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Joscha Bach

@Plinz

Dec 6

I don't think that the scaling hypothesis gets recognized enough for how radical it is. For decades, AI sought some kind of master algorithm of intelligence. The scaling hypothesis says that there is none: intelligence is the ability to use more compute on more data.

If the scaling hypothesis is correct, it means that intelligence is not an algorithm, but a grab bag of many specialized skills, which can be acquired using any good enough learning procedure. Current AI researchers have strong disagreements about the limits of scaling.

It is not easy to make a compelling argument against scaling: if foundation models are worse than humans at eg. reasoning, will the problems go away if we train them on more reasoning examples? Perhaps there is a master algorithm for creative reasoning hidden in the data?

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Joscha Bach

@Plinz

Jul 28

Nonconstructive mathematics is the claim that there exist mathematics that can do more than computation. In other words, there is a mathematical universe in which you might build a machine that can traverse an infinite graph in a finite amount of steps, that can splice a 3D ball into two 3D balls of the same size and that can simulate Hilbert's hotel.

Physicists who import their math and modeling library from nonconstructive mathematicians have to deal with a language that describes phenomena that are impossible in physics as if they were valid occurrences, and allows the construction of objects that could never be real.

If we understand physics as the attempt to discover the language of the universe, the compositional operations that lead to emergence and interaction of elementary particles, supervenience of spacetime, and the observable macrostates, shouldn't it use a constructive encoding?

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Joscha Bach

@Plinz

Jul 10

I currently think that consciousness may be a learning algorithm for a self organizing information processing system, a colonizing pattern that entrains itself on a brain once it is discovered early in development. This is an unusual hypothesis and thus not unlikely to be wrong.

Perhaps we can think of consciousness in similar terms to the principle of government in human society. A primitive government is bullying people based on a personal reputation system and does not scale beyond the tribal level. Scalable governments require "recursive bullying".

Recursive governments are colonizing by imposing order that can harvest more energy than it costs to maintain the administration. Once the principle of recursive bullying is discovered, it spreads until it meets another government with similarly efficient implementation.

Read 15 tweets

Joscha Bach

@Plinz

Nov 27, 2023

When failure to repair Christian doctrine led to God's demise, Western moral philosophy lost its foundation in divine will. We got utilitarianism (optimizing quantified measurable properties), humanism (species level self idolization), and fascism (group level self idolization).

Without a concept of transcendental agency, attempts to measure moral value tend to either assign intrinsic valence to mental states, or to material outcomes for laughably coarse grained human players. Neither deal well with actual human preferences and strategies.

A modern meta-morality has to be rationally sound, built on a deep understanding of psychology and game theory, deal with the perspectives of atypical and non-human minds, and allow negotiation between substrate bound agents and mature substrate agnostic sentient agents.

Read 6 tweets

Joscha Bach

@Plinz

Sep 6, 2023

Physics may be better understood not as modeling physical reality, but as the practice of describing arbitrary systems by short algebraic equations (some not even computable). Physicists tend to ignore physical reality that resists being analyzed in this way (eg. chemistry).

In practice, most physicists don’t work on modeling the physical world; less than 10% are working in science. Most degreed physicists end up in IT, finance, business and whereever else analytical models are useful.

What makes physics weird is that we treat it as fundamental and associate it with the world we perceive. In actuality, we live in a simulation, a physics engine, a kind of 3d computer game, which (according to our best models) is created by the computations of our brains.

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Joscha Bach

@Plinz

Jun 9, 2023

I suspect the experience that leads to the panpsychism syndrome of some philosophers and other consciousness enthusiasts represents the realization that we don't end at the self, but share a resonant universe representation with every other observer coupled to the same universe.

This representation is approximately almost true, and it should not be surprising that our mind is capable of generating the percept of an interpretation of the observer's relationship between self and universe representation in which the observer is identified with the universe.

This state has been described well by many observers, eg. Neil Gaiman in The Ocean at the End of the Lane, or by K.E. in personal conversation, and can be a training goal for meditators. It is sometimes referred to as the Non-dual State. Some people confuse it with enlightenment.

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