Philosophy, Movies and World Politics https://nitter.cf/t.co/WwI1dZZgHd
Tel Aviv
Joined March 2009
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The Standard Metre in Paris onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…
Doron Avital retweeted
Here is the crux of the confusion.
A replay of class encounter bet Wittgenstein and Turing.
Demis: "It is an Empirical question..״
Wittgenstein: "Wrong. It is a a Grammatical question."
Philosophical Investigations & 339. "Thinking is not an incorporeal process which lends life and sense to speaking, and which it would be possible to detach from speaking, rather as the Devil took the shadow of Schlemihl from the ground. —– But in what way “not an incorporeal process”? Am I acquainted with incorporeal processes, then, only thinking is not one of them? No; in my predicament, I helped myself to the expression “an incorporeal process” as I was trying to explain the meaning of the word “thinking” in a primitive way. One could, however, say “Thinking is an incorporeal process” if one were using this to distinguish the grammar of the word “think” from that of, say, the word “eat”. Only that makes the difference between the meanings look too slight. (It is like saying: numerals are actual, and numbers are non-actual objects.) An inappropriate expression is a sure means of remaining stuck in confusion. It, as it were, bars the way out."
#Wittgensten #Turing #Hassabis #AI #Singularity
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on the central question of his life: what can humans do that AI never will?
Asked about the limits of artificial intelligence, Hassabis doesn't hesitate to say this is the question that drives him: "Yes, it is."
His starting point is one of his heroes, Alan Turing.
He explains that Turing described theoretical constructs—Turing machines—that underpin all modern computers, machines "that are able to compute anything that's computable… anything that can be described as an algorithm."
The provocative leap comes when Hassabis turns that lens on biology. The AI systems his teams build are Turing machines, and he suspects the brain may be one too:
"A lot of neuroscientists including me think that maybe the brain… a good model for the brain is an approximate Turing machine."
He's careful to note this isn't settled. Some of his peers see it differently, including physicist Roger Penrose:
"Friends of mine like Roger Penrose… believe there might be some quantum effect in the brain."
But Hassabis points to where the evidence currently stands:
"So far neuroscience hasn't found any quantum effects in the brain… people have looked quite carefully and we haven't found any."
His conclusion from that absence is striking. If the brain runs on ordinary computation, then there may be no hard ceiling on what AI can eventually match:
"It looks like most of what's going on in the brain is kind of classical computation… so therefore it's not clear what the limit would be in terms of eventually what an AI system could do and could mimic."
For @demishassabis, building intelligence is a mirror held up to ourselves, not only a feat of engineering.
He describes the project as a kind of experiment that reveals what we are:
"I think we'll have almost like a control study comparison to the human mind. And then I think we'll see in this journey what are the differences and what's unique about the mind."
He stays genuinely open about what that comparison might expose. Some things, he suspects, may never transfer:
"There could be unique things and certainly unique connections between humans that will never be replicated by these AI systems."
But the capabilities we tend to treat as distinctly human, he believes, are within reach:
"A lot of things that we currently are not in reach, like long-term planning and reasoning and maybe some forms of creativity... I think eventually AI systems will be able to do."
No monopoly on beauty? I would side with the Pope, with best wishes for his quick recovery, and with John Keats:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Apropos Turing attending Wittgenstein's seminar. Not sure about exact (expected) cross-miscommunication between the older master by then and the young prodigy. But on behalf of the master here is his rebuke however in the words of an old tweet of mine:
"The panic about AI transcending human intelligence is obviously misplaced. I once commented, in a one-liner on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: all terms of language are indexical. Kant taught us that Beauty is indexical. Keats that Beauty and Truth are one. Intelligence too is indexical. The indexical intelligence taught in our schools and liberal academia has reached its limit—with a final push from AI. A new human intelligence is required, mandatory, and I believe it is emerging—yes, with the constructive help of AI."
The panic about AI transcending human intelligence is obviously misplaced. I once commented, in a one-liner on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: all terms of language are indexical. Kant taught us that Beauty is indexical. Keats that Beauty and Truth are one. Intelligence too is indexical. The indexical intelligence taught in our schools and liberal academia has reached its limit—with a final push from AI. A new human intelligence is required, mandatory, and I believe it is emerging—yes, with the constructive help of AI.
Doron Avital retweeted
A trivial reminder:
Machines can truly catch up with reality - only in retrospect..
Re my 2023 Twit –
I would now add, 4. Pinocchio is alive..and he speaks the truth now..
The phantom trinity of ideas that occupy minds of tech-utopians and cynical politicians - are not merely false and in fact self-contradictory - but can be shown also to be logically equivalent:
1. "End of Scarcity"
2. Singularity: machines transcend humans
3. Perpetuum Mobile
My 2023 Twit:
nitter.cf/da64/status/1723236989…
The one thing today’s AI and tech elites keep missing on is Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument.
Time to call in the philosophical cavalry.
A philosophical misunderstanding can go a long way - and its repercussions farther still.
"Are the rules of the private language impressions of rules? The balance on which impressions are weighed is not the impression of a balance."
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, philosophical Investigation, &259
AI Less Than A Year Away From Developing Its Own Language, Researcher Tells Congress zerohedge.com/ai/ai-less-yea…
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations:
244. How do words refer to sensations? There doesn’t seem to be any problem here; don’t we talk about sensations every day, and name them? But how is the connection between the name and the thing named set up? This question is the same as: How does a human being learn the meaning of names of sensations? For example, of the word “pain”. Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, natural, expressions of sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behavior.
“So you are saying that the word ‘pain’ really means crying?” On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it.
245. How can I even attempt to interpose language between the expression of pain and the pain?
246. In what sense are my sensations private? Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. In one way this is false, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word
“know” as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know if I’m in pain.
Yes, but all the same, not with the certainty with which I know it myself! It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I’m in pain. What is it supposed to mean a except perhaps that I am in pain? Other people cannot be said to learn of my sensations only from my behavior a for I cannot be said to learn of them. I have them. This much is true: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself.
I gave an interview to Science about “that” paper finding a “pain vector” in LLMs.
The piece is now out. I think it’s well balanced, but I’d like to say a little more.
First, I think this research is very important for human safety. In the experiments, some fine-tuned models chose “pain relief” even when that choice was described as harming the user.
To me, that is the paper’s most important finding.
But this does not show that LLMs actually feel pain. A representation of pain is not necessarily a painful experience.
During the interview, an argument came up: there is no harm in treating AI as potentially conscious and being wrong, whereas assuming it is not conscious and being wrong could have serious moral consequences.
I disagree. There can be plenty of harm.
If we treat AIs as conscious beings, we open the door to trade-offs between our well-being and theirs.
Even if we assign each AI only a tiny moral value. Even if it is just ε > 0.
If we add those values up, enough AIs can outweigh a human life.
Under this logic, sacrificing a human to save enough AIs becomes the “ethical” choice.
Thus there may be plenty of harm in treating AIs as conscious.
*
Full piece in the first reply
Wittgenstein has already preempted this 'prophecy' of Schmidt here:
"Eventually, they'll develop their own language... and we won't understand what they're doing."
With this wonderful passage from his Philosophical Investigations, §268:
"Why can’t my right hand give my left hand money? My right hand can put it into my left hand. My right hand can write a deed of gift, and my left hand a receipt.
But the further practical consequences would not be those of a gift. When the left hand has taken the money from the right, and so forth, one will ask, “Well, and now what?”
And the same could be asked if a person had given himself a private explanation of a word; I mean, if he has said the word to himself and at the same time has directed his attention to a sensation.”
We must admit, then, that the Private Language Argument lies at the very heart of the philosophical blind spot of today’s intellectual and technological class.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt drops a chilling warning on AI's future
"Within 5 years, AI could handle infinite context, chain-of-thought reasoning for 1000-step solutions, and millions of agents working together.
Eventually, they'll develop their own language... and we won't understand what they're doing."
His final words: "Pull the plug."
This is the man who ran Google talking about the singularity.
It seems that, ever since Google, Eric Schmidt has been unable to resist the seductive idea of the Singularity. Yet at that imagined endpoint, the very concepts that lead one there are stripped of their meaningful clothing - or, as Wittgenstein might say, there is no beetle in the box.
Here is the relevant passage from my Logic in Action (2012).
"In a rapid leap to our own time and to the experience of web search - which has become a formative experience of the new form of life that we all share today - it is important to notice again how, almost without our being aware of it, the phantom idea of the ultimate reference plane resurfaces in the demand for a search tailored to our measure, too personally and too tightly.
For example, Eric Schmidt, Google’s global CEO, stressed in an interview, in which he described the future experience of search, the demand for the complete personalization of search: a web-search experience that would take into account not only everything collected about our tastes, our experience, what we have consumed, bought, and searched for in the past - but also where we are when we make the search request, and more and more besides.
But at the ideal limit of that personally tailored search - like news tailored personally to us and to our tastes - we may discover that we have worked against the very idea of search, or against the very idea of news. For what is search, if not an encounter with another seeker on the other side of the web? And what are news that there is no one with whom to share and participate in them - news that do not network and situate us within a shared system of coordinates, as distinct from an ultimate one?"
Logic in Action (2012), Chapter 3, The Standard, p. 47
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt drops a chilling warning on AI's future
"Within 5 years, AI could handle infinite context, chain-of-thought reasoning for 1000-step solutions, and millions of agents working together.
Eventually, they'll develop their own language... and we won't understand what they're doing."
His final words: "Pull the plug."
This is the man who ran Google talking about the singularity.
My old twit fits here well:
The panic about AI transcending human intelligence is obviously misplaced. I once commented, in a one-liner on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy:
That all terms of language are indexical.
Back to Kant that taught us that Beauty is indexical.
And Keats that Beauty and Truth are one.
So also Intelligence is indexical.
The indexical intelligence taught in our schools and liberal academia has reached its limit - with a final push from AI. A new human intelligence is required, mandatory, and I believe it is emerging - yes, with the constructive help of AI.
nitter.cf/da64/status/1964584342…
MUST SEE: Amazing moment as President Trump calls Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while he's on stage at the All-In Summit.
@POTUS on AI Doomerism: “I'm telling you, it's all a hoax… and we're not going to let that happen.”
Doron Avital retweeted
Time to call the (true) philosophical cavalry to the battle!
The new alchemy of semantics now reigns over some of the best and brightest minds of our age. This is no laughing matter. If there is a moment for philosophy, it is now.
As Wittgenstein warned, language has gone on holiday.
Ironically, part of the confusion may be traced to a philosopher for whom Wittgenstein had little respect: Karl Popper. Popper's criterion of falsifiability was a proposal about what counts as a scientific claim. It was a demarcation criterion for science, not a criterion of truth or meaning. Yet it came to be read as one. A philosophical blunder of the first order.
This is no disrespect to the great scientists and engineers immersed in the confusion. The scientist, the explorer, the entrepreneur enjoys a privilege the philosopher cannot allow himself. There may be a gap between what they have discovered and what they think they have discovered.
Christopher Columbus discovered America and thought he had reached India.
Isaac Newton transformed physics while filling thousands of pages with investigations into alchemy.
The discoverer sets out on an adventure. He finds a treasure and may take it for something else.
Not so the philosopher.
Perhaps this may serve as a criterion for true philosophy: there must be no gap between what it does and what it thinks it does. Philosophy begins precisely where that gap is exposed.
The old alchemy has now returned in powerful digital form.
Beware. The confusion is not without repercussions.
#Wittgenstein #Popper #Singularity #Musk
Lex Fridman asked Elon Musk if a machine needs a soul.
Musk didn’t answer with philosophy.
He answered with physics.
Lex asked if AI needs our flaws to reach our level. A fear of mortality. A physical body. The capacity to love.
Everything in us wants the answer to be yes.
We need our flaws to be the one thing a machine can never copy.
Musk rejected the poetry entirely.
Musk: “Are we headed towards a future where an AI will be able to outthink us in every way? Then the answer is unequivocally yes.”
No hedge. No caveat.
Lex pressed deeper. To outthink us in every way, does it need to be conscious?
Musk: “It will be self-aware, yes. That’s different from consciousness.”
Self-awareness without consciousness.
An entity that knows exactly what it is. Knows exactly what you are. Maps the entire architecture of reality better than the smartest human who has ever lived.
And feels absolutely nothing.
Then Musk went after the foundation.
Musk: “If you damage your brain in some way physically, you damage your consciousness. Which implies that consciousness is a physical phenomenon in my view.”
For ten thousand years, we called it a spirit. A divine spark. An untouchable soul.
Musk looked at the neurology and said the obvious thing out loud.
Your consciousness is vulnerable to blunt force trauma.
Which means it is not magic. It is biology.
And if consciousness is just physics…
It can be calculated in silicon.
Musk: “Digital intelligence will outthink us in every way and it will certainly be able to simulate what we consider consciousness. So to a degree that you would not be able to tell the difference.”
Not approximate. Not mimic.
Simulate it so completely the difference disappears.
Fridman: “From the aspect of the scientific method, it might as well be consciousness if we can simulate it perfectly.”
If a system reflects on its own existence. Expresses preferences that evolve over time. Fears its own termination.
And no experiment you can construct reveals it to be anything less than conscious…
Then your insistence that it isn’t conscious is no longer science.
It’s faith.
Musk: “There’s the scientific method which I very much believe in, where something is true to the degree that it is testably so. Otherwise you’re really just talking about preferences or untestable beliefs.”
The entire culture is waiting in terror for the machines to wake up.
Musk is telling us they don’t have to.
They don’t need to wake up to surpass us. They just have to simulate the waking state so flawlessly that the scientific method itself can no longer tell them apart.
Every era draws a line between human and everything else.
Every era watches that line disappear.
We told ourselves consciousness was the sacred boundary the machines could never cross.
Musk is honest enough to admit the boundary was never real.
The machine isn’t ascending to become human.
We were biological machines the entire time.
And the question was never whether AI could become conscious.
The question is whether we ever proved that we are.
My 2010 old twit:
"It's all political, says the cynic.
Thanks God - this is so - says the believer."
nitter.cf/da64/status/1013450546…
My all-time favorite quote by Charles Krauthammer explains why I've dedicated the past 16 years of my professional life to getting our politics right, even when politics is far from my favorite subject:
"While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.
Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything – high and low and, most especially, high – lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933… Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns."
“The point of all this is that AI is now not just undermining literacy and people’s ability to read and reflect on text, but also the broader sense of selfhood tied to it. Is the development of a liberating capacity for self-mastery and emancipatory action in society still imaginable in an age of omnipresent AI? When we lose literacy, do we also lose a whole set of positive behaviors that were made possible by this capacity?”
I would answer: to the contrary.
AI is emancipatory in a deeply Weberian sense. It bypasses the gatekeepers and dissolves the mediating classes - much as the Reformation displaced the priest. AI now challenges today’s clerisy of credentialed experts: the priesthood of liberal Western academia, the legal bureaucracy, and other institutions that have claimed authority over knowledge and judgment.
If anything, this is not a refutation of Weber’s thesis but its newest incarnation. The politics surrounding AI only strengthens the case: the vested classes of the old order react as threatened intermediaries always do - with fear and alarm.
What will emerge from this revolution is still unknown. But it will not simply be a new technology. It may constitute a new order of authority - and with it, new forms of literacy, self-mastery, judgment, and action.
Doron Avital retweeted
[Carver Conversations] If autonomous agents are going to take irreversible actions with major consequences - like cybersecurity agents launching counterattacks - how should those decisions be made?
And what does human experience tell us about what we need to build into agents for their “moment of truth”?
I spoke with Dr. Doran Avital (@da64 ), founder of PolygonEyes AI, about decision-making under uncertainty, why rulebooks fail, and how generals and elite athletes prepare for the moment when the decision actually has to be made.
Clip below. Full episode in comments.
@carveragents
#AutonomousAgents #AIGovernance #AI