this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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chapotraphouse

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the-podcast guy recently linked this essay, its old, but i don't think its significantly wrong (despite gpt evangelists) also read weizenbaum, libs, for the other side of the coin

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[–] Frank@hexbear.net 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (36 children)

Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it, and when I politely raised the issue in subsequent email communications, they still had nothing to offer months later. They saw the problem. They didn’t dismiss the challenge as trivial. But they couldn’t offer an alternative. In other words, the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them.

I mean, protip, if you ask people to discard all of their language for discussing a subject they're not going to be able to discuss the subject. This isn't a gotcha. We interact with the world through symbol and metaphors. Computers are the symbolic language with which we discuss the mostly incomprehensible function of about a hundred billion weird little cells squirting chemicals and electricity around.

Yeah I'm not going to finish this but it just sounds like god of the gaps contrarianness. We have a symbolic language for discussing a complex phenomena that doesn't really reflect the symbols we use to discuss it. We don't know how memory encoding and retrieval works. The author doesn't either, and it really just sounds like they're peeved that other people don't treat memory as an irreducibly complex mystery never to be solved.

Something they could have talked about - Our memories change over time because, afaik, the process of recalling a memory uses the same mechanics as the process of creating a memory. What I'm told is we're experiencing the event we're remembering again, and because we're basically doing a live performance in our head the act of remembering can also change the memory. It's not a hard drive, there's no ones and zeroes in there. It's a complex, messy biological process that arose under the influence of evolution, aka totally bonkers bs. But there is information in there. People remember strings of numbers, names, locations, literal computer code. We don't know for sure how it's encoded, retrieved, manipulated, "loaded in to ram", but we know it's there. As mentioned, people with some training and recall enormous amounts of information verbatim. There are, contrary to the dollar experiment, people who can reproduce images with high detail and accuracy after one brief viewing. There's all kinds of weird eiditic memory and outliers.

From what I understand most people are moving towards a system model - Memories aren't encoded in a cell, or as a pattern of chemicals, it's a complex process that involves a whole lot of shit and can't be discrete observed by looking at an isolated piece of the brain. YOu need to know what the system is doing. To deliberately poke fun at the author - It's like trying to read the binary of a fragmented hard drive, it's not going to make any sense. You've got to load it in to memory so the index that knows where all the pieces of the files are stored on the disk so it can assemble them in to something useful. Your file isn't "stored" anywhere on the disk. Binary is stored on the disk. A program is needed to take that binary and turn it in to readable information. 'We're never going to be able to upload a brain" is just whiney contrarian nonesense, it's god of the gaps. We don't know how it works now so we'll never know how it works. So we need to produce a 1:1 scan of the whole body and all it's processes? So what, maybe we'll have tech to do that some day. maybe we'll, you know, skip the whole "upload" thing and figure out how to hook a brain in to a computer interface directly, or integrate the meat with the metal. It's so unimaginative to just throw your hands up and say "it's too complicated! digital intelligence is impossible!" Like come on, we know you can run an intelligence on a few pounds of electrified grease. That's a known, unquestionable thing. The machine exists, it's sitting in each of our skulls, and every year we're getting better and better at understanding and controlling it. There's no reason to categorically reject the idea that we'll some day be able to copy it, or alter it such a way that it can be copied. It doesn't violate any laws of physics, it doesn't require goofy exists only on paper exotic particles. it's just electrified meat.

Also, if bozo could please explain how trained oral historians and poets can recall thousands of stanzas of poetry verbatim with few or no errors I'd love to hear that, because it raises some questions about the dollar bill "experiment".

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (31 children)

You don’t remember the text though, and stanzas recounting can sometimes have word substitutions which fit rhythmically.

If I asked you what is 300th word of the poem, you cannot do it. Computer can. If I start with two words of the verse, you could immediately continue. It’s sequence of words with meaning, outside of couple thousands of competitive pi-memorizers, people cannot remember gibberish, try to remember hash number of something for a day. It’s significantly less memory, either as word vector or symbol vector than a haiku.

Re: language, and how far along did the mechanical analogy took us? Until equations or language corresponding to reality are used, you are fumbling about fitting round spheres in spiral holes. Sure you can use ptoleimaic system and add new round components, or you can realize orbits are ellipses

History of science should actually horrify science bros, 300 years scientists firmly believed phlogiston was the source of burning, 100 years ago aether was all around us, and our brains were ticking boxes of gears, 60 years ago neutrinos didn’t have mass, while dna was happily deterministically making humans. Whatever we believe now is scientific truth by historic precedent likely isn’t (correspondence between model and reality), they are getting better all the time (increasing correspondence), but I don’t know perfect scientific theory (maybe chemistry is sorta solved with fiddling around the edges).

[–] m532@hexbear.net 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Computers know the 300th word because they store their stuff in arrays, which do not exist in brains. They could also store it in linked lists, like a brain does, but that's inefficient for the silicon memory layout.

Also, brains can know the 300th word. Just count. Guess what a computer does when it has to get the 300th element of a linked list: it counts to 300.

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And computers can count, that’s all they can do as turing machines, we can’t or not that well, feels there is a mismatch here in mediums🤔. If I took 10 people knowing same poem, what are the odds I’ll get same word from all of them?

Is that linked list in the brain can be accessed in all contexts then? Can you sing hip hop song while death metal backing track is playing?

Moreover linked list implies middle parts are not accessible before going through preceding elements, do you honestly think that’s a good analogue for human memory?

[–] m532@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Humans have fingers so they can count, so the odds 10 people get the same word should be 100%.

I can plug my ears.

I could implement a linked list connected to a hash map that can be accessed from the middle.

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Lol @100 percent.

So which one brain does? Linked list with hash maps then? Final simple computer analogy? Maybe indexed binary tree? Or maybe it’s not that?

[–] m532@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When I want to recall a song, I have to remember one part, and then I can play it in my head. However, I can't just skip to the end.

Linked list

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So if second verse plays you can’t sing along until your brain parses through previous verses? I find it rather hard to believe

[–] m532@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago

Just because linked lists are usually implemented with a starting point doesn't mean they have to. Content + a pointer to the next object is all that's needed for an element of a linked list. It could even be cyclic.

[–] m532@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you think humans are so dumb they can't count to 300?

[–] plinky@hexbear.net 3 points 1 year ago

you can try to find 200th word on physical book page, I suspect on first tries you’ll get different answers. It’s not dumbness, with poem it’s rather complicated counting and reciting (and gesturing, if you use hands), and direct count while you are bored (as in with book), might make mind either skip words, or cycle numbers. We aren’t built for counting, fiddling with complicated math is simpler than doing direct and boring count

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