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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir57ty4 wrote

Reply to comment by Professional-Song216 in What happens in the first month of AGI/ASI? by kmtrp

The proof is in the fundamental mechanism of explanation and computation itself. Explanations are just strings of statements. The difference between a simple explanation and the most complex explanation you could imagine, is just the length of their string of statements. So if you can understand anything that wasn't genetically programmed into you to understand, like it is for all animals, then you can understand anything. Some people are tricked into thinking animals can do this, but all they can do is mix and match whatever subroutines they were born with, some which look like a shadow of learning, but they never actually understand anything. The fact that we can understand something as obscure as quantum physics, means we can understand outside of our genetic programming, which means we can understand anything. To think otherwise, you'd be claiming that we can follow a string of statements up to some point, and then all of a sudden it just won't make sense anymore. But we know this isn't true. The proof to Fermat's Last Theorem was so long that no human could hold its string of statements in their mind at once. Yet people who are very interested and chose to learn that type of math, can read through page by page, and by the end, they understand the proof. At no point does the length of the explanation hinder their understanding. And if one day we do get to a length that's just too long, that's just a matter of increasing memory and processing power. We'll never need a qualitative increase, in fact there just isn't one to be had.

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Professional-Song216 t1_ir7t1cz wrote

Thanks for your explanation, although I humbly disagree on some key points.

For one I think that there are varying degrees of thinking outside one’s genetic code. For example our ability to read and use symbols are derived from our ability to identify and decipher varying shapes. Bees have this ability well. I say that to say, biology and evolution isn’t cut and dry. All of our abilities to from abstractions could be a result of a mix of hard programmed processes.

All explanations and computation could be string based but I find that hard to believe. There has to be a way to determine weather the string is actually true or false maybe even varying degrees of the two. Asking questions seems to be a huge help part of the spark that drove humanity to such a high degree of productivity.

Your argument is very believable once you really think about it. However I believe it’s easy to forget that we live in somewhat of an illusion. Our perspective does not reflect what is necessarily true. Our biology provides a convenient picture of what surrounds us and there is a large possibility that it has limitations not only in perception but conception on a qualitative level.

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_ir89guc wrote

I'll admit that we are infinitely ignorant, and endlessly fallible, and thus we can never be sure that we've reached the truth, regardless of what it is. But we do have our best explanations, and we must live and act as if those best explanations are true, because there is nothing else we can do. Epistemologies like Bayesianism are very popular today, but those never made much sense to me. We have the best most useful explanations until they are falsified, and even then they remain useful approximations, like Newton's Gravity being replaced by Einstein's. The reason Newton's is still a good approximation is because it was our best explanation at one time, and good explanations are good for a reason. They are falsifiable, and therefore testable, and they are hard to vary, and therefore fully explain the phenomena they reference. One day, Einstein's theory will also be replaced, or absorbed into Quantum theory, and one day even Quantum theory will be replaced. We will never have the final ultimate explanation, but we will always be able to create closer and closer approximations to the truth. Even if we did discover the final ultimate theory of something, we would never know it to be so.

This theory of the mind and universal explanation may indeed be wrong, but I would strongly suggest it is our current best explanation, and should be acted on as such. It can easily be falsified by discovering a completely new mode of explanation that is out of our reach, or by building an ASI that has a qualitative gain on us. I hope I'm alive for that because it'll be a very exciting time! :)

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LeCodex t1_irupspb wrote

I'm glad to see another fan of Popper and Deutsch in the midst of this sea of arrogantly confident errors about intelligence, AGI, knowledge,...

Seeing so many people here parrot the kind of misconceptions that are so prevalent in the field, I'm beginning to really understand Deutsch's arguments in his "Why has AGI not been created yet?" video at a deeper level.

It's as if the people supposedly interested in bringing about AGI, had decided to choose one of the worst epistemological framework they could find to get there (certainly worse than Popper's epistemology), then proceeded to lock themselves out of any error-correction mechanism in that regard. Now they're all wondering why their AIs can't generalize well, can't learn in an open-ended fashion, struggle with curiosity, suck at abductive reasoning... and for that matter, even deduction (since finding good proofs requires a serious dose of abduction), are data hungry...

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Professional-Song216 t1_irc2vmd wrote

Absolutely the concussion is not clear as of yet, I am exited as well. The next chapter in human history with be grand none the less.

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MurderByEgoDeath t1_irc4hfk wrote

I definitely agree there. Part of this whole philosophy is that all problems can be solved, because anything that is physically possible, can be achieved with the requisite knowledge. So all suffering in the world, is merely the result of a lack of knowledge, and since we are all knowledge creators, there is no reason to be pessimistic. Optimism is not an attitude or a state of mind, it's a claim about reality. We live in a universe where problems can be solved with the requisite knowledge, and we exist as entities who can create that knowledge! Thus our reality is intrinsically optimistic! :)

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