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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26519 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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It's a trillion monkeys typing at a trillion typewriters all at the same time, and then the machine reads all of their outputs (quickly) and finds one which looks like it matches your input

But anyways, enough about how human speech works.

More seriously: every time a computer does a seemingly intelligent task, that task is retroactively declared to entirely lack intelligence. Recently this has become increasingly comical as current LLMs sometimes produce insightful outputs """without any intelligence""".

But anyways, enough about how human speech works.

That is not how human speech works.

Intelligence is complicated

Indeed. “Is this thing intelligent” is probably the question, maybe a question that will never be answered. The Christians would say that this is because machines do not have souls and I agree with them.

Is your position that animals are also not intelligent? IIUC the Christian position is that animals do not have souls in the ordinary conception of the word.

My position is to not go on a podcast and make ridiculous proclamations about “intelligence”.

Intuitively it doesn’t seem like my dogs, for instance, have the same sort of reasoning or creative ability that my toddlers do.

And it definitely does not seem like a trillion monkeys do either.

Not monkeys exactly but 10s of billions of neurons. Each one very much not intelligent or full of qualia.

When you or I generate a verbal statement sodium and potassium flow through billions of neurons and the best generated statement gets passed to our conscious awareness to say. It's a little "monkeys on typewriters"-ish.

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