Digest, 4/2/2023: There's a Dream in My Brain
Digest, 4/2/2023: There's a Dream in My Brain
the eighty-seventh digest post
Who knew I had so many mind-body dualists among my readers?
This Week’s Posts
Monday, March 27th - You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now.
The technological walls between you and others and between you and yourself will only grow. You must be right to fight back.
Wednesday, March 29th - The EduSkeptic’s Guidebook 1.0
An overview and repository of my views on education.
Thursday, March 30th - What’s Happened with the Socialist Left
see title
Friday, March 31st - May “Destroy My Enemies” Be All of Our Law (subscriber only)
In giving people pure, unfiltered will to destroy, Trump presaged our politics.
Saturday, April 1st - Theory of the World, Theory of Mind, and Media Incentives
LLMs are still just distributional semantic models and cannot think.
God I publish too much.
From the Archives
Song of the Week
Non-Garbage Online Reading
Jaron Lanier: “The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane.”
Comment of the Week
I remember seeing a lot of people justifying that screenshot up there with, "oh they're just introverts. It's fine."
I am what they'd call "an introvert", and let me tell ya, those answers do not sound like me when I'm in a healthy mood. Just spitballing here, but I would even posit that "being pleasantly alone" has suffered as much as "making meaningful human connections". There's just that grey fugue, interacting with a screen, not quite alone, not quite with others. - The OtherKC
That’s it. I intended to publish fewer posts this week. I failed, obviously.
Digest, 4/2/2023: There's a Dream in My Brain
I very much appreciated the quantity of posts this week.
Sorry if it's bad form to take a discussion from a previous thread into the digest post, but I felt the need to address the point about mind-body duality. I am emphatically not a mind-body dualist, and I believe that most of the people who agreed with me weren't either. It's funny to hear you say that, because I interpreted your stance - that there is something called "theory of the world" that is endowed only to the human mind and can't possibly exist within a machine seemingly by definition - to be much more dualistic in nature. Obviously I acknowledge it isn't conventional dualism, but to me it has a similar taste.
Now that I am able to put a bit more time into my response, I want to give a bit more explanation of where I'm coming from. The first important thing is to separate the idea of consciousness - the subjective experience of being, the sensation of thinking - from the idea of intelligence and understanding - the ability to model and manipulate the world. Consciousness is obviously immeasurable, and completely undefined from a scientific perspective, so it is silly to talk about and I make no claims along that axis.
Intelligence, on the other hand, can be measured and demonstrated, and each generation of LLMs (usually less than a year apart) have shown dramatically increasing levels of it. Their mistakes are rapidly becoming rarer, and the situations in which they occur are becoming more complex. And don't forget that humans also make dumb mistakes all the time.
So then that leads me to my last question: What capability would these machines need to demonstrate before you admitted that they had something akin to a theory of the world? It's not a question of consciousness or experience or "mind" or other immeasurable things, it's a question about demonstrated ability to interact with the world.