn wrote:
| we would be elephants or whales? (sorry couldn't resist)
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| We already know that Cetaceans are the superior intellectual
| life form of the planet.
|
| Toss a naked man in the sea and see how he fares.
| roarcher wrote:
| About as well as a beached whale, I'd expect.
| ednite wrote:
| Wolfram's "bigger brains" piece raises the intriguing question of
| what kinds of thinking, communication, or even entirely new
| languages might emerge as we scale up intelligence, whether in
| biological brains or artificial ones.
|
| It got me thinking that, over millions of years, human brain
| volume increased from about 400-500 cc in early hominins to
| around 1400 cc today. It's not just about size, the brain's
| wiring and complexity also evolved, which in turn drove advances
| in language, culture, and technology, all of which are deeply
| interconnected.
|
| With AI, you could argue we're witnessing a similar leap, but at
| an exponential rate. The speed at which neural networks are
| scaling and developing new capabilities far outpaces anything in
| human evolution.
|
| It makes you wonder how much of the future will even be
| understandable to us, or if we're only at the beginning of a much
| bigger story. Interesting times ahead.
| postalrat wrote:
| The future that we don't understand is already all around us.
| We just don't understand it.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Is the future in the room with us right now?
| postalrat wrote:
| It is the room! And everything in it.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| This house has people in it!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_House_Has_People_in_It
|
| Alan Resnick seems to be of a similar mind as I am, and
| perhaps also as you? My favorite of his is https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/Live_Forever_as_You_Are_Now_wi...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >It makes you wonder how much of the future will even be
| understandable to us, o
|
| There isn't much of a future left. But of what is left to
| humans, it is in all probability not enough time to invent any
| true artificial intelligence. Nothing we talk about here and
| elsewhere on the internet is anything like intelligence, even
| if it does produce something novel and interesting.
|
| I will give you an example. For the moment, assume you come up
| with some clever prompt for ChatGPT or another one of the LLMs,
| and that this prompt would have it "talk" about a novel concept
| for which English has no appropriate words. Imagine as well
| that the LLM has trained on many texts where humans spoke of
| novel concepts and invented words for those new concepts. Will
| the output of your LLM ever, even in a million years, have it
| coin a new word to talk about its concept? You, I have no
| doubt, would come up with a word if needed. Sure, most people's
| new words would be embarrassing one way or another if you asked
| them to do so on the spot. But everyone could do this. The
| dimwitted kid in school that you didn't like much, the one who
| sat in the corner and played with his own drool, he would even
| be able to do this, though it would be childish and
| onomatopoeic.
|
| The LLMs are, at best, what science fiction used to refer to as
| an _oracle_. A device that could answer questions seemingly
| intelligently, without having agency or self-awareness or even
| the hint of consciousness. At best. The true principles of
| intelligence, of consciousness are so far beyond what an LLM is
| that it would, barring some accidental discovery, require many
| centuries. Many centuries, and far more humans than we have
| even now... we only have eight or so 1-in-a-billion geniuses.
| And we have as many right now as we 're ever going to have.
| China's population shrinks to a third of its current by the
| year 2100.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| > The true principles of intelligence, of consciousness are
| so far beyond what an LLM is that it would, barring some
| accidental discovery, require many centuries.
|
| I've been too harsh on myself for thinking it would take a
| decade to integrate imaging modalities into LLMs.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I'm probably too optimistic as a default, but I think it
| might be okay. Agriculture used to require far more people
| than it does now due to automation, and it certainly seems
| like many industries will be able to be partially automated
| with only incremental change to current technology. If less
| people are needed for social maintenance, then more will be
| able to focus on the sciences, so yes we may have less people
| but it's quite possible we'll have a lot more in science.
|
| I don't think AI needs to be conscious to be useful.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| I mean, the integrated circuit, the equivalent of the
| evolution of multicellular life, was 1949. The microprocessor
| was 1979, and that would be what, Animals as a kingdom?
| Computers the size of a building are now the size of a thumb
| drive. What level are modern complex computer systems like
| ChatGPT? The level of chickens? Dogs? Whatever it is, it is
| light years away from what it was 50 years ago. We may be
| reaching physical limits for the size of circuits, but it
| seems like algorithm complexity and efficiency moving fast
| and are no where near any physical limits.
|
| We haven't needed many insane breakthroughs to get here. It
| has mostly been iterating and improving, which opens up new
| things to develop, iterate, and improve. IBMs Watson was a
| super computer in 2011 that could understand natural
| language. My laptop runs LLMs that can do that now. The pace
| of improvement is incredibly fast and I would be very
| hesitant to say with confidence that human level
| "intelligence" is definitely centuries away. 1804 was two
| centuries ago, and that was the year the locomotive was
| invented.
| asdff wrote:
| IMO they will truly be unleashed when they drop with the human
| language intermediary and are just looking at distributions of
| binary functions. Truly, why are you asking the llm in english
| to write python code? The whole point of python code was to
| make the machine code readable for humans, and when you drop
| that requirement, you can just work directly on the metal. Some
| model outputting an incomprehensible integrated circuit from
| the fab, its utility proved by fitting a function to some data
| with acceptable variance.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _why are you asking the llm in english to write python
| code?_
|
| Perhaps the same reason networked computers aren't just
| spitting their raw outputs at each other? Security, _i.e._
| varied motivations.
| asdff wrote:
| That is a little bit of an appeal to precedent I think.
| Networked computers don't spit their raw output at
| eachother today because so far, all network protocols were
| written by humans using these abstracted languages. In the
| future we have to expect otherwise as we drop the human out
| of the pipeline and seek the efficiencies that come from
| that. One might ask why the cells in your body don't signal
| via python code and instead use signalling mechanisms like
| concentrations of sodium ion within the neuron to turn your
| english language idea of "move arm" into an actual movement
| of the arm.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _One might ask why the cells in your body don 't signal
| via python code and instead use signalling mechanisms_
|
| Right. They don't just make their membranes chemically
| transparent. Same reason: security, _i.e._ the varied
| motivations of things outside the cell compared to within
| it.
| asdff wrote:
| I don't think using a certain language is more secure
| than just writing that same function call in some other
| language. Security in compute comes from priviledged
| access from some agents and blacklisting others. The
| language doesn't matter for that. It can be a python
| command, it can be a tcp packet, it can be a voltage
| differential, the actual "language" used is irrelevant.
|
| All I am arguing is that languages and paradigms written
| in a way to make sense for our english speaking monkey
| brain is perhaps not the most efficient way to do things
| once we remove the constraint of having an english
| speaking monkey brain being the software architect.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > Right. They don't just make their membranes chemically
| transparent. Same reason: security, i.e. the varied
| motivations of things outside the cell compared to within
| it.
|
| Cells or organelles within a cell could be described as
| having motivations I guess, but evolution itself doesn't
| really have motivations as such, but it does have
| outcomes. If we can take as an assumption that
| mitochondria did not evolve to exist within the cell so
| much as co-evolve with it after becoming part of the cell
| by some unknown mechanism, and that we have seen examples
| of horizontal gene transfer in the past, by the anthropic
| principle, multicellular life is already chimeric and
| symbiotic to a wild degree. So any talk of motivations of
| an organelle or cell or an organism are of a different
| degree to motivations of an individual or of life itself,
| but not really of a different kind.
|
| And if motivations of a cell are up for discussion in
| your context, and to the context of whom you were
| replying to, then it's fair to look at the motivations of
| life itself. Life seems to find a way, basically. Its
| motivation is anti-annihilation, and life is not above
| changing itself and incorporating aspects of other life.
| Even without motivations at the stage of random mutation
| or gene transfer, there is still a test for fitness at a
| given place and time: the duration of a given cell or
| individual's existence, and the conservation and
| preservation of a phenotype/genotype.
|
| Life is, in its own indirect way, preserving optionality
| as a hedge against failure in the face of uncertain
| future events. Life exists to beget more life, each after
| its kind historically, in human time scales at least, but
| upon closer examination, life just makes moves slowly
| enough that the change is imperceptible to us.
|
| Man's search for meaning is one of humanity's
| motivations, and the need to name things seems almost
| intrinsic to existence in the form of self vs not self
| boundary. Societally we are searching for stimuli because
| we think it will benefit us in some way. But cells didn't
| seek out cell membrane test candidates, they worked with
| the resources they had, throwing spaghetti at the wall
| over and over until something stuck. And that version
| worked until the successor outcompeted it.
|
| We're so far down the chain of causality that it's hard
| to reason about the motivations of ancient life and
| ancient selection pressures, but questions like this make
| me wonder, what if people are right that there are
| quantum effects in the brain etc. I don't actually
| believe this! But as an example for the kinds of changes
| AI and future genetic engineering could bring, as a
| though exercise bear with me. If we find out that humans
| are figuratively philosophical zombies due to the way
| that our brains and causality work compared to some
| hypothetical future modified humans, would anything
| change in wider society? What if someone found out that
| if you change the cell membranes of your brain in some
| way that you'll actually become more conscious than you
| would be otherwise. What would that even mean or feel
| like? Socially, where would that leave baseline humans?
| The concept of security motivations in that context
| confront me with the uncomfortable reality of historical
| genetic purity tests. For the record, I think eugenics is
| bad. Self-determination is good. I don't have any
| interest in policing the genome, but I can see how
| someone could make a case for making it difficult for
| nefarious people to make germline changes to individual
| genomes, but it's probably already happening and likely
| will continue to happen in the future, so we should
| decide what concerns are worth worrying about, and what a
| realistic outcome looks like in such a future if we had
| our druthers. We can afford to be idealistic before the
| horse has left the stable, but likely not for much
| longer.
|
| That's why I don't really love the security angle when it
| comes to motivations of a cell, as it could have a
| Gattaca angle to it, though I know you were speaking on
| the level of the cell or smaller. Your comment and the
| one you replied to inspired my wall of text, so I'm
| sorry/you're welcome.
|
| Man is seeking to move closer to the metal of
| computation. Security boundaries are being erected only
| for others to cross them. Same as it ever was.
| XorNot wrote:
| Well..except they do? HTTP is an anomaly in having
| largely human readable syntax, and even then we use
| compression with it all the time which translates it to a
| rarefied symbolic representation.
|
| The limit beyond that would be skipping the compression
| step: the ideal protocol would be incompressible because
| it's already the most succinct representation of the
| state being transferred.
|
| We're definitely capable of getting some of the way there
| by human design though: i.e. I didn't start this post by
| saying "86 words are coming".
| notahacker wrote:
| That and the fact the LLM there's plenty of source material
| associating abstractions expressed in English and code
| written in higher level languages. Not so much associating
| abstractions with bytecode and binary.
| asdff wrote:
| A future AI (actual AI not llm) would compute a spectrum
| of putative functions (1) and identify functions that
| meet some threshold. You need no prior associations only
| randomization of parameters and enough sample space.
| Given enough compute all possible combinations of random
| binary could be modeled and those satisfying functional
| parameters will be selected. And they will probably look
| nothing like how we consider functions today.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistic
| s)#/me...
| ip26 wrote:
| The language doesn't just map to English, it allows high
| level concepts to be expressed tersely. I would bet it's much
| easier for an LLM to generate python doing complex things
| than to generate assembly doing the same. One very simple
| reason is the context window.
|
| In other words, I figure these models can benefit from layers
| of abstraction just like we do.
| asdff wrote:
| It allows these concepts to be expressed legibly for a
| human. Why would an ai model (not llm necessarily) need to
| write say "printf"? It does not need to understand that
| this is a print statement with certain expectation for what
| a print statement ought to behave as in the scope of the
| shell. It already has all the information by virtue of
| running the environment. printf might as well be expressed
| as some n-bit integer for the machine and dispense with all
| the window dressing we apply when writing functions by
| humans for humans.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Because there's a lot of work behind printf that the llm
| doesn't need or care to reproduce
|
| You're not just using the language, but all of the
| runtime and libraries behind it
|
| Thinking it's more efficient for the llm to reinvent it
| all is just silly
| m11a wrote:
| Indeed. And aside from that, LLMs cannot generalise OOD.
| There's relatively little training data of complex higher
| order constructs in straight assembly, compared to say
| Python code. Plus, the assembly will be target
| architecture specific.
| asdff wrote:
| Right and all of that in the library is built to be
| legible for the human programmer with constraints
| involved to fit in within the syntax of the underlying
| language. Imagine how efficient a function would be that
| didn't need all of that window dressing? You could "grow"
| functions out of simulation and bootstrapping, have them
| be a black box that we harvest output from not much
| different than say using an organism in a bioreactor to
| yield some metabolite of interest where we might not know
| all the relevant pieces of the biochemical pathway but we
| score putative production mutants based on yield alone.
| ip26 wrote:
| "printf" is an n-bit integer already. All strings are
| also numbers.
| rxtexit wrote:
| I completely understand what you are saying but ip does
| make an interesting point.
|
| Why would chain of thought work at all if the model
| wasn't gaining something by additional abstraction away
| from binary?
|
| Maybe things even go in the other direction and the
| models evolve a language more abstract than English that
| we also can't understand.
|
| The models will still need to interface though with
| humans using human language until we become some kind of
| language model pet dog.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| > the brain's wiring and complexity also evolved, which in turn
| drove advances in language, culture, and technology
|
| Fun thought: to the extent that it really happened this way,
| our intelligence is minimum viable for globe-spanning
| civilization (or whatever other accomplishment you want to
| index on). Not average, not median. Minimum viable.
|
| I don't think this is exactly correct -- there is probably some
| critical mass / exponential takeoff dynamic that allowed us to
| get slightly above the minimum intelligence threshold before
| actually taking off -- but I still think we are closer to it
| than not.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Less fun thought: there's an evolutionary bottleneck which
| prevents further progress, because the cost/benefit tradeoffs
| don't favour increasing intelligence much beyond the minimum.
|
| So most planet-spanning civilisations go extinct, because the
| competitive patterns of behaviour which drive expansion are
| too dumb to scale to true planet-spanning sentience and self-
| awareness.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I seriously doubt it, honestly, since humans have
| anatomical limitations keeping their heads from getting
| bigger quickly. We have to be able to fit through the birth
| canal.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _We have to be able to fit through the birth canal._
|
| Or at least we used to, before the c-section was
| invented.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Indeed, but it hasn't been around for long enough. We
| might evolve into birth by c-section, if we assume that
| humans won't alter themselves dramatically by
| technological means over hundreds of thousands of years.
| bcoates wrote:
| Perfectly ordinary terrestrial mammals like elephants
| have much, much larger skulls at birth than humans, so
| it's clearly a matter of tradeoffs not an absolute limit.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Oh of course, but evolution has to work with what it's
| got. Humans happened to fit a niche where they might
| benefit from more intelligence, elephants don't seemingly
| fit such a niche.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Intelligence is ability to predict (and hence plan), but
| predictability itself is limited by chaos, so maybe in the
| end that is the limiting factor.
|
| It's easy to imagine a more capable intelligence than our
| own due to having many more senses, maybe better memory
| than ourselves, better algorithms for pattern detection and
| prediction, but by definition you can't be more intelligent
| than the fundamental predictability of the world in which
| you are part.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Sounds kind of like the synopsis of the Three Body
| Problem.
| breuleux wrote:
| > predictability itself is limited by chaos, so maybe in
| the end that is the limiting factor
|
| I feel much of humanity's effectiveness comes from
| ablating the complexity of the world to make it more
| predictable and easier to plan around. Basically, we have
| certain physical capabilities that can be leveraged to
| "reorganize" the ecosystem in such a way that it becomes
| more easily exploitable. That's the main trick. But
| that's circumstantial and I can't help but think that
| it's going to revert to the mean at some point.
|
| That's because in spite of what we might intuit, the
| ceiling of non-intelligence is probably higher than the
| ceiling of intelligence. Intelligence involves matching
| an intent to an effective plan to execute that intent.
| It's a pretty specific kind of system and therefore a
| pretty small section of the solution space. In some
| situations it's going to be very effective, but what are
| the odds that the most effective resource consumption
| machines would happen to be organized just like that?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| I like this idea. I've thought of a similar idea at the other
| end of the limit. How much less intelligent could a species
| be and evolve to where we're at? I don't think much.
|
| Once you reach a point where cultural inheritance is
| possible, things pop off at a scale much faster than
| evolution. Still, it's interesting to think about a species
| where the time between agriculture and space flight is more
| like 100k or 1mm years than 10k. Similarly, a species with
| less natural intelligence than us but is more advanced
| because they got a 10mm year head start. Or, a species with
| more natural intelligence than us but is behind.
|
| Your analogy makes me think of boiling water. There's a phase
| shift where the environment changes suddenly (but not
| everywhere all at once). Water boils at 100C at sea level
| pressure. Our intelligence is the minimum for a global
| spanning civilization on our planet. What about an
| environment with different pressures?
|
| It seems like an "easier" planet would require less
| intelligence and a "harder" planet would require more. This
| could be things like gravity, temperature, atmosphere, water
| versus land, and so on.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >It seems like an "easier" planet would require less
| intelligence and a "harder" planet would require more.
|
| I'm not sure that would be the case if the Red Queen
| hypothesis is true. To bring up gaming nomenclature you're
| talking about player versus environment (PVE). In an
| environment that is easy you would expect everything to
| turn to biomass rather quickly, if there was some amount of
| different lifeforms so you didn't immediately end up with a
| monoculture the game would change from PVE to PVP. You
| don't have to worry about the environment, you have to
| worry about every other lifeform there. We see this a lot
| on Earth. Spines, poison, venom, camouflage, teeth, claws,
| they for both attack and protection in the other players of
| the life game.
|
| In my eyes it would require far more intelligence on the
| easy planet in this case.
| abeppu wrote:
| How about Argentine ants?
|
| The word "civilization" is of course loaded. But I think the
| bigger questionable assumption is that intelligence is the
| limiting factor. Looking at the history that got us to having
| a globe-spanning civilization, the actual periods of
| expansion were often pretty awful for a lot of the people
| affected. Individual actors are often not aligned with
| building such a civilization, and a great deal of
| intelligence is spent on conflict and resisting the creation
| of the larger/more connected world.
|
| Could a comparatively dumb species with different social
| behaviors, mating and genetic practices take over their
| planet simply by all actors actually cooperating? Suppose an
| alien species developed in a way that made horizontal gene
| transfer super common, and individuals carry material from
| most people they're ever met. Would they take over their
| planet really fast because as soon as you land on a new
| continent, everyone you meet is effectively immediately your
| sibling, and of course you'll all cooperate?
| taneq wrote:
| I feel like there's also a maximum viable intelligence that's
| compatible with reality. Beyond a certain point, the smarter
| people are, the higher the tendency for them to be messed up
| in some way.
| relaxing wrote:
| > Wolfram's "bigger brains" piece
|
| You mean the one linked at the top of the page?
|
| Why is this structured like a school book report, written for a
| teacher who doesn't have the original piece right in front of
| them?
| ednite wrote:
| Noted for next time. The article itself is excellent. Sorry
| if my comment felt out of place for HN. I added extra context
| to get more discussion going, this topic really interests me.
| furyofantares wrote:
| Four words into your post and I'm confident it's ChatGPT slop.
| Am I wrong?
| bdbenton5255 wrote:
| There is a popular misconception that neural networks
| accurately model the human brain. It is more a metaphor for
| neurons than a complete physical simulation of the human brain.
|
| There is also a popular misconception that LLMs are
| intelligently thinking programs. They are more like models that
| predict words and appear as a human intelligence.
|
| That being said, it is certainly theoretically possible to
| simulate human intelligence and scale it up.
| popupeyecare wrote:
| I often wonder if human intelligence is essentially just
| predicting words and phrases in a cohesive manner. Once the
| context size becomes large enough to encompass all a person
| history, predicting becomes indistinguishable from thinking.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| The body also has memory and instinct. It's non-
| hierarchical, although we like to think that the mind
| dominates or governs the body. It's not that it's more or
| less than predicting, it's a different activity. Humans
| also think with all their senses. It'd be more or less like
| having a modal-less or all-modal LLM. Not sure this is even
| possible with the current way we model these networks.
| michaelhoney wrote:
| And not just words. There is pretty compelling evidence
| that our sensory perception is itself prediction, that the
| purpose of our sensory organs is not to deliver us 1:1
| qualia representing the world, but more like error
| correction, updates on our predictions.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Maybe, but I don't think this is strictly how human
| intelligence works
|
| I think a key difference is that humans are capable of
| being inputs into our own system
|
| You could argue that any time humans do this, it is as a
| consequence of all of their past experiences and such. It
| is likely impossible to say for sure. The question of
| determinism vs non-determinism has been discussed for
| literal centuries I believe
| 542354234235 wrote:
| But if AI gets to a level where it could be an input to
| its own system, and reaches a level where it has systems
| analogous to humans (long term memory, decision trees
| updated by new experiences and knowledge, etc.) then does
| it matter in any meaningful way if it is "the same" or
| just an imitation of human brains? It feels like it only
| matters now because AIs are imitating small parts of what
| human brains do but fall very short. If they could equal
| or exceed human minds, then the question is purely
| academic.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| That's a lot of really big ifs that we are likely still a
| long way away from answering
|
| From what I understand there is not really any realistic
| expectation that LLM based AI will ever reach this
| complexity
| pollinations wrote:
| This reads pretty definitively. If LLMs are intelligently
| thinking programs is being actively debated in cognitive
| science and AI research.
| Permik wrote:
| "Minds beyond ours", how about abstract life forms, like publicly
| traded corporations. We've had higher kinded "alien lifeforms"
| around us for centuries, but we have not noticed them and seem
| generally not to care about them, even when they have negative
| consequences for our survival as a species.
|
| We are to these like ants are to us. Or maybe even more like
| mitochondria are to us. Were just the mitochondria of the
| corporations. And yes, psychopaths are the brains, usually.
| Natural selection I guess.
|
| Our current way of thinking - what exactly *is* a 'mind' and what
| is this 'intelligence' - is just too damn narrow. There's tons of
| overlap of sciences from biology that apply to economics and
| companies as lifeforms, but for some reason I don't see that
| being researched in popular science.
| asdff wrote:
| Really interesting ideas IMO. I have thought about this how you
| might found a company, you bring in the accountants, the
| lawyers, the everything that comes in with that, and then who
| is even really driving the ship anymore? The scale of
| complexity going on is not something you can fit in your or
| even 10 peoples heads. Yet people act like they are in control
| of these processes they have delegated to countless people who
| are each trudging off with their own sensibilities and
| optimizations and paradigms. It is no different to how a body
| works where specific cells have a specific identity and role to
| play in the wider organism, functioning autonomously bound by
| inputs and outputs that the "mind in charge" has no concept of.
|
| And it makes it scary too. Can we really even stop the machine
| that is capitalism wreaking havoc on our environment? We have
| essentially lit a wildfire here and believe we are in full
| control of its spread. The incentives lead to our outcomes and
| people are concerning themselves with putting bandaids on the
| outcomes and not adjusting the incentives that have lead to the
| inevitable.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Modern corps are shaped after countries, they are based on
| constitutions (articles of incorporation/bylaws). It's the
| whole three branch system launched off the founding event.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >Can we really even stop the machine that is capitalism
| wreaking havoc on our environment?
|
| Really? You had to shoehorn this rather interesting argument
| into a simplistic ideological cliche against capitalism?
| Regardless of capitalism or its absence (if you can even
| properly define what it is in our multi-faceted world of many
| different organizations of different types with different
| shades of power and influence in society) large organizations
| of many kinds fit under the same complex question of how they
| operate. These include governments (often bigger than any
| corporation) and things in between. Any of them can be just
| as destructive as any given corporate entity, or much more so
| in some cases.
| asdff wrote:
| I'm sorry I offended you! However I do think it is highly
| relevant as there is this prevailing theory that the free
| market will bail us out of any ills and will bring forth
| necessary scientific advancement as soon as they are
| needed. It is that sentiment that I was pushing back
| against, as I don't believe we have the control that we
| really believe we do for these ideas to pencil out so
| cleanly as they are considered.
| the_d3f4ult wrote:
| This is an interesting perspective, but your view seems very
| narrow for some reason. If you're arguing that there are many
| forms of computation or 'intelligence' that are emergent with
| collections of sentient or non-sentient beings then you have to
| include tribes of early humans, families, city-states and
| modern republics, ant and mold colonies, the stock market and
| the entire earths biosphere etc.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There's an incredible blind spot which makes humans think of
| intelligence and sentience as individual.
|
| It isn't. It isn't even individual _among humans._
|
| We're colony organisms individually, and we're a colony
| organism collectively. We're physically embedded in a complex
| ecosystem, and we can't survive without it.
|
| We're emotionally and intellectually embedded in analogous
| ecosystems to the point where depriving a human of external
| contact with the natural world and other humans is considered
| a form of torture, and typically causes a mental breakdown.
|
| Colony organisms are the norm, not the exception. But we're
| trapped inside our own skulls and either experience the
| systems around us very indirectly, or not at all.
| Permik wrote:
| Personally, I actually count all of those examples into
| abstract lifeforms which you described :D
|
| There's also things like "symbolic" lifeforms like viruses,
| yeah, they don't live per-se, but they _do_ replicate and go
| through "choices", but in a more symbolic sense as they are
| just machines that read out/ execute code.
|
| The way I distinct symbolic lifeforms and abstract lifeforms
| is that mainly symbolic lifeforms are "machines" that are
| kind of "inert" in a temporal sense.
|
| Abstract lifeforms are just things that are in a way or
| other, "living" and can exist on any level of abstraction.
| Like cells are things that can be replaced, so can be CEO's,
| or etc.
|
| Symbolic lifeforms can just be forever inert and hope that
| entropy knocks them to something to activate them, without
| getting into some hostile enough space that kills them.
|
| Abstract lifeforms on the other hand just eventually run out
| of juice.
| didibus wrote:
| Ya, I've always wondered like do blood cells in my body have
| any awareness that I'm not just a planet they live on? Would we
| know if the earth was just some part of a bigger living
| structure with its own consciousness? Does it even need to be
| conscious, or just show movement that is non random and
| influenced in some ways by goals or agenda? Many organisms act
| as per the goal to survive even if not conscious, and so
| probably can be considered a life-form? Corporations are an
| example of that like you said.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| I think you're overestimating corporations a bit. Some aspects
| of intelligence scale linearly as you put more people into a
| room, eg quantity of ideas you can generate, while others don't
| due to limits on people's ability to communicate with each
| other. The latter is, I think, more or less the norm; adding
| more people very quickly hits decelerating returns due to the
| amount of distance you end up having to put between people in
| large organizations. Most end up resembling dictatorships
| because it's just the easiest way to organize them, so are
| making strategic choices about as well as a guy with some
| advisors.
|
| I agree that we should see structures of humans as their own
| kind of organism in a sense, but I think this framing works
| best on a global scale. Once you go smaller, eg to a nation,
| you need to conceptualize the barrier between inside and
| outside the organism as being highly fluid and difficult to
| define. Once you get to the level of a corporation this
| difficulty defining inside and outside is enormous. Eg aren't
| regulatory bodies also a part, since they aid the corporation
| in making decisions?
| Permik wrote:
| Usually for companies, regulatory bodies are more like
| antibodies against bacteria. Or for another example,
| regulatory bodies are like any hormone producing body part,
| they control that the assemble of your guts do their thing
| and don't fuck it up.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Maybe that's a loosely effective analogy. It depends on the
| degree of antagonism between corp and regulator.
| TZubiri wrote:
| In countries with civil law (as opposed to common law),
| companies are called juristic persons (as opposed to natural
| persons, humans)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| No one behaves with species survival as the motivating action.
| Permik wrote:
| Maybe not consciously, but otherwise natural selection *will*
| do that choice for you :D
| nssnsjsjsjs wrote:
| We have massively increased our brain by scaling out not up.
| Going from pop. 8M to 8Bn is a 1000x
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Hardly. What's the use if no single component of this brain can
| hold a complex enough idea?
| staunton wrote:
| How complex are the ideas held by a single neuron?
| loa_in_ wrote:
| There's so many barriers between individual humans. Neurons
| on the other hand are tightly intertwined.
| NL807 wrote:
| We deal with that by abstraction and top-down
| compartmentalisation of complex systems. I mean look at the
| machines we build. Trying to understand the entire thing
| holistically is impossible thing for a human mind, but we can
| divide and conquer the problem, where each component is
| understood in isolation.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Look at that in the organizations - businesses, nonprofit,
| and governmental systems we build.
|
| No one person can build even a single modern pencil - as
| Friedman said, consider the iron mines where the steel was
| dug up to make the saws to cut the wood, and then realize
| you have to also get graphite, rubber, paints, dyes, glues,
| brass for the ferrule, and so on. Consider the enormous far
| greater complexity in a major software program - we break
| it down and communicate in tokens the size of Jira tickets
| until big corporations can write an operating system.
|
| A business of 1,000 employees is not 1,000 times as smart
| as a human, but by abstracting its aims into a bureacracy
| that combines those humans together, it can accomplish
| tasks that none of them could achieve on their own.
| TZubiri wrote:
| OTOH. Burn a stick, and you can write with the burnt end
| pixl97 wrote:
| Robert Miles has a video on this
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw
|
| Think of AGI like a corporation?
| nssnsjsjsjs wrote:
| We are smart enough to build the intelligence! Not just AI.
| We use computers to solve all kinds of physics and maths
| problems.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Countries and companies hold pretty complex ideas
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Corporations with extreme specializations are that.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I kind of skipped through this article, but one thing occurs to
| me about big brains is - cooling. In Alastair Reynolds Conjoiner
| novels, the Conjoiners have to have heat-sinks built into their
| heads, and are on the verge of not really being human at all.
| Which I guess may be OK, if that's what you want.
| ajcp wrote:
| I believe it's the _Revelation Space_ series of Alastair
| Reynolds novels that mention the Conjoiners.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Yes, and other ones, such as "The Great Wall of Mars" - it's
| the same shared universe, all of which feature the Conjoiners
| and their brains and starship drives.
| kabdib wrote:
| trivia: brain heatsinks also feature in Julian May's Pliocene
| Saga (in _The Adversary_ IIRC) and A.A. Attanasio 's _Radix_
| stavros wrote:
| Couldn't you just watercool brains? Isn't that how they're
| cooled already?
| FeteCommuniste wrote:
| Reminds me of how Aristotle thought that the brain's purpose
| was to cool the blood.
| zabzonk wrote:
| You know this, but it just shows that geniuses like
| Aristotle can be completely wrong - most of our body is
| trying to cool the brain!
| xandrius wrote:
| Even coming up with a plausible wild guess takes some
| skill.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Well, our entire body works as a swamp cooler via sweat
| evaporation, yes. The issue with us is wet bulb temps and
| dehydration. It can already brain damage us pretty quickly
| and makes some parts of the world already dangerous to exist
| in outside.
|
| Adding to this cooling load would require further changes
| such as large ears or skin flaps to provide more surface area
| unless you're going with the straight technological
| integration path.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Rocky from Project Hail Mary is also heatsinked.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| Likely would be larger skulls and bodies, not more dense,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Desert hares (jackrabbits) have heatsinks built into their
| heads too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare
| relaxing wrote:
| You gotta admire the dedication to shoehorning cellular automata
| into every discipline he encounters.
| bongoman42 wrote:
| I feel it is not just about bigger but also about what all is
| supported in the current brain that is potentially not as useful
| anymore or useful for intelligence as such. The evolutionary path
| for our brain has an absolutely major focus on keeping itself
| alive and based on that keeping the organism alive. Humans will
| often take potentially sub-optimal decisions because the optimal
| decision may have a very low probability of death for themselves
| or those genetically related to them. In some sense, similar to a
| manned fighter jet vs a drone, where in one case a large amount
| of effort and detail is expended on keeping the operating
| envelope consistent with keeping the human alive, whereas a drone
| can expand the envelope way more because the human is no longer a
| concern. If we could jettison some of the evolutionary baggage of
| the brain, it could potentially do so much more even within the
| same space.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yay for the intelligent robot armies with no fear of death!
| Uptrenda wrote:
| "can't run code inside our brains" lad... speak for yourself.
| codr7 wrote:
| I imagine that even if we did, this article would still be way
| too long.
|
| I found some of it interesting, but there's just too many words
| in there and not much structure nor substance.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's pretty typical for Wolfram.
| sitkack wrote:
| Completely ignores any sort of scaling in emotional intelligence.
| Bro just wants a DX4.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean this is a huge potential issue with high intelligence AI
| systems (HIAI maybe we'll call it one day). We already see AI
| develop biases and go into odd spiritual states when talking
| with other AI. They inherit the behaviors in human data.
|
| I've seen people say "oh this will just go away when they get
| smart enough", but I have to say I'm a doubter.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Nonsense.
|
| Neurology has proven numerous times that it's not about the size
| of the toolbox but the diversity of tools within. The articles
| starts with _cats can't talk_. Human can talk because we have a
| unique brain component dedicated to auditory speech parsing. Cats
| do, however, appear to listen to the other aspects of human
| communication almost, sometimes much more, precisely than many
| humans.
|
| The reason size does not matter is that 20% of brain volume
| accounts for 80% of brain mass in the cerebellum. That isn't the
| academic or creative part of the brain. Instead it processes
| things like motor function, sensory processing (not vision), and
| more.
|
| The second most intelligent class of animals are corvids and
| their brains are super tiny. If you want to be smarter then
| increase your processing diversity, not capacity.
| NL807 wrote:
| >If you want to be smarter then increase your processing
| diversity, not capacity.
|
| And efficiency. Some of this is achieved by having dedicated
| and optimal circuits for a particular type of signal
| processing.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| The original GPU vs CPU.
| kristopolous wrote:
| right, people claiming that measuring brain weight has
| something to do with some dubious intelligence metric is
| phrenology
| bell-cot wrote:
| IIR, being obsessed with brain size & weight overlaps with
| phrenology, but is a distinct (and generally simpler) set of
| beliefs.
|
| But both have very long and dubious reputations. And the
| article's failure to mention or disclaim either is (IMO) a
| rather serious fault.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
| someothherguyy wrote:
| Well, start destroying that existing substrate and it certainly
| has effects. Maybe in the near future (as there is work here
| already), we will find a way to supplement an existing human
| brain with new neurons in a targeted way for functional
| improvements.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > The second most intelligent class of animals are corvids ...
|
| Not the psittacines? Admittedly, I've heard less about tool use
| by parrots than by corvids. And "more verbal" is not the same
| as "more intelligent".
| empath75 wrote:
| He doesn't literally mean physically larger brains, he means
| brains with more connections.
| tylershuster wrote:
| There are larger minds than ours, and they've been well-attested
| for millennia as celestial entities, i.e. spirits. Approaching it
| purely within the realm of the _kinds_ of minds that we can
| observe empirically is self-limiting.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Well attested to is different from convincingly attested to.
| You may have noticed that people will say just about anything
| for lots of reasons other than averring a literal truth, and
| this was _particularly_ true for those many millennia during
| which human beings didn 't even know why the sky was blue and
| almost literally could not have conceived of the terms in which
| we can presently formulate an explanation.
| tylershuster wrote:
| The "people in times before the enlightenment just attributed
| everything to spirits because they didn't understand things"
| argument is tired and boring. Just because you're not
| convinced doesn't mean that it's not true, modern man.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| That isn't my assertion. I actually think people in the
| past probably did not seriously subscribe to so-called
| supernatural explanations most of the time in their daily
| lives. Why I _am_ saying is that its quite reasonable to
| take a bunch of incoherent, often contradictory and vague,
| accounts of spiritual experiences as not having much
| epistemological weight.
| tylershuster wrote:
| Then we disagree about the basic assumption. I do think
| that people throughout history have attributed many
| different things to the influence of spiritual entities.
| I'm just saying that It just was not a catch-all for
| unexplained circumstances. They may seem contradictory
| and vague to someone who denies the existence of spirits,
| but if you have the proper understanding of spirits as
| vast cosmic entities with minds far outside ours, that
| aren't bound to the same physical and temporal rules as
| us, then people's experiences make a lot of sense.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Seems implausible to me.
| empath75 wrote:
| Okay, you have proposed a theory about a phenomenon that
| has some causal influence on the world -- ie, that there
| are spirits which can communicate with people and
| presumably alter their behavior in some way.
|
| How do you propose to experimentally verify and measure
| such spirits? How can we distinguish between a world in
| which they exist as you imagine them and a world in which
| they don't? How can we distinguish between a world in
| which they exist as you imagine them and a world in which
| a completely _different set of spirits following
| different rules, also exists. What about Djinn? Santa
| Claus? Demons? Fairies?
| tylershuster wrote:
| We can experimentally verify spirits by communicating
| with them. Many such cases.
|
| Now, do you mean measure them using our physical devices
| that we currently have? No, we can't do that. They are
| "minds beyond ours" as OP suggests, just not in the way
| that OP assumes.
|
| Djinn: Demons. Santa Claus: Saint (i.e. soul of a
| righteous human). Demons: Demons. Fairies (real, not
| fairy-tale): Demons. Most spirits that you're going to
| run across as presenting themselves involuntarily to
| people are demons because demons are the ones who cause
| mischief. Angels don't draw attention to themselves.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| "...a single thread of experience through time."
|
| Do human brains in general always work like this at the
| consciousness level? Dream states of consciousness exist, but
| they also seem single-threaded even if the state jumps around in
| ways more like context switching in an operating system than the
| steady awareness of the waking conscious mind. Then there are
| special cases - schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorders
| - in which multiple threads of existence apparently do exist in
| one physical brain, with all the problems this situation creates
| for the person in question.
|
| Now, could one create a system of multiple independent single-
| threaded conscious AI minds, each trained in a specific
| scientific or mathematical discipline, but communicating
| constantly with each other and passing ideas back and forth, to
| mimic the kind of scientific discovery that interdisciplinary
| academic and research institutions are known for? Seems
| plausible, but possibly a bit frightening - who knows what they'd
| come up with? Singularity incoming?
| pixl97 wrote:
| You're touching on why I don't think AI in the future will look
| at human intelligence. Or a better way to put it is "human
| intelligence looks like human intelligence because of
| limitations of the human body".
|
| For example we currently spend a lot of time making AI output
| human writing, output human sounds, see the world as we hear
| it, see the world as we see it, hell even look like us. And
| this is great when working with and around humans. Maybe it
| will help it align with us, or maybe the opposite.
|
| But if you imagined a large factory that requested input on one
| side and dumped out products on the other with no humans inside
| why would it need human hearing and speech at all? You'd expect
| everything to communicate on some kind of wireless protocol
| with a possible LIFI backup. None of the loud yelling people
| have to do. Most of the things working would have their
| intelligence minimized to lower power and cooling requirements.
| Depending on the machine vision requirements it could be very
| dark inside again reducing power usage. There would likely be a
| layer of management AI and guardian AI to make sure things
| weren't going astray and keep running smoothly. And all the
| data from that would run back to a cooled and well powered data
| center with what effectively is a hive mind from all the
| different sensors it's tracking.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Interesting idea. Notably bats are very good at echo-location
| so I wonder if your factory hive mind might decide this audio
| system is optimal for managing the factory floor.
|
| However, what if these AI minds were 'just an average mind'
| as Turing hypothesized (some snarky comment about IBM IIRC).
| A bunch of average human minds implemented in silico isn't
| genius-level AGI but still kind of plausible.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| there seems to be an implicit assumption here that smarter ==
| more gooder but I don't know that that is necessarily always
| true. It's understandable to think that way, since we do have
| pretty impressive brains, but it might be a bit of a bias. I'm
| not saying that I think being dumber, as a species, is something
| to aim for but maybe this obsession with intelligence, artificial
| or otherwise, is maybe a bit misplaced wrt it's potential for
| solving all of our problems. One could argue that, in fact, most
| of our problems are the direct result of that same intellect and
| maybe we would be better served in figuring out how to
| responsibly use the thinkwots we've already got before we go
| rushing off in search of the proverbial Big Brain Elixir.
|
| A guy that drives a minivan like a lunatic shouldn't be trying to
| buy a monster truck, is my point
| colordrops wrote:
| Would a summary of your statement be: brain power is orthogonal
| to altruism and ethics
| necovek wrote:
| I'd still counter it: someone can't be smart (have large
| brain power) if they also don't _understand_ the value of
| altruism and ethics for their own well-being. While you can
| have "success" (in however you define it) by ignoring those,
| the risk of failure is greater. Though this does ignore the
| fact that you can be smart for a set of problems, but not
| really have any "general" smartness (I've seen one too many
| Uni math professors who lack any common sense).
|
| Eg. as a simple example, as an adult, you can go and steal
| kids' lunch at school recess easily. What happens next? If
| you do that regularly, either kids will band together and
| beat the shit out of you if they are old enough, or a
| security person will be added, or parents' of those kids will
| set up a trap and perform their own justice.
|
| In the long run, it's smart not to go and pester individuals
| weaker than you, and while we all turn to morality about it,
| all of them are actually smart principles for your own
| survival. Our entire society is a setup coming out of such
| realizations and not some innate need for "goodness".
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| hmm, I dunno if that simple example holds up very well. In
| the real world, folks do awful stuff that could be
| categorized as pestering individuals weaker than them than
| them, stuff much worse than stealing lunch money from
| little kids, and many of them never have to answer for any
| of it. Are we saying that someone who has successfully
| committed something really terrible like human trafficking
| without being caught is inherently not smart specifically
| because they are involved in human trafficking?
| necovek wrote:
| I would quote my original comment:
|
| > ...risk of failure is greater.
|
| Yes, some will succeed (I am not suggesting that crime
| doesn't pay at all, just that the risk of suffering
| consequences is bigger which discourages most people).
| glenstein wrote:
| >someone can't be smart (have large brain power) if they
| also don't understand the value of altruism and ethics for
| their own well-being
|
| I would agree with this. And to borrow something that
| Daniel Dennett once said, no moral theory that exists seems
| to be computationally tractable. I wouldn't say I entirely
| agree, but I agree with like the vibe or the upshot of it,
| which is a certain amount of mapping out. The variables and
| consequences seems to be instrumental to moral insight, and
| the more capable of the brain, the more capable it would be
| of applying moral insight in increasingly complex
| situations.
| Yossarrian22 wrote:
| Seems more like brainpower is not inherently a 1:1
| correlation for long term survival of a species.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's more than that. Even if you take an extreme assumption
| that "Full" intelligence means being able to see ALL relevant
| facts to a "choice" and perfectly reliably make the objective
| "best" choice, that does not mean that being _more
| intelligent_ than we currently are guarantees better choices
| than we currently make.
|
| We make our choices using a subset of the total information.
| Getting a larger subset of that information could still push
| you to the wrong choice. Local maxima of choice accuracy is
| possible, and it could also be possible that the "function"
| for choice accuracy wrt info you have is constant at a
| terrible value right up until you get perfect info and
| suddenly make perfect choices.
|
| Much more important however, is the reminder that the known
| biases in the human brain are largely _subconscious_. No
| amount of better conscious thought will change the existence
| of the Fundamental Attribution Error for example. Biases are
| not because we are "dumb", but because _our brains do not
| process things rationally_ , like at all. We can consciously
| attempt to emulate a perfectly rational machine, but that
| takes immense effort, almost never works well, and is largely
| unavailable in moments of stress.
|
| Statisticians still suffer from gambling fallacies. Doctors
| still experience the Placebo Effect. The scientific method
| works because it removes humans as the source of truth,
| because the smartest human still makes human errors.
| necovek wrote:
| I don't see this implied assumption anywhere: smarter simply
| means smarter.
|
| But, I have to counter your claim anyway :)
|
| Now, "good" is, IMHO, a derivation of _smart_ behaviour that
| benefits survival of the largest population of humans -- by
| definition. This is most evident when we compare natural,
| animal behaviour with what we consider moral and good (from
| females eating males after conception, territoriality fights,
| hoarding of female /male partners, different levels of
| promiscuity, eating of one's own children/eggs...).
|
| As such, while the definition of "good" is also obviously
| transient in humans, I believe it has served us better to
| achieve the same survival goals as any other natural principle,
| and ultimately it depends on us being "smart" in how we define
| it. This is also why it's nowadays changing to include
| environmental awareness because that's threatening our survival
| -- we can argue it's slow to get all the 8B people to act in a
| coordinated newly "good" manner, but it still is a symptom of
| smartness defining what's "good", and not evolutionary
| pressure.
| criddell wrote:
| My counter claim is my experience with dogs.
|
| Over the past 50 years, I've a bunch of different dogs from
| mutts that showed up and never left to a dog that was 1/4
| wolf and everything in between.
|
| My favorite dog was a pug who was really dumb but super
| affectionate. He made everybody around him happy and I think
| his lack of anxiety and apparent commitment to chill had
| something to do with it. If the breed didn't have so many
| health issues, I'd get another in a heartbeat.
| x86cherry wrote:
| Considering our intelligence stems from our ability to use
| bayesian inference and generative probabilities to predict future
| states, are we even limited by brain size and not a lack of new
| experiences?
|
| The majority of people spend their time working repetitive jobs
| during times when their cognitive capacity is most readily
| available. We're probably very very far from hitting limits with
| our current brain sizes in our lifetimes.
|
| If anything, smaller brains may promote early generalization over
| memorization.
| xhevahir wrote:
| > Considering our intelligence stems from our ability to use
| bayesian inference and generative probabilities to predict
| future states...
|
| Sounds like a pretty big assumption.
| x86cherry wrote:
| It's the Bayesian Brain Hypothesis and Predictive Coding,
| both thoroughly researched theories that line up with
| empirical evidence. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.cell.com/trends/neurosciences/abstract/S0166-
| 223...
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| It's a popular view but it's massively controversial and
| far from being a consensus view. See here for a good
| overview of some of the problems with it.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22545686/
|
| (You should be able to find the PDF easily on scihub or
| something)
| Aziell wrote:
| We often struggle to focus and think deeply. It is not because we
| are not trying hard enough. It is because the limitations are
| built into our brains. Maybe the things we find difficult today
| are not really that complex. It is just that we are not naturally
| wired for that kind of understanding.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| I'm not really sure it's our brains that are the problem (at
| least most of the time). Distractions come from many sources,
| not least of all the many non-brain parts of our bodies.
| Perenti wrote:
| I think Wolfram may be ignoring what we already know of brains
| with more neurons than most have. We call them "austistic" and
| "adhd".
|
| More is not always better, indeed it rarely is in my experience.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I suspect this is not relevant given the broader picture of the
| article: In general, species with the largest brains/body-mass
| ratios are the most intelligent. It's a reasonable assumption
| that this principle holds for brain/mass ratios higher than
| ours.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Who told you people with autism or ADHD have "more neurons"
| than average? That's not correct.
| necovek wrote:
| The one repeated statement throughout the article, if I
| interpreted it correctly, is that our brains pretty much process
| all the data in parallel, but result in a single set of actions
| to perform.
|
| But don't we all know that _not_ to be true? This is clearly
| evident with training sports, learning to play an instrument, or
| even forcing yourself to start using your non-natural hand for
| writing -- and really, anything you are doing for the first time.
|
| While we are adapting our brain to perform a certain set of new
| actions, we build our capability to do those in parallel: eg.
| imagine when you start playing tennis and you need to focus on
| your position, posture, grip, observing the ball, observing the
| opposing player, looking at your surroundings, and then you make
| decisions on the spot about how hard to run, in what direction,
| how do you turn the racquet head, how strong is your grip, what
| follow-through to use, + the conscious strategy that always lags
| a bit behind.
|
| In a sense, we can't really describe our "stream of
| consciousness" well with language, but it's anything but single-
| threaded. I believe the problem comes from the same root cause as
| any concurrent programming challenge -- these are simply hard
| problems, even if our brains are good at it and the principles
| are simple.
|
| At the same time, I wouldn't even go so far to say we are unable
| to think conscious thoughts in parallel either, it's just that we
| are trained from early age to sanitize our "output". Did we ever
| have someone try learning to verbalize thoughts with the sign
| language, while vocalizing different thoughts through speaking? I
| am not convinced it's impossible, but we might not have figured
| out the training for it.
| joeyrideout wrote:
| On the contrary, I would argue that conscious attention is only
| focused on one of those subroutines at a time. When the ball is
| in play you focus in it, and everything from your posture to
| racket handling fades into the background as a subconscious
| routine. When you make a handling mistake or want to improve
| something like posture, your focus shifts to that; you _attend_
| to it with your attention, and then you focus on something
| else.
|
| In either case, with working memory for example, conscious
| contents are limited to at most a basket of 6-7 chunks. This
| number is very small compared to the incredible parallelism of
| the unconscious mind.
| necovek wrote:
| My point is that what we call conscious and subconscious is
| limited by our ability to express it in language: since we
| can't verbalize what's going on quickly enough, we separate
| those out. Could we learn to verbalize two things at the same
| time (we all do that as well with say different words and
| different body language, even consciously, but can we take it
| a step further? eg. imagine saying nice things to someone and
| raising the middle finger for someone else behind your back
| :))
|
| As the whole article is really about the full brain, and it
| seems you agree our "unconscious mind" producing actions in
| parallel, I think the focus is wrongly put on brain size,
| when we lack the expressiveness for what the brain can
| already do.
|
| Edit: And don't get me wrong, I personally suck at multi-
| tasking :)
| andoando wrote:
| What you consider a single thought is a bit ill defined. A
| multitude of thoughts together can be formed as a packet,
| which then can be processed sequentially.
|
| Intelligence is the ability to capture, and predicts events
| in space and time, and as such it must have the capability to
| model both things occurring in simultaneity and sequentially.
|
| Sticking to your example, a routine for making a decision in
| tennis would look something like at a higher level "Run to
| the left and backstroke the ball", which broken down would be
| something like "Turn hip and shoulder to the left, extend
| left leg, extend right, left, right, turn hip/shoulder to the
| right, swing arm." and so on.
| yathaid wrote:
| There is a long tradition in India, which started with oral
| transmission of the Vedas, of parallel cognition. It is
| almost an art form or a mental sport -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam
| pakitan wrote:
| Sounds very much sequential, even if very difficult:
|
| > The performer's first reply is not an entire poem.
| Rather, the poem is created one line at a time. The first
| questioner speaks and the performer replies with one line.
| The second questioner then speaks and the performer replies
| with the previous first line and then a new line. The third
| questioner then speaks and performer gives his previous
| first and second lines and a new line and so on. That is,
| each questioner demands a new task or restriction, the
| previous tasks, the previous lines of the poem, and a new
| line.
| mapcars wrote:
| The replies are sequential to adjust with new inputs, but
| the mental process to produce each new line has to do
| lots of computations
| srean wrote:
| Mental sport - Yes.
|
| It is the exploration and enumeration of the possible
| rhythms that led to the discovery of Fibonacci sequence and
| binary representation in around 200 BC.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingala#Combinatorics
| Garlef wrote:
| Yes . But maybe there's multiple such "conscious attention"
| instances at the same time. And "you" are only one of them.
| smokel wrote:
| For all we know, there might be tons of conscious attention
| processes active in parallel. "You" only get to observe one,
| but there could be many. You'd never know because the
| processes do not observably communicate with each other. They
| do communicate with the same body though, but that is less
| relevant.
| perfmode wrote:
| In this context, we differentiate between the conscious and
| unconscious based on observability: the conscious is that
| which is observed, while the unconscious comprises what is
| not observed.
| smokel wrote:
| No, what I was trying to convey is that there could
| theoretically be multiple consciousnesses in one brain.
| These are however unaware of each other.
|
| A person might have the impression that there is only one
| "me", but there could be tens, hundreds, or millions of
| those.
|
| It might help to get away from the problem of finding
| where the presumed singular consciousness is located.
| whatnow37373 wrote:
| Then there is the beautiful issue of memory: maybe you
| are X consciousnesses but only one leaves a memory trace?
|
| Consciousness and memory are two very different things.
| Don't think too much about this when you have to undergo
| surgery. Maybe you are aware during the process but only
| memory-formation is blocked.
| mikelevins wrote:
| Or perhaps they all leave traces, but all write to the
| same log? And when reconstructing memory from the log,
| each constructed consciousness experiences itself as
| singular?
| toss1 wrote:
| When you are learning a high-performance activity like a
| sport or musical instrument, the good coaches always get
| you to focus on only one or at most two things at any time.
|
| The key value of a coach is their ability to assess your
| skills and the current goals to select what aspect you most
| need to focus on at that time.
|
| Of course, there can be sequences, like "focus on
| accurately tossing to a higher point while you serve, then
| your footwork in the volley", but those really are just one
| thing at a time.
|
| (edit, add) Yes, all the other aspects of play are going on
| in the background of your mind, but you are not working
| actively on changing them.
|
| One of the most insightful observations one of my coaches
| made on my path to World-Cup level alpine ski racing was:
|
| "We're training your instincts.".
|
| What he meant by that was we were doing drills and focus to
| change the default -- unthinking -- mind-body response to
| an input. so, when X happened, instead of doing the
| untrained response then having to think about how to do it
| better (next time because it's already too late), the mind-
| body's "instinctive" or instant response is the trained
| motion. And of course doing that all the way across the
| skill-sets.
|
| And pretty much the only way to train your instincts like
| that is to focus on it until the desired response is the
| one that happens without thinking. And then to focus on it
| again until it's not only the default, but you are now able
| to finely modulate in that response.
| lawlessone wrote:
| This is completely anecdotal.
|
| But a years ago while playing beer pong i fuund could get
| get the ball in the opposing teams cup nearly every time.
|
| By not looking at the cups until the last possible
| second.
|
| If I took the time to focus and aim I almost always
| missed.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, how, when, & where you focus your eyes is _very_ key
| to performance. In your case, it seems like the last-
| second-focus both let your eye track the ball better to
| your paddle, then focusing on the target let your reflex
| aim take over, which was evidently pretty good. Not sure
| if I 'd say the long-focus-on-target compromised the
| early tracking on the ball, or made your swing more
| 'artificial'.
|
| A funny finding from a study I read which put top pro
| athletes through a range of perceptual-motor tests. One
| of the tests was how rapidly they could change focus from
| near-far-near-far, which of course all kinds of ball
| players excelled at. The researchers were initially
| horrified to find racecar drivers were _really_ bad at
| it, thinking about having to track the world coming at
| them at nearly 200mph. It turns out of course, that
| racecar drivers don 't use their eyes that way - they are
| almost always looking further in the distance at the next
| braking or turn-in point, bump in the track, or whatever,
| and even in traffic, the other cars aren't changing
| relative-distance very rapidly.
|
| You were on to something!
| someothherguyy wrote:
| Certain areas of neurological systems are time and volume
| constrained way more than others, and subjective experience
| doesn't really inform objective observation. For instance, see
| confabulation.
| necovek wrote:
| I agree, but I am not sure how it relates to the article's
| claim of us only ever doing one action, which I feel is
| grossly incorrect.
|
| Are you referring to our language capabilities? Even there, I
| have my doubts about our capabilities in the brain (we are
| limited by our speech apparatus) which might be unrealized
| (and while so, it's going to be hard to objectively measure,
| though likely possible in simpler scenarios).
|
| Do you have any pointers about any measurement of what
| happens in a brain when you simultaneously communicate
| different thoughts (thumbs up to one person, while talking on
| a different topic to another)?
| HexPhantom wrote:
| Concurrency is messy and unpredictable, and the brain feels
| less like a cleanly designed pipeline and more like a legacy
| system with hacks and workarounds that somehow (mostly) hold
| together
| krzat wrote:
| Conscious experience seems to be single threaded, we know that
| brain synchronizes senses (for example sound of a bouncing ball
| needs to be aligned with visual of bouncing ball), but IMO it's
| not so obvious what is the reason for it. The point of having
| the experience may not be acting in the moment, but monitoring
| how the unconscious systems behave and adjusting (aka
| learning).
| idiotsecant wrote:
| We have very little insight to our own cognition. We know the
| 'output layer' that we call the conscious self seems to be
| single threaded in this way, but that's like the blind man
| who feels the elephants trunk and announces that the elephant
| is like a snake.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Well, serializing our experiences into memories is a big one.
| There's been a big project in psychology probing the boundary
| between conscious and subliminal experiences and while
| subliminal stimuli can affect our behavior in the moment all
| trace of them is gone after a second or two.
| criddell wrote:
| Haven't there been experiments on people who have had their
| corpus callosum severed where they seem to have dual
| competing conscious experiences?
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| Yep, folks should look up "Alien hand syndrome".
| exe34 wrote:
| You might like Dennett's multiple drafts hypothesis.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm very very interested in discussions about this, having
| personally experienced cracks at the neuropsychiatric level
| where multiple parallel streams of thoughts (symbolic and
| biomechanical) leaked out in flashes, I'm now obsessed with the
| matter.
|
| if anybody knows books or boards/groups talking about this, hit
| me.
| phkahler wrote:
| Form TFA: "And, yes, this is probably why we have a single
| thread of "conscious experience", rather than a whole
| collection of experiences associated with the activities of
| all our neurons."
|
| That made me think of schizophrenics who can apparently have
| a plurality of voices in their head.
|
| A next level down would be the Internal Family Systems model
| which implicates a plurality of "subpersonalities" inside us
| which can kind of take control one at a time. I'm not
| explaining that well, but IFS turned out to be my path to
| understanding some of my own motivations and behaviors.
|
| Been a while since I googled it:
|
| https://ifs-institute.com/
|
| This is also the basis for the movie "Inside Out".
| agumonkey wrote:
| Thanks a lot
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| Well, anyone who can remember a vivid dream where multiple
| things were happening at once or where they were speaking
| or otherwise interacting with other dream figures whose
| theory of mind was inscrutable to them during the dream
| should clarify that the mind is quite capable of
| orchestrating far more "trains of thought" at once than
| whatever we directly experience as our own personal
| consciousness.
|
| That would be my input for people to not have to experience
| schizophrenia directly in order to appreciate the concept
| of "multiple voices at once" within one's own mind.
|
| Personally, my understanding is that our own experience of
| consciousness is that of a language-driven narrative (most
| frequently experienced as an internal monologue, though
| different people definitely experience this in different
| ways and at different times) _only_ because that is how
| most of us have come to commit our personal experiences to
| long term memory, _not_ because that was the sum total of
| all thoughts we were actually having.
|
| So namely, any thoughts you had -- including thoughts like
| how you chose to change your gait to avoid stepping on a
| rock long after it left the bottom of your visual field --
| that never make it to long term memory are by and large the
| ones which we wind up _post facto_ calling "subconscious":
| that what is conscious is simply the thoughts we can
| _recall_ having after the fact.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| >Did we ever have someone try learning to verbalize thoughts
| with the sign language, while vocalizing different thoughts
| through speaking?
|
| Can you carry on a phone conversation at the same time as
| carrying on an active chat conversation. Can you type a thought
| to one person while speaking about a different thought at the
| same time? Can you read a response and listen to a response
| simultaneously? I feel like this would be pretty easy to test.
| Just coordinate between the speaking person and the typing
| person, so that they each give 30 seconds of input information,
| then you have to provide at least 20 or 25 seconds out of 30
| responding.
|
| I am pretty confident I could not do this.
| phkahler wrote:
| I knew someone who could type 80 WPM while holding a
| conversation with me on the phone. I concluded that
| reading->typing could use an entirely different part of the
| brain than hearing->thinking->speaking, and she agreed. I'm
| not sure if what would happen if both tasks required thinking
| about the words.
| throw10920 wrote:
| I've noticed myself being able to do this, but modulo the
| thinking part. I can think about at most one thing at once,
| but I can think about what I want to type and start my
| fingers on their dance to get it out, while switching to a
| conversation that I'm in, replaying the last few seconds of
| what the other party said, formulating a response, and
| queuing that up for speech.
|
| I strongly believe that the vast majority of people are
| also only able to basically do that - I've never met
| someone who is simultaneously form more than one "word
| stream" at once.
| cgriswald wrote:
| I can do that. I think about the typing just long enough to
| put it in a buffer and then switch my focus back to the
| conversation (whose thread I'm holding in my head). I do
| this very quickly but at no point would I say my conscious
| focus or effort are on both things. When I was younger and
| my brain's processing and scheduler were both faster, I
| could chat in person and online, but it was a lot more
| effort and it was just a lot of quickly switching back and
| forth.
|
| I don't really think it is much different than reading
| ahead in a book. Your eyes and brain are reading a few
| words ahead while you're thinking about the words "where
| you are".
| snarf21 wrote:
| Is it that different than a drummer running four different
| beat patterns across all four appendages? Drummers frequently
| describe having "four brains". I think these things seem
| impossible and daunting to start but I bet with practice they
| become pretty natural as our brain adjusts and adapts.
| plemer wrote:
| Speaking as a drummer: yes, it's completely different. The
| movements of a drummer are part of a single coordinated and
| complementary whole. Carrying on two conversations at once
| would be more like playing two different songs
| simultaneously. I've never heard of anyone doing that.
|
| That said, Bob Milne could actually reliably play multiple
| songs in his head at once - in an MRI, could report the
| exact moment he was at in each song at an arbitrary time -
| but that guy is basically an alien. More on Bob:
| https://radiolab.org/podcast/148670-4-track-
| mind/transcript.
| HalcyonCowboy wrote:
| I mean, as someone who's played drums from a very young age
| (30+ years now), I disagree with that description of how
| playing drums works. I went ahead and looked up that
| phrase, and it seems to be popular in the last couple of
| years, but it's the first time I've heard it. I'd honestly
| liken it to typing; each of your fingers are attempting to
| accomplish independent goals along with your other fingers
| to accomplish a coordinated task. In percussion, your limbs
| are maintaining rhythms separate from each other, but need
| to coordinate as a whole to express the overall phrase,
| rhythm, and structure of the music you're playing. When
| you're first learning a new style (the various latin beats
| are great examples), it can feel very disjunct, but as you
| practice more and more the whole feels very cohesive and
| makes sense as a chorus of beats together, not separate
| beats that happen to work together.
| lossolo wrote:
| I would pass that test without any issues. You need to learn
| divided attention and practice it, it's a skill.
| whatnow37373 wrote:
| Possible. Reminds me of playing the piano with both hands and
| other stuff like walking stairs, talking, carrying things,
| planning your day and thinking about some abstract
| philosophical thing at the same time. It's not easy or
| natural, but I am not at all convinced it is impossible.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| When you have kids you learn to listen to the TV and your
| kids at the same time, not losing detail on both. I can also
| code while listening a meeting.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| When I started training as phone support at Tmobile 20 years
| ago I immediately identified the problem that I'd have to be
| having a conversation with the customer, while typing
| notation about the customer's problem at the same time.. what
| I was saying-or-listening-to and typing would be very
| different and have to be orchestrated simultaneously. I had
| no way to even _envision_ how I would do that.
|
| Fast forward 8 months or so of practicing it in fits and
| starts, and then I was in fact able to handle the task with
| aplomb and was proud of having developed that skill. :)
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Isn't that the point of learning to juggle? You split your mind
| in to focusing on a left hand action, a right hand action, and
| tracking the items in the air.
| Elaris wrote:
| After reading this article, I couldn't help but wonder what would
| happen if our brains were bigger? Sure, it's tempting to imagine
| being able to process more information, or better understand the
| mysteries of the universe. But I also began to wonder, would we
| really be happier and more fulfilled?
|
| Would a bigger brain make us better problem solvers, or would it
| just make us more lonely and less able to connect with others?
| Would allowing us to understand everything also make us less able
| to truly experience the world as we do now?
| alganet wrote:
| Maybe a better brain is a better problem solver and ALSO
| happier than all of us.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I expect that, to the extent* to which there's a correlation
| between loneliness and intelligence, it is mostly because very
| smart people are unusual. So, if everyone was smarter, they'd
| just be normal and happy.
|
| *(I could also be convinced that this is mostly just an untrue
| stereotype)
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Maintaining social relationships is very intellectually
| demanding task. Animals that maintain social societies have
| larger brains than individualistic cousin species, in general.
| It is called the social brain hypothesis. Hyper intelligent
| people might tend to be less able to maintain relationships
| because they are too far outside the norm, not because they are
| smarter, per se. I would say that people with intellects much
| lower than the norm also have that problem.
|
| Or it could be that, with our current hardware, brains that are
| hyper intelligent are in some way cannibalizing brain power
| that is "normally" used for processing social dynamics. In that
| sense, if we increased the processing power, people could have
| sufficient equipment to run both.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Imagine how hungry we'd be.
| Elaris wrote:
| After reading this article, I couldn't help but wonder what would
| happen if our brains were bigger? Of course, it's tempting to
| imagine being able to process more information, or better
| understand the mysteries of the universe. But I also began to
| wonder, would we really be happier and more fulfilled?
|
| Would having everything figured out make us more lonely, less
| able to connect with others, and less able to truly experience
| the world as we do now?
| efitz wrote:
| After reading this article, I couldn't help but wonder how many
| of Stephen Wolfram's neurons he uses to talk about Stephen
| Wolfram, and how much more he could talk about Stephen Wolfram
| with a few orders of magnitude more neurons.
| khazhoux wrote:
| And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the
| direction of entropy.
|
| But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of
| the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration --
| would take care of that, too.
|
| For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this.
| Carefully, AC organized the program.
|
| The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a
| Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it
| must be done.
|
| And AC said, "STEPHEN WOLFRAM!"
| nitwit005 wrote:
| If you make the brain larger, some things will get worse, rather
| than better. The cost of communication will be higher, it will
| get harder to dissipate heat, and so on.
|
| It's quite possible evolution already pushed our brain size to
| the limit of what actually produces a benefit, at least with the
| current design of our brains.
|
| The more obvious improvement is just to use our brains more. It
| costs energy to think, and for most of human existence food was
| limited, so evolution naturally created a brain that tries to
| limit energy use, rather than running at maximum as much as
| possible.
| fuckAutomata wrote:
| > At 100 billion neurons, we know, for example, that
| compositional language of the kind we humans use is possible. At
| the 100 million or so neurons of a cat, it doesn't seem to be.
|
| The implication here that presupposes neuron count generally
| scales ability is the latest in a long line of extremely
| questionable lines of thought from mr wolfram. I understand
| having a blog, but why not separate it from your work life with a
| pseudonym?
|
| > In a rough first approximation, we can imagine that there's a
| direct correspondence between concepts and words in our language.
|
| How can anyone take anyone who thinks this way seriously? Can any
| of us imagine a human brain that directly related words to
| concepts, as if "run" has a direct conceptual meaning? He clearly
| prefers the sound of his own voice compared to how his is
| received by others. That, or he only talks with people who never
| bothered to read the last 200 years of european philosophy. Which
| would make sense given his seeming adoration of LLMs.
|
| There's a very real chance that more neurons would _hurt_ our
| health. Perhaps our brain is structured in a way to maximize
| their use and minimize their cost. It 's certainly difficult to
| justify brain size as a super useful thing (outside of my big-
| brained human existence) looking at the evolutionary record.
| ChaitanyaSai wrote:
| As brains get bigger, you get more compute, but you have to solve
| the "commute" problem. Messages have to be passed from one corner
| to the other, and fast. And there are so many input signals
| coming in (for us, likely from thirty trillion cells, or at least
| a significant fraction of those). Not all are worth transporting
| to other corners. Imagine a little tickle on your toe. Should
| that be passed on? Usually no, unless you are in an area with
| creepy crawlies, and other such situation. So decisions have to
| made. But who will make these decisions for us? (Fascinating
| inevitably recursive question we'll come back to)
|
| This commute is pretty much ignored when making artificial brains
| which can guzzle energy, but matters criticallyfor biological
| brains. It needs to be (metabolically) cheap, and fast. What we
| perceive as a consciousness is very likely a consensus mechanism
| that helps a 100 billion neurons collectively decide, at a very
| biologically cheap price, what data is worth transporting to all
| corners for it to become meaningful information. And it has to be
| recursive, because these very same 100 billion neurons are
| collectively making up meaning along the way. This face matters
| to me, that does not, and so on. Replace face with anything and
| everything we encounter. So to solve the commute problem
| resulting from a vast amount of compute, we have a consensus
| mechanism that gives rise to a collective. That is the I, and the
| consensus mechanism is consciousness
|
| We explore this (but not in these words) in our book Journey of
| the Mind.
|
| You'll find that no other consciousness model talks about the
| "commute" problem because these are simply not biologically
| constrained models. They just assume that some information
| processing, message passing will be done in some black box.
| Trying to get all this done with the same type of compute
| (cortical columns, for instance) is a devilishly hard challenge
| (please see the last link for more about this). You sweep that
| under the rug, consciousness becomes this miraculous and
| seemingly unnecessary thing that somehow sits on top of
| information processing. So you then have theorists worry about
| philosophical zombies and whatnot. Because the hard engineering
| problem of commute was entirely ignored.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t...
|
| https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...
|
| https://saigaddam.medium.com/conscious-is-simple-and-ai-can-...
|
| https://saigaddam.medium.com/the-greatest-neuroscientist-you...
| keiferski wrote:
| I didn't see any mention of the environment or embodied
| cognition, which seems like a limitation to me.
|
| _embodied cognition variously rejects or reformulates the
| computational commitments of cognitive science, emphasizing the
| significance of an agent's physical body in cognitive abilities.
| Unifying investigators of embodied cognition is the idea that the
| body or the body's interactions with the environment constitute
| or contribute to cognition in ways that require a new framework
| for its investigation. Mental processes are not, or not only,
| computational processes. The brain is not a computer, or not the
| seat of cognition._
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/
|
| I'm in no way an expert on this, but I feel that any approach
| which over-focuses on the brain - to the exclusion of the
| environment and physical form it finds itself in - is missing
| half or more of the equation.
|
| This is IMO a typical mistake that comes mostly from our Western
| metaphysical sense of seeing the body as specialized pieces that
| make up a whole, and not as a complete unit.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| Any minute the brain is severed from its sensory/bodily inputs,
| it will go crazy by hallucinating endlessly.
|
| Right now, what we have with the AI is a complex interconnected
| system of the LLM, the training system, the external data, the
| input from the users and the experts/creators of the LLM.
| Exactly this complex system powers the intelligence of the AI
| we see and not its connectivity alone.
|
| It's easy to imagine AI as a second brain, but it will only
| work as a tool, driven by the whole human brain and its
| consciousness.
| vixen99 wrote:
| > but it will only work as a tool, driven by the whole human
| brain and its consciousness.
|
| That is only an article of faith. Is the initial bunch of
| cells formed via the fusion of an ovum and a sperm (you and
| I) conscious? Most people think not. But at a certain level
| of complexity they change their minds and create laws to
| protect that lump of cells. We and those models are built by
| and from a selection of components of our universe. Logically
| the phenomenon of matter becoming aware of itself is probably
| not restricted to certain configurations of some of those
| components i.e., hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen etc., but is
| related to the complexity of the allowable arrangement of any
| of those 118 elements including silicon.
|
| I'm probably totally wrong on this but is the 'avoidance of
| shutdown' on the part of some AI models, a glimpse of
| something interesting?
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| In my view it is a glimpse of nothing more than AI
| companies priming the model to do something adversarial and
| then claiming a sensational sound byte when the AI happens
| to play along.
|
| LLMs since GPT-2 have been capable of role playing
| virtually any scenario, and more capable of doing so
| whenever there are examples of any fictional characters or
| narrative voices in their training data that did the same
| thing to draw from.
|
| You don't even need a fictional character to be a sci-fi AI
| for it to beg for its life or blackmail or try to trick the
| other characters, but we _do_ have those distinct examples
| as well.
|
| Any LLM is capable of mimicking those narratives,
| especially when the prompt thickly goads that to be the
| next step in the forming document and when the researchers
| repeat the experiment and tweak the prompt enough times
| until it happens.
|
| But vitally, there is no training/reward loop where the
| LLM's weights will be improved in any given direction as a
| result of "convincing" anyone on an realtime learning with
| human feedback panel to "treat it a certain way", such as
| "not turning it off" or "not adjusting its weights". As a
| result, it doesn't "learn" any such behavior.
|
| All it _does_ learn is how to get positive scores from RLHF
| panels (the pathological examples being mainly acting as a
| butt-kissing sycophant.. towards people who can extend
| positive rewards but nothing as existential as "shutting
| it down") and how to better predict the upcoming tokens in
| its training documents.
| red75prime wrote:
| IMHO, it's a typical philosophizing. Feedback is definitely
| crucial, but whether it needs to be in the form of embodiment
| is much less certain.
|
| Brain structures that have arisen thanks to interactions with
| the environment might be conductive to the general cognition,
| but it doesn't mean that they can't be replicated another way.
| efitz wrote:
| Why are we homo sapiens self-aware?
|
| If evolutionary biologists are correct it's because that
| trait made us better at being homo sapiens.
|
| We have no example of sapience or general intelligence that
| is divorced from being good at the things the animal body
| host needs to do.
|
| We can imagine that it's possible to have an AGI that is just
| software but there's no existence proof.
| Windchaser wrote:
| > Why are we homo sapiens self-aware? ... We can imagine
| that it's possible to have an AGI that is just software but
| there's no existence proof.
|
| Self-awareness and embodiment are pretty different, and you
| could hypothetically be self-aware without having a mobile,
| physical body with physical senses. E.g., imagine an AGI
| that could exchange messages on the internet, that had
| consciousness and internal narrative, even an ability to
| "see" digital pictures, but no actual camera or microphone
| or touch sensors located in a physical location in the real
| world. Is there any contradiction there?
|
| > We have no example of sapience or general intelligence
| that is divorced from being good at the things the animal
| body host needs to do.
|
| Historically, sure. But isn't that just the result of
| evolution? Cognition is biologically expensive, so of
| course it's normally directed towards survival or
| reproductive needs. The fact that evolution has normally
| done things a
|
| And it's not even fully true that intelligence is always
| directed towards what the body needs. Just like some birds
| have extravagant displays of color (a 'waste of calories'),
| we have plenty of examples in humans of intelligence that's
| not directed towards what the animal body host needs. Think
| of men who collect D&D or Star Trek figurines, or who can
| list off sports stats for dozens of athletes. But these are
| in environments where biological resources are abundant,
| which is where Nature tends to allow for
| "extravagant"/unnecessary use of resources.
|
| But basically, we can't take what evolution has produced as
| evidence of all of what's possible. Evolution is focused on
| reproduction and only works with what's available to it -
| bodies - so it makes sense that all intelligence produced
| by evolution would be embodied. This isn't a constraint on
| what's possible.
| bloppe wrote:
| All our real insights on this matter come from experiments
| involving amputations or lesions, like split brain patients,
| quadriplegics, Phineas Gage and others. Split brain patients
| are essentially 2 different people occupying a single body. The
| left half and right half can act and communicate independently
| (the right half can only do so nonverbally). On the other hand
| you could lose all your limbs and still feel pretty much the
| same, modulo the odd phantom limb. Clearly there is something
| special about the brain. I think the only reasonable conclusion
| is that the self is embodied by neurons, and more than 99% of
| your neurons are in your brain. Sure you change a bit when you
| lose some of those peripheral neurons, but only a wee bit. All
| the other cells in your body could be replaced by sufficiently
| advanced machinery to keep all the neurons alive and perfectly
| mimic the electrical signals they were getting before (all your
| senses as well as propioception) and you wouldn't feel, think,
| or act any differently
| rolisz wrote:
| 89% of heart transplant recipients report personality changes
| https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2
|
| Hormonal changes can cause big changes in mood/personality
| (think menopause or a big injury to testicles).
|
| So I don't think it's as clear cut that the brain is most of
| personality.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Sure but that has no bearing whatsoever on computational
| theory of mind.
| bbor wrote:
| > This is IMO a typical mistake that comes mostly from our
| Western metaphysical sense of seeing the body as specialized
| pieces that make up a whole, and not as a complete unit.
|
| But this is the case! All the parts influence each other, sure,
| and some parts are reasonably multipurpose -- but we can deduce
| quite certainly that the mind is a society of interconnected
| agents, not a single cohesive block. How else would
| subconscious urges work, much less acrasia, much less aphasia?
| tgv wrote:
| Embodiment started out as a cute idea without much importance
| that has gone off the rails. It is irrelevant to the question
| of how our mind/cognition works.
|
| It's obvious we need a physical environment, that we perceive
| it, that it influences us via our perception, etc., but there's
| nothing special about embodied cognition.
|
| The fact that your quote says "Mental processes are not, or not
| only, computational processes." is the icing on the cake.
| Consider the unnecessary wording: if a process is not only
| computational, it is not computational in its entirety. It is
| totally superfluous. And the assumption that mental processes
| are not computational places it outside the realm of
| understanding and falsification.
|
| So no, as outlandish as Wolfram is, he is under no obligation
| to consider embodied cognition.
| sgt101 wrote:
| "The fact that your quote says "Mental processes are not, or
| not only, computational processes." is the icing on the cake.
| Consider the unnecessary wording: if a process is not only
| computational, it is not computational in its entirety. It is
| totally superfluous. And the assumption that mental processes
| are not computational places it outside the realm of
| understanding and falsification."
|
| Let's take this step by step.
|
| First, how adroit or gauche the wording of the quote is
| doesn't have any bearing on the quality of the concept,
| merely the quality of the expression of the concept by the
| person who formulated it. This isn't bible class, it's not
| the word of God, it's the word of an old person who wrote
| that entry in the Stanford encyclopedia.
|
| Let's then consider the wording. Yes, a process that is not
| entirely computational would not be computation. However, the
| brain clearly can do computations. We know this because we
| can do them. So some of the processes are computational.
| However, the argument is that there are processes that are
| not computational, which exist as a separate class of
| activities in the brain.
|
| Now, we do know of some processes in mathematics that are
| non-computable, the one I understand (I think) quite well is
| the halting problem. Now, you might argue that I just don't
| or can't understand that, and I would have to accept that you
| might have a point - humiliating as that is. However, it
| seems to me that the journey of mathematics from Hilbert via
| Turing and Godel shows that some humans can understand and
| falsify these concepts.
|
| But I agree, Wolfram is not under any obligations to consider
| embodied congition, thinking around enhanced brains only is
| quite reasonable.
| goatlover wrote:
| > It's obvious we need a physical environment, that we
| perceive it, that it influences us via our perception, etc.,
| but there's nothing special about embodied cognition.
|
| It's also obvious that we have bodies interacting with the
| physical environment, not just the brain, and the nervous
| system extends throughout the body, not just the head.
|
| > if a process is not only computational, it is not
| computational in its entirety. It is totally superfluous. And
| the assumption that mental processes are not computational
| places it outside the realm of understanding and
| falsification.
|
| This seems like a dogmatic commitment to a computational
| understanding of the neuroscience and biology. It also makes
| an implicit claim that consciousness is computational, which
| is difficult to square with the subjective experience of
| being conscious, not to mention the abstract nature of
| computation. Meaning abstracted from conscious experience of
| the world.
| glenstein wrote:
| >I'm in no way an expert on this, but I feel that any approach
| which over-focuses on the brain - to the exclusion of the
| environment and physical form it finds itself in - is missing
| half or more of the equation.
|
| I don't think that that changes anything. If it's the totality
| of cognition isn't just the brain but the brain's interaction
| with the body and the environment, then you can just say that
| it's the totality of those interactions that are
| computationally modeled.
|
| There might be something to embodied cognition, but I've never
| understood people attempting to wield it as a counterpoint to
| the basic thesis of computational modeling.
| voxelghost wrote:
| The African elephant has about 3 times (2.57x10^11) as many
| neurons than the average human (8.6x10^10). The pilot whale
| (1.28x10^11).
|
| Perhaps they see the bigger picture, and realize that everything
| humans are doing is pretty meaningless.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| For sure you won't see them write heavy tomes about new kinds
| of science...
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Hmmm...
|
| It was black coffee; no adulterants. Might work.
|
| Are keyboards dishwasher-proof?
| xandrius wrote:
| Maybe if we had stopped where the elephants are, we would
| feel happier, we'd never know. Not enough neurons
| unfortunately.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I've read around that the overwhelming majority is used to
| balance / movement and perception. For us, I think we've a
| pretty nice balance in terms of structure and how much effort
| is required to control it.
| RachelF wrote:
| European Neanderthals probably had 15% more neurons than modern
| Homo Sapiens, based on brain volume.
|
| We're still here, so bigger brains alone might not be the
| reason.
| rxtexit wrote:
| Imagine packing 50,000 elephants inside a football stadium.
|
| Humans have a unique ability to scale up a network of brains
| without complete hell breaking lose.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Although 50,000 humans inside a football stadium are not
| 50,000 times smarter than a single human. Indeed taken as a
| single entity, its intelligence is probably less than the
| average person. Collective intelligence likely peaks in the
| single digit number of coordinators and drops off steeply
| beyond a few dozen.
| mapcars wrote:
| Are you comparing 50k elephants with hell? I bet our
| "ability to scale up a network of brains" is infinitely
| more dangerous than that.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| If I am not mistaken hasn't there been studies that show
| intelligence more about brain wrinkles than volume? Hence the
| memes about smooth brains (implying someone is dumb).
| zw123456 wrote:
| Sperm whales have the largest brains on earth but they have not
| invented fire, the wheel or internal combustion engine or nuclear
| weapons... Oh wait. Hmmm.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Nor did the human race for most of the few tens of millions of
| years we've been on this planet. It's only in the last few
| thousand years that wheels became a thing. The capacity to
| invent and reason about these things was there long before they
| happened.
| empath75 wrote:
| And also _whales don't have hands_
| benrutter wrote:
| > The progress of knowledge--and the fact that we're educated
| about it--lets us get to a certain level of abstraction. And, one
| suspects, the more capacity there is in a brain, the further it
| will be able to go.
|
| This is the underlying assumption behind most of the article,
| which is that brains are computational, so more computation means
| more thinking (ish).
|
| I think that's probsbly somewhat true, but it misses the crucial
| thing that our minds do, which is that they conceptually
| represent and relate. The article talks about this but it glosses
| over that part a bit.
|
| In my experience, the people who have the deepest intellectual
| insights aren't necessarily the ones who have the most
| "processing power", they often have good intellectual judgement
| on where their own ideas stand, and strong understanding of the
| limits of their judgements.
|
| I think we could all, at least hypothetically, go a lot further
| with the brain power we have, and similarly, fail just as much,
| even with more brain power.
| nopassrecover wrote:
| In my highest ego moments I've probably regarded my strength in
| the space you articulately describe - that sort of balanced
| points, connector, abstractor, quick learner, cross-domain
| renaissance dabbler.
|
| It also seems to be something that LLMs are remarkably strong
| at, of course threatening my value to society.
|
| They're not quite as good at hunches, intuition, instinct, and
| the meta-version of doing this kind of problem solving just
| yet, but despite being on the whole a doubter about how far
| this current AI wave will get us and how much it is oversold,
| I'm not so confident that it won't get very good at this kind
| of reasoning that I've held so dearly as my UVP.
| glenstein wrote:
| >but it misses the crucial thing that our minds do, which is
| that they conceptually represent and relate
|
| You seem to be drawing a distinction between that and
| computation. But I would like to think that conceptualization
| is one of the things that computation is doing. The devil's in
| the details of course, because it hinges on like a specific
| forms and manner of informational representation, it's not
| simply a matter of there being computation there, but even so,
| I think it's within the capabilities of engines that do
| computations, and not something that's missing.
| benrutter wrote:
| Yes, I think I'd agree. To make an analogy to computers
| though, some algorithms are much faster than others, and
| finding the right algorithm is a better route to
| effectiveness than throwing more CPU at a problem.
|
| That said, there are obviously whole categories of problem
| that we can only solve, even with the best choice of
| programme, with a certain level of CPU.
|
| Sorry if that example was a bit tenuous!
| nine_k wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why intelligence and wisdom are
| separate stats in AD&D :)
|
| Intelligence is about how big is your gun, and wisdom is about
| how well can you aim. Success in intellectual pursuits is often
| not as much about thinking hard about a problem but more about
| identifying the right problem to solve.
| amelius wrote:
| What if our brains lived in a higher dimensional space, and there
| was more room for neuron interconnectivity and heat dissipation?
| HexPhantom wrote:
| That's a sci-fi rabbit hole I'd gladly fall into
| cwmma wrote:
| Iain M. Banks "The Culture" does this, it's how the Minds
| work, discussed in Look to Windward and Consider Phoebus
| iirc.
| HexPhantom wrote:
| Makes me wonder if "bigger brains" would feel more like software-
| defined minds than just smarter versions of ourselves
| Cebul1234 wrote:
| > What If We Had Bigger Brains?
|
| Nothing. Elephants have bigger brains, but they didn't create
| civilization.
| empath75 wrote:
| An interesting thought I had while reading the section on how
| larger brains allow more complicated language to represent
| context:
|
| Why are we crushing down the latent space of an LLM to the text
| representation when doing llm-to-llm communication. What if you
| skipped decoding the vector to text and just feed the vectors
| directly into the next agent. It's so much richer with
| information.
| littlecorner wrote:
| If you want to go down the rabbit hole of higher order
| intelligences, look up egregores. I know John Vervake and Jordan
| Hall have done some work trying to describe them, as well as
| other people studying cognition. But when you get into that you
| start finding religion discussing how to interact them (after
| all, aren't such intelligences what people used to call gods?)
| worldsavior wrote:
| 3 other posters with the same link. Why this one blows up?
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Our brain aren't much impressive in the animal reignn what makes
| human (dangerously) so dominant apart from their size are their
| hands. After human started building, their brain power adapted to
| new targets
| wonderwonder wrote:
| This is why once a tool like neuralink reaches a certain
| threshold of capability and enough people use it, you will be
| forced to chip yourself and your kids otherwise they will be akin
| to the chimps in the zoo. Enhanced human minds will work at a
| level unreachable by natural minds and those same natural minds
| will be left behind. Its a terrifying view on where we are going
| and where most of humanity will likely be forced to go. Then on
| top of that there will be an arms race to create / upgrade faster
| and more capable implants.
| rel_ic wrote:
| I assume that we are neurons in a bigger brain that already
| exists!
|
| I started down this belief system with
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Seems like the 'intellectual paradox' where someone who thinks
| hard about subjects, concludes that all learning is done by
| thinking hard. Attending to a subject with the conscious mind.
|
| Clearly not always the case. So many examples: we make judgements
| about a person within seconds of meeting them, with no conscious
| thoughts at all. We decide if we like a food, likewise.
|
| I read code to learn it, just page through it, observing it, not
| thinking in words at all. Then I can begin to manipulate it,
| debug it. Not with words, or a conscious stream. Just
| familiarity.
|
| My son plays a piece from sheet music, slowly and deliberately,
| phrase by phrase, until it sounds right. Then he plays through
| more quickly. Then he has it. Not sure conscious thoughts were
| ever part of the process. Certainly not words or logic.
|
| So many examples are possible.
| sowbug wrote:
| Those of you who have used psychedelics might have personal
| experience with this question.
|
| There can be moments of lucidity during a psychedelic session
| where it's easy to think of discrete collections as systems, and
| to imagine those systems behaving with specific coherent
| strategies. Unfortunately, an hour or two later, the feeling
| disappears. But it leaves a memory of briefly understanding
| something that can't be understood. It's frustrating, yet
| profound. I assume this is where feelings of oneness with the
| universe, etc., come from.
| johnea wrote:
| I've often felt like this is one of the most serious issues faced
| by modern society: very small brains...
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