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I mean is it? Quantitative Realism doesn't exactly seem self evident.
I've consistently pointed AI hype believers to their own metaphysical assumptions and this is the crux of it.
Are we just pattern matching engines or does agency have another source and is that in anyway connected to our experience of consciousness?
I think when people believed that larger gizmoes we don't fully understand would give us the answer to this question, they were deluding themselves, and I'm somewhat dissapointed that I was right since we are still without answers. But at least the possibility that we have a soul, ghost or another manner of special thing that automata don't is still secure.
Now the real test will be this: if Musk can convince enough people to use Neuralink and get their brain patterns recorded 24/7, and if someone trains transformers on that, what will be the outcome? Can we Chinese room our way to general intelligence?
I don't know, but it seems like the most logical way forward, since access to immense unpolluted datasets is no longer a possibility.
Isn't Computational Complexity Theory supposed to tackle questions of this kind?
Scott Aaronson offered the following highly evocative metaphor:
Although I doubt such general questions and theories are that helpful in guiding our research: they provide boundaries for what is possible, but what is practical typically lies far away from those boundaries.
Scott's metaphor is funny to think about but it has no philosophical rigor.
Complexity theory is not meaningfully different from other mathematics in its relationship to the metaphysical: it's a pure reason construct that attempts to map out necessary truths.
In many ways it it actually completely disconnected from the question at hand, because the machines it is concerned about are abstractions that are not and cannot possibly be real. They just happen to map onto real objects in a useful enough way. As you point out.
Scott isn't the first to connect this type of endeavor and the sacred. Pythagoras did it a long time ago. But the connection isn't relevant to the question of intelligence in my view.
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I think pure data is a directionally useful way of looking at the world, and useful for most problem-solving purposes. I am a theist so I think there’s more beyond just physical reality, but whether or not it’s true, I think that for most projects, reducing the universe to data is going to work just fine. Consciousness is produced in the brain, and definitely experienced there, so I think you can get something like a conscious AI simply by recreating a brain. Might be easier to start with a dog or something like that, but I think even though there’s a metaphysical aspect to consciousness, that doesn’t mean that there’s no point to studying it in brains.
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