We certainly haven’t ruled out the possibility that the human brain is capable of some sort of “super Turing” calculations. That would lead me to 2 questions;

1. Can we devise some test to show this? If we expand our definition of “test” to include anything we can measure, directly or indirectly, through our senses?

2. What do we think is the “magic” ingredient that allows humans to engage in “super turing” activities, that a computer doesn’t have? eg Are carbon compounds inherently more suited to intelligence than silicon compounds?

There’s a real vs theoretical distinction. Turing machines are defined as having infinite memory. Running out of memory is a big issue that prevents computers from solving problems that Turing machines should be able to solve.

The halting problem, a bunch of problems involving prime numbers, a bunch of other weird math problems are all things that can’t be solved with Turing machines. They can all sort of be solved in some circumstances (eg A TM can correctly classify many programs as either halting or not halting but there are a bunch of edge cases it can’t figure out, even with infinite memory).

From what I remember, most researchers believe that human brains are Turing Complete. I’m not aware of any class of problem that humans can solve that we don’t think are solvable by sufficiently large computers.

You’re right that Quantum Computers are Turing Complete. They’re just the closest practical thing I could think of to something beyond it. They often let you knock down the Big Oh relative to regular computers. That was my point though. We can describe something that goes beyond TC (like “it can solve the halting lemma”) but there don’t seem to be any examples of them.

Most modern languages are theoretically Turing complete but they all have finite memory. That also keeps human brains from being Turing complete. I’ve read a little about theories beyond Turing completeness, like quantum computers, but I’m not aware of anyone claiming that human brains are capable of that.

A game of Magic could theoretically do any task a Turing machine could do but it would be really slow. Even if it could “think” it would likely take years to decide to do something as simple as farting.

Feelings are certainly real. That doesn’t mean that they provide any evidence beyond the existence of the feeling. The standard thought experiment around that is to think about dreams. In a dream, everything I feel can be completely convincing and I have no way to know it’s a hallucination. Once I wake up that reality becomes clear and I know that the feelings I was 100% certain of a few moments ago, were false. That suggests that even complete certainty in our feelings is not indicative of underlying truth.

The extra dimension thing is a bit tricky. The standard 3+1 are widely accepted. There are several conjectures that involve more dimensions but we haven’t found evidence to support them. All of those are still physical dimensions. They generally fall into 2 categories; testable and not testable.

The non-testability is why everyone looks down on string theorists. Their models “explain” everything by piling on more and more dimensions but non of it is testable.

Since none of the dimensions above 4 are measurable, I’m much more comfortable believing they don’t exist than that they do. I don’t see why it would make sense to fill a void of non-knowledge with arbitrary guesses. I don’t see a problem in not knowing if it’s possible for AIs (or humans) to be conscious.

I can understand a desire to find something beyond ourselves but I’m not driven by it.

That’s exactly where Descartes lost me. I was with him on the whole “cogito ergo sum” thing but his insistence that his feelings of a higher being meant that it must exist in real form somewhere made no sense to me.

I’m not talking about a precise definition of consciousness, I’m talking about a consistent one. Without a definition, you can’t argue that an AI, a human, a dog, or a squid has consciousness. You can proclaim it, but you can’t back it up.

The problem is that I have more than a basic understanding of how an LLM works. I’ve written NNs from scratch and I know that we model perceptrons after neurons.

Researchers know that there are differences between the two. We can generally eliminate any of those differences (and many research do exactly that). No researcher, scientist, or philosopher can tell you what critical property neurons may have that enable consciousness. Nobody actually knows and people who claim to know are just making stuff up.

I think this is likely an unsurmountable point of difference.

The problem is that once we eliminate measurability we can’t differentiate between reality and fantasy. We can imagine anything we want and believe in it.

The Philosophy of Balance has “believe in the universal God” as its first core tenant. That makes it more like a religion than a philosophy.

I don’t know if we’ll ever define consciousness or if we’ll ever discover what it is.

My central claim is that if we don’t do that we can’t convincingly claim that an AI is or is not conscious. We can conjecture about it either way and either guess may be right, but we won’t be able to move past guesses.

This definition of consciousness essentially says that humans have souls and machines don’t. It’s unsatisfying because it just kicks the definition question down the road.

Saying that consciousness exists outside the realm of physics and science is a very strong statement. It claims that none of our normal analysis and measurement tools apply to it. That may be true, but if it is, how can anyone defend the claim that an AI does or does not have it?

Defining “consciousness” requires much more handwaving and many more assumptions than any of the other three. It requires so much that I claim it’s essentially an undefined term.

With such a vague definition of what “consciousness” is, there’s no logical way to argue that an AI does or does not have it.

I can define “LLM”, “a painting”, and “alive”. Those definitions don’t require assumptions or gut feelings. We could easily come up with a set of questions and an answer key that will tell you if a particular thing is an LLM or a painting and whether or not it’s alive.

I’m not aware of any such definition of conscious, nor am I aware of any universal tests of consciousness. Without that definition, it’s like Ebert claiming that, “Video games can never be art”.

Kurt Gödel wrote a whole paper on it.

He used math to show that all statements, in any language, can be expressed as math statements. He then proved that it’s impossible to create any consistent set of math statements that completely describes everything.

Do you have more details on that?

I can’t think of any outcomes from these attacks that are likely to improve the US position at a strategic or tactical level.

The only potential explanations are that Trump is doing it for personal reasons. Given the long history of embattled politicians getting a “pass” during war, this seems like a highly probably explanation.

Are there any lab scientists that don’t hate their pipettes? My wife used to complain constantly about getting cramps from those things, especially those multi-drop dispensers.

Her explanation was always that biotechs can afford robots to do the pipetting but academia is budget constrained and grad students are (were) cheaper than robots.

<puts on nerd hat>

Normal people rarely see the above image.
When you look at Jupiter with the naked eye, you see a slightly brighter dot. The only way to tell it’s not a star is that it changes position relative to them from day to day.
If you look at it with a good pair of binoculars, you can see that the dot seems to be slightly bigger than other dots. You still can’t see the red spot.
If you look at it through a telescope with a 10" objective and 100x magnification, you can definitely make out the red spot and you can make out that the rest of the planet has some texture.

An image that clear and crisp takes some very expensive equipment.

Thanks. That sounds more like a joke aimed at non-programmers about people who think they’re programmers. If I’m willing to ignore all the valid use cases of AI, I guess it might be funny to assume that none exist.

Can someone explain this joke in programmer terms?

I just wrote an AI that is trained to classify image patterns and automatically creates bitmasks based on the pattern distributions. We tried k-means clustering and got garbage. How would I have done that without AI?

There are a bunch of tools that are basically a text editor hooked up to an LLM. So you use natural language to prompt the software to write code for you.

It’s a better measure but not a perfect one. The big problem with the US-China GDP comparison is that the US has much more of a service economy while China has a much more manufacturing based economy.

Manufacturing pollutes much more than services do but services don’t exist without the manufacturing.

That’s why I was saying a better measure would be pollution per GNP. That would cut out services and basically just count manufacturing output. That would make sense because it’s the biggest source of pollution and it’s the source you can do the most about (ie there’s a lot of room to make many parts of the manufacturing chain cleaner).

Nobody is as green as their marketing suggests and China is no exception. China is making huge investments in green tech and there’s still a long way to go.

Because humans just existing produces far less pollution than humans producing a lot of stuff.

It’s trivial to say that a bunch of hunter-gatherers don’t pollute much but we’re not generally willing to relegate people to living in the stone age.

Our economic choices have a much larger impact on pollution than our personal choices do. Ideally we’d have a measure of pollution per consumption. Everyone would have a score that calculates the total pollution created by the entire supply chain that supports their choices. So if a mine in Africa is polluting so a Chinese guy can have a nice air condition, that should be counted for China; and if a factory in China pollutes so that a guy in the US can have a new Iphone, that should be counted for the US.

I’m not aware of any such data set. The closest proxy would be GDP or GNP. That essentially provides a measure of how much pollution the total lifestyle of that population produces.