The era of aviation arose, not by dissecting birds but by making conceptual leaps to understand fluid dynamics and the mechanics of flight. Similarly if we ever build mind machines it will be through conceptual leaps in the science of intelligence
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We are at least two scientific revolutions away from understanding the mysteries of consciousness and intelligence. Maybe those revolutions will never come. Maybe we're fundamentally incapable of producing the empirical lens that will grant us those insights
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I think machine learning can teach us a lot about ourselves. Neural networks learn by aggregating perceptions into statistics. For a given stimulus, they generate a range of outputs weighted by probability. The weights represent the network's confidence in its judgement
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If I'm honest about my own cogitations, I can relate to that. People think computers are rigid in their logic, that's what "robotic" means, but neural networks and learning algorithms use rigid logic to build flexible logic
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Despite everything we hear, many of us stubbornly believe we're so rational and lucid and driven by evidence and careful consideration, but the truth is we just make guesses based on the frequencies at which we see things
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In Chinese they have an expression, three men make a tiger, 三人成虎, it means you'll believe anything if you hear it from enough people.
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Despite all the things that we don't know, we can still model the people around us, and we can do so quite accurately, and we can make very good models using very simple tricks
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Much of what people do is mechanical, and I'm a reductionist in the sense that my models round off all spiritual experience to mere emotion and I think that makes them work better, not worse
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I invite you to disagree with me. Disagreements are assets. When I was younger I spent many hours reading books about the philosophy of mind, about consciousness, about neuroscience (admittedly, books for the layman). I satisfied my curiousity that no one knows anything
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Replying to @0x49fa98
K, here are a few doubts to kick around later: “Man” is not hypocritical b/c some selection-environments favor hypocrisy, some integrity (and character of neighbors is main element of environment...)
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(a lemma; to distinguish predispositions from one another you first need to distinguish b/w selection pressures that favor different strategies)
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Replying to @QuasLacrimas @0x49fa98
this saves you from thinking eg the integrity-strategy is “really” hypocritical (muddled, blurry) b/c the hypocrisy-strategy gives you a conceptual counterpoint
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