I don’t know of any clear progress on your interests yet. My argument was about the trajectory MI is on, which I think is largely pointed in the right direction. We can argue about the speed at which it gets to the hard problems, whether its fast enough, and how to make it faster though. So you seem to have understood me well.
A core motivating intuition behind the MI program is (I think) “the stuff is all there, perfectly accessible programmatically, we just have to learn to read it”. This intuition is deeply flawed: Koan: divining alien datastructures from RAM activations
I think I’m more agnostic than you are about this, and also about how “deeply” flawed MI’s intuitions are. If you’re right, once the field progresses to nontrivial dynamics, we should expect those operating at a higher level of analysis—conceptual MI—to discover more than those operating at a lower level, right?
If, hypothetically, we were doing MI on minds, then I would predict that MI will pick some low hanging fruit and then hit walls where their methods will stop working, and it will be more difficult to develop new methods that work. The new methods that work will look more and more like reflecting on one’s own thinking, discovering new ways of understanding one’s own thinking, and then going and looking for something like that in the in-vitro mind. IDK how far that could go. But then this will completely grind to a halt when the IVM is coming up with concepts and ways of thinking that are novel to humanity. Some other approach would be needed to learn new ideas from a mind via MI.
However, another dealbreaker problem with current and current-trajectory MI is that it isn’t studying minds.
I don’t know of any clear progress on your interests yet. My argument was about the trajectory MI is on, which I think is largely pointed in the right direction. We can argue about the speed at which it gets to the hard problems, whether its fast enough, and how to make it faster though. So you seem to have understood me well.
I think I’m more agnostic than you are about this, and also about how “deeply” flawed MI’s intuitions are. If you’re right, once the field progresses to nontrivial dynamics, we should expect those operating at a higher level of analysis—conceptual MI—to discover more than those operating at a lower level, right?
If, hypothetically, we were doing MI on minds, then I would predict that MI will pick some low hanging fruit and then hit walls where their methods will stop working, and it will be more difficult to develop new methods that work. The new methods that work will look more and more like reflecting on one’s own thinking, discovering new ways of understanding one’s own thinking, and then going and looking for something like that in the in-vitro mind. IDK how far that could go. But then this will completely grind to a halt when the IVM is coming up with concepts and ways of thinking that are novel to humanity. Some other approach would be needed to learn new ideas from a mind via MI.
However, another dealbreaker problem with current and current-trajectory MI is that it isn’t studying minds.