Some thoughts on overconfidence in the Singularity, from Jaron Lanier.
84 thoughts on “The First Church Of Robotics”
One of the best articles I’ve ever read. In summary, we are more than just machines.
“we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.”
Given that a lot of people probably have more sex with the aid of their computer than with a human partner, is this necessarily a bad thing?
[I’m probably really going to regret this post…]
[I’m probably really going to regret this post…]
Only if we can get the right people to look at it.
Summary of the piece: “I work for a large company that, thank God, doesn’t produce a lot of life-critical software. I have built some *nationally* critical systems, but let’s face it–we use that mostly for tweeting, piracy and porn. And while I might–and might, because now all I do is tinker and, increasingly, evangelize about tinkering–build a system that takes weeks to turn around bug fixes, I’d never build one that structurally could have a an appreciable (read, fraction out of 100,000) risk of could killing you. Therefore, don’t worry about artificial intelligence.”
No disrespect to Lanier intended, but for the most part we work in a field that doesn’t have to worry much about the precautionary principle. We don’t field a lot of P.E.s for a reason, there’s just not enough median risk in our business to justify holding someone legally responsible for designs and executions. We don’t even have to contemplate strong AI to to worry about, say, some distributed system that by virtue of the areas of control its invaded has the capability to kill thousands.
Jason Lanier is a hipster doofus, and his arguments boil down to “I never came to grips with materialistic reality”. His arguments are 17th century nonsense and the only reason why he gets away with them is that no-one wants to argue with a smelly hippie.
…no-one wants to argue with a smelly hippie.
Hey, Trent, we argue with you don’t we? Ok, sorry, but you’ve got to lay off the straight lines.
This is a key statement of his…
Some would say these too are examples of A.I., but I would say it is research on a specific software problem that shouldn’t be confused with the deeper issues of intelligence or the nature of personhood.
A.I. folks just assume that intelligence is an ’emergent’ quality with no actual evidence to support the claim. They can’t even define what intelligence is other than I know it when I see it. That’s the Turing test.
It’s pure arrogance and cargo cult science. Once day we may create an ‘electronic brain’ but it’s telling that they are embarrassed to use that expression today.
A.I. folks just assume that intelligence is an ‘emergent’ quality with no actual evidence to support the claim. They can’t even define what intelligence is other than I know it when I see it.
That’s not an assumption, it’s an observed fact. Humans emerged. I would further qualify the observation is made under the default naturalist assumption, but I don’t think we care much about the foundation of science itself outside of a debate with creationists.
ken, if you go read what Lanier has written over the years you’ll discover that his argument is essentially: people have souls and machines don’t so you’ll never achieve AI. If you think that’s a legitimate argument then you’re welcome to the guy.
If he really wants to make an argument about the non-inevitability of AI there’s a heck of a lot more sensible ways to make it. I personally make it by pointing at how terrible AI researchers are at actually coding anything.
That’s not an assumption, it’s an observed fact.
In that case, you should have no trouble providing the specification for ‘intelligence’ so the rest of us can reproduce it in our labs. Otherwise, it’s hand waving.
I personally make it by pointing at how terrible most any programmers are at actually coding anything.
FIFY. I’ve been arguing the topic of A.I. with adults since I was ten, so now for over forty years. Since we’re [presumed] intelligent and [presumed] mechanist A.I. naturally follows. But I think this is just another case of minimizing the difficulty of something we really do not understand. It’s tantalizing because we can mimic so many features of what we understand intelligence to be comprised of. It’s not too hard to imagine a program capable of passing the Turing test that is no smarter than a rock.
I find spiritualistic discussions uncomfortable because they are nonsense mostly, but there is no way in this Quantum world to claim we’re all just machines. Penrose tries to make that point in his A.I. book.
In that case, you should have no trouble providing the specification for ‘intelligence’ so the rest of us can reproduce it in our labs. Otherwise, it’s hand waving.
“The” specification? I can provide “a” specification. And reproducing it in a lab is as easy as IVF, gestation, and childbirth. Attach whatever measure of intelligence you deem valid, or simply declare the resulting agent intelligent by inspection.
“Traits” amounted to an indefinite but completely acceptable observables in biology before expressed phenotypes were even tied to genomes. They still are, as the mapping of genome to phenotype across the whole extent of biodiversity is still incomplete. This is a matter of precision and multiplicity in definition, not terribly dissimilar from say the evolution of entropy into to a consistent, useful concept with a universal, formal expression.
ken, and fails. We *are* just machines, even if we *are* “quantum machines”. Throwing the word “quantum” around doesn’t change anything. Lanier’s point is that we’re not machines because God made us more. Get a grip.
Lanier’s point is that we’re not machines because God made us more. Get a grip.
If this is Creation, why assume that Man isn’t an emergent component of said design and purpose? Neither atheism nor the debasement of mankind is a necessary prerequisite to do away with such an assumption.
Ah, I see the Church of Materialism is holding a camp meeting. Say it with me, brothers: “The map is the territory! If I cain’t poke it with a stick, it ain’t real!”
With respect: you guys are fooling yourselves. There is something intrinsic to the human person that transcends time, space, matter, and energy; what’s worse, you all know this deep inside, but pride (you know, what got Adam and Eve booted from the Garden) won’t let you admit it. “We shall become gods!”, you cry, shaking your tiny fists at the Almighty in Whom you so desperately disbelieve. “We shall define Reality for ourselves, and to Hell with Aristotle, Aquinas, Gödel—and You!” And so you place your faith in fundamentalist Materialism, and in the words of Imam Kurzweil, hoping for the day of the Digital Rapture when we finally cobble together an ersatz human soul out of rocks and sparks. That’ll show the Old Man Upstairs who’s boss!
And that’s fine. Don’t stop believing. Hold on to that fee-ay-lee-ang, Streetlight People. It’s cute, in a sad kind of way. As a patient Father understands the rantings of a three-year-old, God understands your tantrums of logic. When you close your eyes for the last time — or when your nanomachine savior emulates your last brain cell in your pathetic attempt to achieve digital Heaven — you will see Reality with a capital R, and know you were wrong.
BLewis, at least you can say it outright.. Lanier has to dress up his faith in hipster terminology to try to sneak it into scientific discussion.
On the contrary, wouldn’t the lack of any such an innate quality (to transcend beyond natural law) immediately disqualify Man from the running for Godhood? That is, a God that is definitively supernatural?
I’m no transhumanist. Not by a long shot. I do believe in thermodynamics, and though men might live longer, think faster, reproduce in more varied ways than carrying around a child for 9 months, I see no reason to believe we will ever achieve some power beyond that found in nature, certainty in all things, or create an eternal paradise for ourselves out of a changing and increasingly entropic universe.
And reproducing it in a lab is as easy as IVF, gestation, and childbirth.
Nope. Presley is not just hand waving, he’s frantically hand waving while running in circular logic. The topic is A.I. So transfer that childs intelligence into a box plugged into the wall and you’ve got something. Now you’re just pointing at the clouds and saying, “see? see?”
We *are* just machines
That, in a nutshell, is the assumption of the singularity crowd. To say we are just machines is to say we live a deterministic life and there is no free will (adding a random number generator doesn’t change that.) This is unacceptable to me and most people. We are more than just machines. This is why creating an electronic brain has turned out to be so much more difficult than first imagined. It will continue to be.
I see no reason to believe we will ever achieve some power beyond that found in nature
Supernatural is a misnomer. Some say we live in a ten dimensional universe. Hawking says everything, not just anything, happens eventually near a naked singularity. That includes the supernatural which is just natural but beyond our normal experience. Our perception of reality is distorted by the fact that we experience so little of it. The universe is bigger than the hundreds of billions of galaxies that we know about. If we are just machines… there is no point.
This is unacceptable to me and most people.
And? So is reality.. get used to it.
In any case, I’m willing to concede to you that human intelligence is special and magical and can never be replicated, if you are willing to concede that sophisticated AI which can do productive work that can only be done by human thinking at present is possible someday and is worth the significant investment required to achieve it.
If that’s the case then I think we’re arguing at cross purposes, I’m quite happy to get behind your spiritual obligations because it keeps at bay the “robot rights” advocates.
sophisticated AI which can do productive work that can only be done by human thinking at present is possible someday
Already here. I can only beat this chess game on my computer 5% of the time. Nobody believes this chess program is intelligent. That’s part of the problem. When we achieve something we thought was intelligence, we find it isn’t.
Eliza isn’t intelligent. You and I, not counting this current discussion, are intelligent. We recognize it, but it is not defined. I don’t know if it is definable. We can mimic parts that are defined. Actually, we easily surpass ourselves in some areas that machines are just better at. But nothing a machine does turns out to be thought.
Software can already write software. Neither has thought.
Animals think. That may be your strongest argument.
ken, surely that’s just a semantics game, which is why there’s people throwing around “AGI” now to distinguish exactly what it is they want.
Software can already write software.
Horribly. When I can make a serious decision about whether to hire a programmer or rent time on a server farm to run a programmer program then we’ll have something to talk about.
But frankly, I’m perfectly happy for people to claim forever that “robots are not really intelligent” as they do in all the SF books because without that it’ll eventually devolve into a discussion of slavery and other unnecessary concepts for constructed “intelligence”.
Nope. Presley is not just hand waving, he’s frantically hand waving while running in circular logic. The topic is A.I. So transfer that childs intelligence into a box plugged into the wall and you’ve got something. Now you’re just pointing at the clouds and saying, “see? see?”
I don’t think “hand-waving” and “circular logic” mean what you think they mean. If I were hand-waving, I’d be talking about something other than an intelligent agent in the first place. If my reasoning were circular, then the word “intelligence” means nothing in the first place and this whole discussion is inane. On the other hand, you are shifting the goalposts somewhat. First you argue we have no precise definition of intelligence. I say fine, here’s an imprecise but concrete one we probably have no problem stipulating to in our real experience. Then you add a demand that the agent exhibit some (unstated) degree of manufacture to qualify, offering the example of a box plugged into a wall. Well fine. My answer is to carefully place the child in one of those vibrating, night-lighted cribs. That’s technically a box plugged into a wall, and you can say the child’s intelligence resides within it.
Supernatural is a misnomer. Some say we live in a ten dimensional universe.
Eleven dimensions, now, and so what? What’s so uniquely natural about the four in our macroscopic experience?
Hawking says everything, not just anything, happens eventually near a naked singularity.
That’s not quite true. You have a principle that states you can completely describe a configuration of matter an energy within a given region through interactions at its boundary; this is Hawking’s contribution specifically as it pertains to Black holes and their string theoretic treatment. There are some who’ve speculated that a similar treatment particle horizon of the universe suggests that we might be within a black hole’s interior. This is conjecture based on informal analogy, and not universally accepted.
That said, this whole business simply sounds exotic. But then again, I imagine thermodynamics sounded exotic as well when first formulated.
That includes the supernatural which is just natural but beyond our normal experience. Our perception of reality is distorted by the fact that we experience so little of it.
Indeed. And our normal experience has expanded considerably in the millenia since tribes congregated in the Levant. How much of our everyday experience would qualify as sorcery in the eyes of our uneducated ancestors?
The universe is bigger than the hundreds of billions of galaxies that we know about. If we are just machines… there is no point.
On the contrary, even if we were “just machines” (insofar as that phrase means anything), who’s to say their is no point? If the universe itself is teleological, of which the faithful should certainly find reassurance in its elegant and orderly arrangement, why would an intelligence that emerges naturally from it be uniquely devoid of such purpose? Put as a two part question, if God created Man and endowed him with purpose, couldn’t he do the same for the universe in which he resides? And if that’s the case, couldn’t he fashion a purposeful universe in which Man is purposeful emergent feature?
There is something intrinsic to the human person that transcends time, space, matter, and energy
That would be nice. And it certainly sounds like a corollary of “I think, therefore I am”. But what I’d like to know is: why doesn’t it transcend things like intoxication, oxygen/sleep/food deprivation, neurotransmitter imbalances, or brain damage? Aren’t those all purely functions of where energetic matter is located in space/time?
It’s hard to feel transcendent when you know that your whole personality can be changed (right down to the predisposition to “sin” or not, for people who see that as the most fundamental part of the soul) by the removal or the addition of a few chemicals.
I just read the other day that suicide rates correlate negatively (while varying by a factor of 2!) with natural lithium concentration in the public water supply. So you kill yourself, perhaps committing a final and thus unforgiveable sin depending on which Book you read… and there’s at least a 50/50 chance it wouldn’t have happened if only you had had enough of a “nutrient” with no RDA, in concentrations thousands of times lower than are used for psychiatric medicine. Ouch.
I’d be talking about something other than an intelligent agent in the first place.
Right. You’re talking about, er… what’s the technical term?… a baby. That’s not an A.I. If I were hand-waving… So I do know the definition, don’t I?
here’s an imprecise but concrete one
Pointing to a baby and saying it has intelligence in no way defines intelligence… it does however, open up a whole new can of worms regarding intelligence that I will not follow (perhaps on my own blog at some later date.)
Why Hawking relates to intelligence (and your link about the universe being a white hole is irrelevant)…
Trent is claiming that the universe is a deterministic machine and so A.I. is a foregone conclusion (which I agree with if the universe were indeed a deterministic machine, but it ain’t regardless of local appearance.) Hawking says, “…the universe isn’t lawful, never will be lawful, never can be lawful … at best we study local phenomena that may be predictable for an unspecifiable time.” I know that Trent is a smart guy, but this Hawking fellow is not a dolt either. In some circles his intelligence is quite highly regarded. Having read this statement in my youth it may be that it irrepairably damaged my own intelligence, but I believe it has widened my consideration of what realitiy is. This is why a quantum universe is significant and not just a tossed off phrase.
The key element of intelligence IMHO is free will. You don’t have that in a deterministic machine (although you can mimic it.) This is why when you look under the covers of any A.I. you find no intelligence… just a deterministic machine.
“just machines” (insofar as that phrase means anything)
I hope I’ve just given you some reason why ‘just machine’ is extremely significant and not something to just cast aside.
why would an intelligence that emerges naturally from it be uniquely devoid of such purpose?
Because it is fundamentally not possible for free will to emerge from a deterministic machine. If you can’t understand that, we are at an impass.
That, in a nutshell, is the assumption of the singularity crowd. To say we are just machines is to say we live a deterministic life and there is no free will (adding a random number generator doesn’t change that.)
Ken, I think you’re mischaracterizing functionalism. No one says that human brains are deterministic. In fact, the inherent unpredictability of neural networks is exactly a feature of your free will.
Roystgnr: “But what I’d like to know is: why doesn’t it transcend things like intoxication, oxygen/sleep/food deprivation, neurotransmitter imbalances, or brain damage?”
If one takes a hammer to a radio, the sound of the music coming out will be affected. The broadcasting studio will not.
In other words: The brain isn’t a “consciousness generator”. It is a “consciousness interface”. You are not your brain; your brain is the interface between You and That Which Can be Poked With a Stick. Damage or modify the interface and the output changes, but the signal — the ontological nature of What you are — remains unaffected.
In other words: The brain isn’t a “consciousness generator”. It is a “consciousness interface”. You are not your brain; your brain is the interface between You and That Which Can be Poked With a Stick. Damage or modify the interface and the output changes, but the signal — the ontological nature of What you are — remains unaffected.
Interesting hypothesis. Where’s your evidence?
Cogito, ergo Sum. — Descartes
So you have no evidence. Got it.
In fact, the inherent unpredictability of neural networks is exactly a feature of your free will.
First, free will is much more than just unpredictability. Second, the unpredictability of a neural net is not fundamental. It’s output can be reproduced exactly, meaning it is a deterministic machine. You can mimic free will with a random number generator, but that’s not actually free will. Free will is guided, not random (it wouldn’t be will otherwise.)
We will be able to mimic it closer and closer but never achieve it because it has a quality beyond what any machine can produce due to the inherent nature of machines.
I also don’t agree with the ‘conscious interface’ analogy. To a large extent we are just machines. Biblically, we don’t have souls, we are souls. Our consciousness, whatever it is, is within us… not some energy being using our body as a puppet. That’s not to say we don’t have some connection that goes beyond the physical, but mostly we are what you can kick, bite and slice. The dead are dead, not transformed into angels which are a separate creation from humans. Slice me in half and when dead my thoughts do perish.
So you have no evidence. Got it.
You crack me up. I’m so glad you post here.
I think you’re mischaracterizing functionalism.
Could you expand on this Titus? I would be very interested in your take.
“The brain isn’t a “consciousness generator”. It is a “consciousness interface”. You are not your brain; your brain is the interface between You and That Which Can be Poked With a Stick. Damage or modify the interface and the output changes, but the signal — the ontological nature of What you are — remains unaffected.”
I had an aunt who suffered a stroke while vacationing with some family (including me) in Las Vegas. She survived, and even recovered in every sense except one: she had absolutely no capacity for emotion. None whatsoever.
This was a woman who had been vivacious, fun-loving, and above average in emotional expressiveness. Post-stroke, she was just an intellect — and she was even aware of the difference between herself and everyone else.
She was what Spock was supposed to have been in “Star Trek,” but without any trace of hidden or repressed emotion in her. She was the same under all circumstances, including her own mother’s funeral. Just an intellect.
The part of her brain that died in the stroke took a major part of her with it. I think the “hardware” defines the person to a greater extent than we know, and we are a long way away from grasping it.
Could you expand on this Titus? I would be very interested in your take.
Nuclear half life: is its decay “determined” or “random” or both?
We live in a probablistic universe which already contains all the randomness necessary to generate something as complex and unpredictable as free willed humans. I mean, really, look no further.
If you’re the religious type, you can marvel at God’s creation before your very eyes OR you can, like some pre-20th century philosopher, curse the presumed (but now debunked) Determinism and assert, like the troll above, that our free will must, MUST reside “elsewhere” in a parallel dimension that is somehow “freer” than ours and then transmits its freedom like a mystical radio.
Titus: I need no evidence to prove my own existence. I do not sense my existence; I simply am. And so are you. Thus we see that “evidence” is not and cannot be the _sine qua non_ of reality. This is Philosophy 101.
“Evidence” of the type you suggest is a fantasy. All “evidence” of any phenomenon comes to us by way of the senses _ those naughty, subjective, easily-fooled senses. We take it on faith that what we perceive _via_ our senses corresponds in some meaningful way to a reality external to ourselves, but we have no way of _knowing_ this — it is an act of belief. It’s therefore obvious that we cannot speak meaningfully about “evidence” of anything, since we have no “evidence” that “evidence” is truly evident. All worldviews, even the Baconian scientific materialism, are therefore systems of _belief_, not knowledge.
And then there is the question of perception. You speak of “having evidence”> What does it mean to “have” evidence? Who “has” it? I look through a microscope; light bounces from the atmos of the cell I am examining; this light causes chemical changes in the rods and cones of my eye; a signal is generated, transmitted; certain chemicals in the brain change as a result. But the chemicals thus changed don’t “see” the cell. They don’t “see” anything. they are only chemicals. I see the cell — but the “I” that sees it is not part of nor product of the electromechanical process just described. What “I” am is Something Else. “Welche denkbare Verbindung besteht zwischen bestimmten Bewegungen bestimmter Atome in meinem Gehirn einerseits, andererseits den für mich ursprünglichen, nicht weiter definierbaren, nicht wegzuleugnenden Tatsachen ‘Ich fühle Schmerz, fühle Lust; ich schmecke Süßes, rieche Rosenduft, höre Orgelton, sehe Roth…” (du Bois-Reymond, 1872).
The only things can be known certainly are those which we know _without_ recourse to the subjective senses; that is, our own existence (Cogito, ergo Sum) and the existence of a divine Mind (the _nous_ of Aristotle) that gives order and meaning to reality. Everything else is up for grabs. We may doubt the existence of anything except mind and Mind.
But I’ll assume you’ve read Kant and skip the sermon on metaphysics here. If you’re still interested in testing the the idea that the map is the territory, you may be interested to learn that there is evidence (LOL) that the brain may not be strictly necessary for consciousness and intelligence to exist. [ http://bit.ly/blR4U4 ]
Whatever the “I” is that defines the physical world, it cannot be explained solely from the physical world. (Here is where Gödel comes in.) The existence of the mind is the one true but unprovable fact; we must accept this, and realize that there are some things that are and will forever be outside the realm of Things That can be Poked With Sticks. _Ignoramus et ignorabimus_.
Right. You’re talking about, er… what’s the technical term?… a baby. That’s not an A.I.
Why not?
Pointing to a baby…
A baby in a vibrating crib. Let’s not forget the crib.
..and saying it has intelligence in no way defines intelligence… it does however, open up a whole new can of worms regarding intelligence that I will not follow (perhaps on my own blog at some later date.)
How is it not a definition? It may not be acceptable to you, but I assure you it’s sufficiently acceptable, though hardly final, to AI researchers.
Why Hawking relates to intelligence (and your link about the universe being a white hole is irrelevant)…
I’m addressing your tangent and clearing up some misunderstandings. And Sean Carroll doesn’t argue that the universe is a white hole.
Trent is claiming that the universe is a deterministic machine and so A.I. is a foregone conclusion (which I agree with if the universe were indeed a deterministic machine, but it ain’t regardless of local appearance.)
I don’t see how determinism is relevant to the question of whether intelligence is emergent. It’s emergent whether as causal certainty or stochastic happenstance. We exist, and we deem ourselves to be intelligent. And we already have the ability to make other intelligent agents of generally equal ability at will. The question is to extent can we vary the form factor embodying the quality we call intelligence.
Hawking says, “…the universe isn’t lawful, never will be lawful, never can be lawful … at best we study local phenomena that may be predictable for an unspecifiable time.”
I know that Trent is a smart guy, but this Hawking fellow is not a dolt either. In some circles his intelligence is quite highly regarded. Having read this statement in my youth it may be that it irrepairably damaged my own intelligence, but I believe it has widened my consideration of what realitiy is. This is why a quantum universe is significant and not just a tossed off phrase.
I hope you don’t expect me to argue against the scientific merit of an extemporaneous pronunciation directed at a popular audience. That said, I can say with all confidence that Hawking certainly believes that the universe to the particle horizon obeys natural laws within the classical limit–the macroscopic world addressed through classical mechanics. I also know that he believes that this universe embeds in a higher-dimensional manifold that is experimentally and observationally testable. He’s entitled to his belief, but we should be careful where any scientist’s empirical knowledge ends and his religion begins.
None of this, and certainly not quantum mechanics, has any bearing on the question of whether intelligence is emergent. That is a phenomenon that manifests itself macroscopically (from a particle physicist’s point of view).
The key element of intelligence IMHO is free will. You don’t have that in a deterministic machine (although you can mimic it.) This is why when you look under the covers of any A.I. you find no intelligence… just a deterministic machine.
Setting aside the question of whether anything in nature, machined or otherwise, is subscribes to anything more than bounded indeterminism, why is a machine necessarily deterministic?
I hope I’ve just given you some reason why ‘just machine’ is extremely significant and not something to just cast aside.
Unfortunately, no. But I think I understand why now. You believe machines are necessarily deterministic. This is odd to me, since I design and build systems that are fundamentally, within bounds, statistical. As a matter of fact, it’s hard for me to conceive of any system–natural or (if we choose to make the distinction) artificual–that isn’t indeterminate within some chosen limit.
Because it is fundamentally not possible for free will to emerge from a deterministic machine. If you can’t understand that, we are at an impass.
See above.
tl dr; mystical garbage of the worst kind. This is a science blog, kthxbye.
I think the “hardware” defines the person to a greater extent than we know
Exactly. Most religions teach the lie that we have souls rather than what the bible teaches, that we are souls. Animals are souls as well. Souls can be cut with the sword. They die.
We live in a probablistic universe which already contains all the randomness necessary to generate something as complex and unpredictable as free willed humans.
I understand and would like to say I agree completely. The problem is I believe free will means I get to choose. If I’m just a complex random number generator then choosing is an illusion. Perhaps it is. I choose not to believe that. I could be wrong. If I am wrong, then life is just one big pachinko machine and has no point. We don’t really choose anything after all. There is no good or evil… just the bouncing ball.
I assure you it’s sufficiently acceptable, though hardly final, to AI researchers.
I think you may have just put the finger on the problem.
Why not?
A.I. The A stands for artificial.
Titus: Your entire worldview is based upon the unproved and unprovable notion that only That Which Can Be Poked With a Stick is real. That’s not science; that’s “mystical garbage” of the purest kind.
You can squeeze your eyes shut, stop your ears and go LALALALALAIDONTBELIEVEINYOU when confronted with the Truth, but the Truth doesn’t care. It remains Truth.
In closing: no man who is ignorant of the fundamentals of reason itself ( = philosophy) has any right to claim to be a student of science. Most of the great philosophical texts are available for free online; I urge you to acquaint yourself with them. Ἓν οἶδα ὅτι ουδὲν οἶδα — Socrates, in Plato’s _Republic_, I.
In closing:
You’re leaving? Awesome.
The question is to extent can we vary the form factor embodying the quality we call intelligence.
No. The question is multipart. Can we define intelligence (write it down, not point to it.) Can we produce it in a machine (software and hardware, not biological which already has intelligence… you pointed at it, remember?)
Artificial means something but is perhaps not in vogue anymore. Saying a baby is A.I. has got to be the ultimate example of moving the goal posts.
Titus: _Ad hominem_. Weak.
You’re leaving? Awesome.
ROFLMAO. Titus, that’s not nice. Hilarious, but definitely not nice.
The problem is I believe free will means I get to choose. If I’m just a complex random number generator then choosing is an illusion. Perhaps it is. I choose not to believe that. I could be wrong. If I am wrong, then life is just one big pachinko machine and has no point. We don’t really choose anything after all. There is no good or evil… just the bouncing ball.
Ken, your analogies are getting in the way.
ROFLMAO. Titus, that’s not nice. Hilarious, but definitely not nice.
The supercilious troll sweeps in here to lecture us benighted fools about the limits of science and demands that we move the discussion into the realm of epistemology or some other god-awful point – being nice just encourages more of that kind of reprehensible behavior.
Hawking certainly believes that the universe to the particle horizon obeys natural laws within the classical limit
Then you don’t understand Hawking or Quantum physics. Reconsider, local phenomena that may be predictable for an unspecifiable time
Ken, your analogies are getting in the way.
A problem I’ve had all my life. My brain just doesn’t work the same way others do. Finding out I’m INTJ helped a little, but doesn’t explain everything. I’m going to do a Dangerfield and leave my brain to science… fiction.
As I said: Weak.
how determinism is relevant to the question of whether intelligence is emergent.
This is an interesting thought that I’m not prepared to respond to as yet. Give me time and I will perhaps blog about it.
Jeez, he’s hanging-on like some jilted girlfriend…
One of the best articles I’ve ever read. In summary, we are more than just machines.
“we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.”
Given that a lot of people probably have more sex with the aid of their computer than with a human partner, is this necessarily a bad thing?
[I’m probably really going to regret this post…]
Only if we can get the right people to look at it.
Summary of the piece: “I work for a large company that, thank God, doesn’t produce a lot of life-critical software. I have built some *nationally* critical systems, but let’s face it–we use that mostly for tweeting, piracy and porn. And while I might–and might, because now all I do is tinker and, increasingly, evangelize about tinkering–build a system that takes weeks to turn around bug fixes, I’d never build one that structurally could have a an appreciable (read, fraction out of 100,000) risk of could killing you. Therefore, don’t worry about artificial intelligence.”
No disrespect to Lanier intended, but for the most part we work in a field that doesn’t have to worry much about the precautionary principle. We don’t field a lot of P.E.s for a reason, there’s just not enough median risk in our business to justify holding someone legally responsible for designs and executions. We don’t even have to contemplate strong AI to to worry about, say, some distributed system that by virtue of the areas of control its invaded has the capability to kill thousands.
Jason Lanier is a hipster doofus, and his arguments boil down to “I never came to grips with materialistic reality”. His arguments are 17th century nonsense and the only reason why he gets away with them is that no-one wants to argue with a smelly hippie.
…no-one wants to argue with a smelly hippie.
Hey, Trent, we argue with you don’t we? Ok, sorry, but you’ve got to lay off the straight lines.
This is a key statement of his…
Some would say these too are examples of A.I., but I would say it is research on a specific software problem that shouldn’t be confused with the deeper issues of intelligence or the nature of personhood.
A.I. folks just assume that intelligence is an ’emergent’ quality with no actual evidence to support the claim. They can’t even define what intelligence is other than I know it when I see it. That’s the Turing test.
It’s pure arrogance and cargo cult science. Once day we may create an ‘electronic brain’ but it’s telling that they are embarrassed to use that expression today.
That’s not an assumption, it’s an observed fact. Humans emerged. I would further qualify the observation is made under the default naturalist assumption, but I don’t think we care much about the foundation of science itself outside of a debate with creationists.
ken, if you go read what Lanier has written over the years you’ll discover that his argument is essentially: people have souls and machines don’t so you’ll never achieve AI. If you think that’s a legitimate argument then you’re welcome to the guy.
If he really wants to make an argument about the non-inevitability of AI there’s a heck of a lot more sensible ways to make it. I personally make it by pointing at how terrible AI researchers are at actually coding anything.
That’s not an assumption, it’s an observed fact.
In that case, you should have no trouble providing the specification for ‘intelligence’ so the rest of us can reproduce it in our labs. Otherwise, it’s hand waving.
I personally make it by pointing at how terrible most any programmers are at actually coding anything.
FIFY. I’ve been arguing the topic of A.I. with adults since I was ten, so now for over forty years. Since we’re [presumed] intelligent and [presumed] mechanist A.I. naturally follows. But I think this is just another case of minimizing the difficulty of something we really do not understand. It’s tantalizing because we can mimic so many features of what we understand intelligence to be comprised of. It’s not too hard to imagine a program capable of passing the Turing test that is no smarter than a rock.
I find spiritualistic discussions uncomfortable because they are nonsense mostly, but there is no way in this Quantum world to claim we’re all just machines. Penrose tries to make that point in his A.I. book.
“The” specification? I can provide “a” specification. And reproducing it in a lab is as easy as IVF, gestation, and childbirth. Attach whatever measure of intelligence you deem valid, or simply declare the resulting agent intelligent by inspection.
“Traits” amounted to an indefinite but completely acceptable observables in biology before expressed phenotypes were even tied to genomes. They still are, as the mapping of genome to phenotype across the whole extent of biodiversity is still incomplete. This is a matter of precision and multiplicity in definition, not terribly dissimilar from say the evolution of entropy into to a consistent, useful concept with a universal, formal expression.
ken, and fails. We *are* just machines, even if we *are* “quantum machines”. Throwing the word “quantum” around doesn’t change anything. Lanier’s point is that we’re not machines because God made us more. Get a grip.
If this is Creation, why assume that Man isn’t an emergent component of said design and purpose? Neither atheism nor the debasement of mankind is a necessary prerequisite to do away with such an assumption.
Ah, I see the Church of Materialism is holding a camp meeting. Say it with me, brothers: “The map is the territory! If I cain’t poke it with a stick, it ain’t real!”
With respect: you guys are fooling yourselves. There is something intrinsic to the human person that transcends time, space, matter, and energy; what’s worse, you all know this deep inside, but pride (you know, what got Adam and Eve booted from the Garden) won’t let you admit it. “We shall become gods!”, you cry, shaking your tiny fists at the Almighty in Whom you so desperately disbelieve. “We shall define Reality for ourselves, and to Hell with Aristotle, Aquinas, Gödel—and You!” And so you place your faith in fundamentalist Materialism, and in the words of Imam Kurzweil, hoping for the day of the Digital Rapture when we finally cobble together an ersatz human soul out of rocks and sparks. That’ll show the Old Man Upstairs who’s boss!
And that’s fine. Don’t stop believing. Hold on to that fee-ay-lee-ang, Streetlight People. It’s cute, in a sad kind of way. As a patient Father understands the rantings of a three-year-old, God understands your tantrums of logic. When you close your eyes for the last time — or when your nanomachine savior emulates your last brain cell in your pathetic attempt to achieve digital Heaven — you will see Reality with a capital R, and know you were wrong.
BLewis, at least you can say it outright.. Lanier has to dress up his faith in hipster terminology to try to sneak it into scientific discussion.
On the contrary, wouldn’t the lack of any such an innate quality (to transcend beyond natural law) immediately disqualify Man from the running for Godhood? That is, a God that is definitively supernatural?
I’m no transhumanist. Not by a long shot. I do believe in thermodynamics, and though men might live longer, think faster, reproduce in more varied ways than carrying around a child for 9 months, I see no reason to believe we will ever achieve some power beyond that found in nature, certainty in all things, or create an eternal paradise for ourselves out of a changing and increasingly entropic universe.
And reproducing it in a lab is as easy as IVF, gestation, and childbirth.
Nope. Presley is not just hand waving, he’s frantically hand waving while running in circular logic. The topic is A.I. So transfer that childs intelligence into a box plugged into the wall and you’ve got something. Now you’re just pointing at the clouds and saying, “see? see?”
We *are* just machines
That, in a nutshell, is the assumption of the singularity crowd. To say we are just machines is to say we live a deterministic life and there is no free will (adding a random number generator doesn’t change that.) This is unacceptable to me and most people. We are more than just machines. This is why creating an electronic brain has turned out to be so much more difficult than first imagined. It will continue to be.
I see no reason to believe we will ever achieve some power beyond that found in nature
Supernatural is a misnomer. Some say we live in a ten dimensional universe. Hawking says everything, not just anything, happens eventually near a naked singularity. That includes the supernatural which is just natural but beyond our normal experience. Our perception of reality is distorted by the fact that we experience so little of it. The universe is bigger than the hundreds of billions of galaxies that we know about. If we are just machines… there is no point.
This is unacceptable to me and most people.
And? So is reality.. get used to it.
In any case, I’m willing to concede to you that human intelligence is special and magical and can never be replicated, if you are willing to concede that sophisticated AI which can do productive work that can only be done by human thinking at present is possible someday and is worth the significant investment required to achieve it.
If that’s the case then I think we’re arguing at cross purposes, I’m quite happy to get behind your spiritual obligations because it keeps at bay the “robot rights” advocates.
sophisticated AI which can do productive work that can only be done by human thinking at present is possible someday
Already here. I can only beat this chess game on my computer 5% of the time. Nobody believes this chess program is intelligent. That’s part of the problem. When we achieve something we thought was intelligence, we find it isn’t.
Eliza isn’t intelligent. You and I, not counting this current discussion, are intelligent. We recognize it, but it is not defined. I don’t know if it is definable. We can mimic parts that are defined. Actually, we easily surpass ourselves in some areas that machines are just better at. But nothing a machine does turns out to be thought.
Software can already write software. Neither has thought.
Animals think. That may be your strongest argument.
ken, surely that’s just a semantics game, which is why there’s people throwing around “AGI” now to distinguish exactly what it is they want.
Software can already write software.
Horribly. When I can make a serious decision about whether to hire a programmer or rent time on a server farm to run a programmer program then we’ll have something to talk about.
But frankly, I’m perfectly happy for people to claim forever that “robots are not really intelligent” as they do in all the SF books because without that it’ll eventually devolve into a discussion of slavery and other unnecessary concepts for constructed “intelligence”.
I don’t think “hand-waving” and “circular logic” mean what you think they mean. If I were hand-waving, I’d be talking about something other than an intelligent agent in the first place. If my reasoning were circular, then the word “intelligence” means nothing in the first place and this whole discussion is inane. On the other hand, you are shifting the goalposts somewhat. First you argue we have no precise definition of intelligence. I say fine, here’s an imprecise but concrete one we probably have no problem stipulating to in our real experience. Then you add a demand that the agent exhibit some (unstated) degree of manufacture to qualify, offering the example of a box plugged into a wall. Well fine. My answer is to carefully place the child in one of those vibrating, night-lighted cribs. That’s technically a box plugged into a wall, and you can say the child’s intelligence resides within it.
Eleven dimensions, now, and so what? What’s so uniquely natural about the four in our macroscopic experience?
That’s not quite true. You have a principle that states you can completely describe a configuration of matter an energy within a given region through interactions at its boundary; this is Hawking’s contribution specifically as it pertains to Black holes and their string theoretic treatment. There are some who’ve speculated that a similar treatment particle horizon of the universe suggests that we might be within a black hole’s interior. This is conjecture based on informal analogy, and not universally accepted.
That said, this whole business simply sounds exotic. But then again, I imagine thermodynamics sounded exotic as well when first formulated.
Indeed. And our normal experience has expanded considerably in the millenia since tribes congregated in the Levant. How much of our everyday experience would qualify as sorcery in the eyes of our uneducated ancestors?
On the contrary, even if we were “just machines” (insofar as that phrase means anything), who’s to say their is no point? If the universe itself is teleological, of which the faithful should certainly find reassurance in its elegant and orderly arrangement, why would an intelligence that emerges naturally from it be uniquely devoid of such purpose? Put as a two part question, if God created Man and endowed him with purpose, couldn’t he do the same for the universe in which he resides? And if that’s the case, couldn’t he fashion a purposeful universe in which Man is purposeful emergent feature?
There is something intrinsic to the human person that transcends time, space, matter, and energy
That would be nice. And it certainly sounds like a corollary of “I think, therefore I am”. But what I’d like to know is: why doesn’t it transcend things like intoxication, oxygen/sleep/food deprivation, neurotransmitter imbalances, or brain damage? Aren’t those all purely functions of where energetic matter is located in space/time?
It’s hard to feel transcendent when you know that your whole personality can be changed (right down to the predisposition to “sin” or not, for people who see that as the most fundamental part of the soul) by the removal or the addition of a few chemicals.
I just read the other day that suicide rates correlate negatively (while varying by a factor of 2!) with natural lithium concentration in the public water supply. So you kill yourself, perhaps committing a final and thus unforgiveable sin depending on which Book you read… and there’s at least a 50/50 chance it wouldn’t have happened if only you had had enough of a “nutrient” with no RDA, in concentrations thousands of times lower than are used for psychiatric medicine. Ouch.
I’d be talking about something other than an intelligent agent in the first place.
Right. You’re talking about, er… what’s the technical term?… a baby. That’s not an A.I. If I were hand-waving… So I do know the definition, don’t I?
here’s an imprecise but concrete one
Pointing to a baby and saying it has intelligence in no way defines intelligence… it does however, open up a whole new can of worms regarding intelligence that I will not follow (perhaps on my own blog at some later date.)
Why Hawking relates to intelligence (and your link about the universe being a white hole is irrelevant)…
Trent is claiming that the universe is a deterministic machine and so A.I. is a foregone conclusion (which I agree with if the universe were indeed a deterministic machine, but it ain’t regardless of local appearance.) Hawking says, “…the universe isn’t lawful, never will be lawful, never can be lawful … at best we study local phenomena that may be predictable for an unspecifiable time.” I know that Trent is a smart guy, but this Hawking fellow is not a dolt either. In some circles his intelligence is quite highly regarded. Having read this statement in my youth it may be that it irrepairably damaged my own intelligence, but I believe it has widened my consideration of what realitiy is. This is why a quantum universe is significant and not just a tossed off phrase.
The key element of intelligence IMHO is free will. You don’t have that in a deterministic machine (although you can mimic it.) This is why when you look under the covers of any A.I. you find no intelligence… just a deterministic machine.
“just machines” (insofar as that phrase means anything)
I hope I’ve just given you some reason why ‘just machine’ is extremely significant and not something to just cast aside.
why would an intelligence that emerges naturally from it be uniquely devoid of such purpose?
Because it is fundamentally not possible for free will to emerge from a deterministic machine. If you can’t understand that, we are at an impass.
Ken, I think you’re mischaracterizing functionalism. No one says that human brains are deterministic. In fact, the inherent unpredictability of neural networks is exactly a feature of your free will.
Roystgnr: “But what I’d like to know is: why doesn’t it transcend things like intoxication, oxygen/sleep/food deprivation, neurotransmitter imbalances, or brain damage?”
If one takes a hammer to a radio, the sound of the music coming out will be affected. The broadcasting studio will not.
In other words: The brain isn’t a “consciousness generator”. It is a “consciousness interface”. You are not your brain; your brain is the interface between You and That Which Can be Poked With a Stick. Damage or modify the interface and the output changes, but the signal — the ontological nature of What you are — remains unaffected.
Interesting hypothesis. Where’s your evidence?
Cogito, ergo Sum. — Descartes
So you have no evidence. Got it.
In fact, the inherent unpredictability of neural networks is exactly a feature of your free will.
First, free will is much more than just unpredictability. Second, the unpredictability of a neural net is not fundamental. It’s output can be reproduced exactly, meaning it is a deterministic machine. You can mimic free will with a random number generator, but that’s not actually free will. Free will is guided, not random (it wouldn’t be will otherwise.)
We will be able to mimic it closer and closer but never achieve it because it has a quality beyond what any machine can produce due to the inherent nature of machines.
I also don’t agree with the ‘conscious interface’ analogy. To a large extent we are just machines. Biblically, we don’t have souls, we are souls. Our consciousness, whatever it is, is within us… not some energy being using our body as a puppet. That’s not to say we don’t have some connection that goes beyond the physical, but mostly we are what you can kick, bite and slice. The dead are dead, not transformed into angels which are a separate creation from humans. Slice me in half and when dead my thoughts do perish.
So you have no evidence. Got it.
You crack me up. I’m so glad you post here.
I think you’re mischaracterizing functionalism.
Could you expand on this Titus? I would be very interested in your take.
“The brain isn’t a “consciousness generator”. It is a “consciousness interface”. You are not your brain; your brain is the interface between You and That Which Can be Poked With a Stick. Damage or modify the interface and the output changes, but the signal — the ontological nature of What you are — remains unaffected.”
I had an aunt who suffered a stroke while vacationing with some family (including me) in Las Vegas. She survived, and even recovered in every sense except one: she had absolutely no capacity for emotion. None whatsoever.
This was a woman who had been vivacious, fun-loving, and above average in emotional expressiveness. Post-stroke, she was just an intellect — and she was even aware of the difference between herself and everyone else.
She was what Spock was supposed to have been in “Star Trek,” but without any trace of hidden or repressed emotion in her. She was the same under all circumstances, including her own mother’s funeral. Just an intellect.
The part of her brain that died in the stroke took a major part of her with it. I think the “hardware” defines the person to a greater extent than we know, and we are a long way away from grasping it.
Nuclear half life: is its decay “determined” or “random” or both?
We live in a probablistic universe which already contains all the randomness necessary to generate something as complex and unpredictable as free willed humans. I mean, really, look no further.
If you’re the religious type, you can marvel at God’s creation before your very eyes OR you can, like some pre-20th century philosopher, curse the presumed (but now debunked) Determinism and assert, like the troll above, that our free will must, MUST reside “elsewhere” in a parallel dimension that is somehow “freer” than ours and then transmits its freedom like a mystical radio.
Titus: I need no evidence to prove my own existence. I do not sense my existence; I simply am. And so are you. Thus we see that “evidence” is not and cannot be the _sine qua non_ of reality. This is Philosophy 101.
“Evidence” of the type you suggest is a fantasy. All “evidence” of any phenomenon comes to us by way of the senses _ those naughty, subjective, easily-fooled senses. We take it on faith that what we perceive _via_ our senses corresponds in some meaningful way to a reality external to ourselves, but we have no way of _knowing_ this — it is an act of belief. It’s therefore obvious that we cannot speak meaningfully about “evidence” of anything, since we have no “evidence” that “evidence” is truly evident. All worldviews, even the Baconian scientific materialism, are therefore systems of _belief_, not knowledge.
And then there is the question of perception. You speak of “having evidence”> What does it mean to “have” evidence? Who “has” it? I look through a microscope; light bounces from the atmos of the cell I am examining; this light causes chemical changes in the rods and cones of my eye; a signal is generated, transmitted; certain chemicals in the brain change as a result. But the chemicals thus changed don’t “see” the cell. They don’t “see” anything. they are only chemicals. I see the cell — but the “I” that sees it is not part of nor product of the electromechanical process just described. What “I” am is Something Else. “Welche denkbare Verbindung besteht zwischen bestimmten Bewegungen bestimmter Atome in meinem Gehirn einerseits, andererseits den für mich ursprünglichen, nicht weiter definierbaren, nicht wegzuleugnenden Tatsachen ‘Ich fühle Schmerz, fühle Lust; ich schmecke Süßes, rieche Rosenduft, höre Orgelton, sehe Roth…” (du Bois-Reymond, 1872).
The only things can be known certainly are those which we know _without_ recourse to the subjective senses; that is, our own existence (Cogito, ergo Sum) and the existence of a divine Mind (the _nous_ of Aristotle) that gives order and meaning to reality. Everything else is up for grabs. We may doubt the existence of anything except mind and Mind.
But I’ll assume you’ve read Kant and skip the sermon on metaphysics here. If you’re still interested in testing the the idea that the map is the territory, you may be interested to learn that there is evidence (LOL) that the brain may not be strictly necessary for consciousness and intelligence to exist. [ http://bit.ly/blR4U4 ]
Whatever the “I” is that defines the physical world, it cannot be explained solely from the physical world. (Here is where Gödel comes in.) The existence of the mind is the one true but unprovable fact; we must accept this, and realize that there are some things that are and will forever be outside the realm of Things That can be Poked With Sticks. _Ignoramus et ignorabimus_.
Why not?
A baby in a vibrating crib. Let’s not forget the crib.
How is it not a definition? It may not be acceptable to you, but I assure you it’s sufficiently acceptable, though hardly final, to AI researchers.
I’m addressing your tangent and clearing up some misunderstandings. And Sean Carroll doesn’t argue that the universe is a white hole.
I don’t see how determinism is relevant to the question of whether intelligence is emergent. It’s emergent whether as causal certainty or stochastic happenstance. We exist, and we deem ourselves to be intelligent. And we already have the ability to make other intelligent agents of generally equal ability at will. The question is to extent can we vary the form factor embodying the quality we call intelligence.
I hope you don’t expect me to argue against the scientific merit of an extemporaneous pronunciation directed at a popular audience. That said, I can say with all confidence that Hawking certainly believes that the universe to the particle horizon obeys natural laws within the classical limit–the macroscopic world addressed through classical mechanics. I also know that he believes that this universe embeds in a higher-dimensional manifold that is experimentally and observationally testable. He’s entitled to his belief, but we should be careful where any scientist’s empirical knowledge ends and his religion begins.
None of this, and certainly not quantum mechanics, has any bearing on the question of whether intelligence is emergent. That is a phenomenon that manifests itself macroscopically (from a particle physicist’s point of view).
Setting aside the question of whether anything in nature, machined or otherwise, is subscribes to anything more than bounded indeterminism, why is a machine necessarily deterministic?
Unfortunately, no. But I think I understand why now. You believe machines are necessarily deterministic. This is odd to me, since I design and build systems that are fundamentally, within bounds, statistical. As a matter of fact, it’s hard for me to conceive of any system–natural or (if we choose to make the distinction) artificual–that isn’t indeterminate within some chosen limit.
See above.
tl dr; mystical garbage of the worst kind. This is a science blog, kthxbye.
I think the “hardware” defines the person to a greater extent than we know
Exactly. Most religions teach the lie that we have souls rather than what the bible teaches, that we are souls. Animals are souls as well. Souls can be cut with the sword. They die.
We live in a probablistic universe which already contains all the randomness necessary to generate something as complex and unpredictable as free willed humans.
I understand and would like to say I agree completely. The problem is I believe free will means I get to choose. If I’m just a complex random number generator then choosing is an illusion. Perhaps it is. I choose not to believe that. I could be wrong. If I am wrong, then life is just one big pachinko machine and has no point. We don’t really choose anything after all. There is no good or evil… just the bouncing ball.
I assure you it’s sufficiently acceptable, though hardly final, to AI researchers.
I think you may have just put the finger on the problem.
Why not?
A.I. The A stands for artificial.
Titus: Your entire worldview is based upon the unproved and unprovable notion that only That Which Can Be Poked With a Stick is real. That’s not science; that’s “mystical garbage” of the purest kind.
You can squeeze your eyes shut, stop your ears and go LALALALALAIDONTBELIEVEINYOU when confronted with the Truth, but the Truth doesn’t care. It remains Truth.
In closing: no man who is ignorant of the fundamentals of reason itself ( = philosophy) has any right to claim to be a student of science. Most of the great philosophical texts are available for free online; I urge you to acquaint yourself with them. Ἓν οἶδα ὅτι ουδὲν οἶδα — Socrates, in Plato’s _Republic_, I.
You’re leaving? Awesome.
The question is to extent can we vary the form factor embodying the quality we call intelligence.
No. The question is multipart. Can we define intelligence (write it down, not point to it.) Can we produce it in a machine (software and hardware, not biological which already has intelligence… you pointed at it, remember?)
Artificial means something but is perhaps not in vogue anymore. Saying a baby is A.I. has got to be the ultimate example of moving the goal posts.
Titus: _Ad hominem_. Weak.
You’re leaving? Awesome.
ROFLMAO. Titus, that’s not nice. Hilarious, but definitely not nice.
Ken, your analogies are getting in the way.
The supercilious troll sweeps in here to lecture us benighted fools about the limits of science and demands that we move the discussion into the realm of epistemology or some other god-awful point – being nice just encourages more of that kind of reprehensible behavior.
Hawking certainly believes that the universe to the particle horizon obeys natural laws within the classical limit
Then you don’t understand Hawking or Quantum physics. Reconsider, local phenomena that may be predictable for an unspecifiable time
Ken, your analogies are getting in the way.
A problem I’ve had all my life. My brain just doesn’t work the same way others do. Finding out I’m INTJ helped a little, but doesn’t explain everything. I’m going to do a Dangerfield and leave my brain to science… fiction.
As I said: Weak.
how determinism is relevant to the question of whether intelligence is emergent.
This is an interesting thought that I’m not prepared to respond to as yet. Give me time and I will perhaps blog about it.
Jeez, he’s hanging-on like some jilted girlfriend…