adrusi

• adrusiJan 23, 2018, 3:56 PM

  5 points

  in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: One-Con­scious­ness Universe

  You’ve woven a story in which I am wrong, and it will be hard for me to admit that I am wrong. In doing so, you’ve made it tricky for to defend my point in the case that I’m not wrong.

  You’re accusing my “conscion” of being the same kind of mysterious answer as phlogiston. It would be, if I were seriously proposing it as an answer to the mystery of consciousness. I’m not.

  I view this one-electron universe model as an ontological koan. It makes us think “hey, reality could be this way rather than the way we think it is and we would be none the wiser — let’s try to deepen our understanding of reality in light of that.”

  I’ll gladly concede a failure of my writing in not making it clearer that I’m not making any claim that the conscion exists, but rather that thinking about what it would mean for our understanding of consciousness if the conscion did exist, as described. I’m trying to force people to drop their intuition about the “flow” of consciousness. I’m saying that all our observations about consciousness can be equally well explained by this weird conscion hypothesis as can be by the conventional consciousness-as-the-christian-soul hypothesis, so we should notice that many of our intuitions about consciousness have simply been transplanted from theology, and we should not trust those.

One-Con­scious­ness Universe

• adrusiJan 13, 2018, 4:50 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: alkjash’s comment on: More Babble

  I’m inclined to think that the babble you’ve been describing is actually just thoughts, and not linguistic at all. You create thoughts by babble-and-prune and then a separate process converts the thoughts into words. I haven’t thought much about how that process works (and at first inspection I think it’s probably also structured as babble-and-prune), but I think it makes sense to think about it as separate.

  If the processes of forming thoughts and phrasing them linguistically were happening at the same level, I’d expect it to be more intuitive to make syntax reflect semantics, like you see in Shakespeare where the phonetic qualities of a character’s speech reflect their personality. Instead, writing like that seems to require System 2 intervention.

  But I must admit I’m biased. If I were designing a mind, I’d want to have thought generation uncoupled from sentence generation, but it doesn’t have to actually work that way.

  Edit: If generating linguistic-babble happens on a separate level from generating thought-babble, then that has consequences for how to train thought-babble. Your suggestions of playing scrabble and writing haikus would train the wrong babble (nothing wrong with training linguistic-babble, that’s how you become a good writer, but I’m more interested in thought-babble). I think if you wanted to train thought-babble, you’d want to do something like freewriting or brainstorming — rapidly producing a set of related ideas without judgment.

• adrusiJan 13, 2018, 12:24 AM

  1 point

  in reply to: SquirrelInHell’s comment on: More Babble

  Are you referring to the second half of my comment? Because perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. I’m confused what alkjash means, because some of their references to the babble graph seemed perfectly consistent with my understanding but I got the impression that overall we might not be talking about the same thing.if we are talking about the same thing then that whole section of my comment is irrelevant.

• adrusiJan 12, 2018, 9:27 PM

  2 points

  in reply to: alkjash’s comment on: Babble

  I’ve made a reply to your followup.

• adrusiJan 12, 2018, 9:26 PM

  3 points

  on: More Babble

  This is a followup to my comment on the previous post.

  This followup (Edit: alkjash’s followup post, not my followup comment) addresses my stated motivation for suggesting that the babble-generator is based on pattern-matching rather than a mere entropy. I had said that there are too many possible ideas for a entropy to generate reasonable ones. For babble to be produced by a random walk along the idea graph is more plausible. It’s not obvious that you couldn’t produce sufficiently high-quality babble with a random-walk along a well-constructed idea-graph.

  Now, while I absolutely think the idea graph exists, and I agree that producing babble involves a walk along that graph, I am still committed to the belief that that walk is not random, but is guided by pattern matching. My first reason for holding this belief is introspection: I noticed that ideas are produced by “guess-and-check” (or babble-and-prune) by introspection, and I also noticed that the guessing process is based on pattern matching. That’s fairly weak evidence. My stronger reason for belieiving that babble is produced by pattern matching is that it’s safer to assume that a neurological process is based on pattern matching than random behavior. Neurons are naturally suited to forming pattern-matching machines (please forgive my lay-understanding of cognitive science), and while I don’t see why they couldn’t also form an entropy generator, I don’t suspect that a random walk down the idea graph would be more adaptive than a more “intelligent” pattern matching algorithm.

  I also infer that the babble-generator is a pattern matcher from the predictions that makes. If the babble-generator is a random-walk down the idea-graph, then the only way to improve your babble should be to improve your idea graph. If the babble-generator is a pattern-matcher-diected-walk down the idea-graph then you should be able to improve your babble both by training the pattern-matcher well and by improving your idea-graph. Let’s say reading nonfiction impoves your idea graph more effectively than it trains a hypthetical pattern-matcher, and that writing novels trains your pattern-matcher more effectively than it improves your idea-graph. Then if the random-walk hypothesis is true, we should see the same kinds of improvements to babble when we read nonfiction and write novels, but if the pattern-matcher hypothesis is true we should expect different kinds of improvements.

  ***

  I think for the most part we’re talking about the same thing, I’m just suggesting this additional detail of pattern-matching, which has normative consequences (as I sketched out in my previous comment). However I’m not quite sure that we’re talking about the same graphs. You say:

  What is the Babble graph? It’s the graph within which your words and concepts are connected. Some of these connections are by rhyme and visual similarity, others are semantic or personal.

  I certainly don’t think think that this graph is a graph of words, even though I agree that there can be connections representing syntactic relationships like rhyme. I don’t think that the babble algorithm is “start at some node of the graph, output the word associated with that node, then select a connected node and repeat.” There is an idea-graph, and it’s used in the production of babble, but not like that. I’m not sure if you were claiming that it does, but in case you were, I disagree. I would try to elaborate what role I do think the idea-graph plays in babble generation, but this comment is already getting very long.

  I’m curious about the details of your model of this “babble-graph,” You mention that it can create new connections, which suggest to me that the “graph” is actually a static representation of an active process of connection-drawing. I could be convinced that the pattern-matching I’m talking about is actually a separate process which is responsible for forming these connections. But I’m fuzzy on what exactly you mean so I’m not sure that’s even coherent.

  Great posts, I wouldn’t mind a part 3!

• adrusiJan 12, 2018, 4:23 PM

  5 points

  on: Babble

  I’ve been thinking about this same idea, and I thought your post captured the heart of the algorithm (and damn you for beating me to it 😉). But I think you got the algorithm slightly wrong, or simplified the idea a bit. The “babble” isn’t random, there are too many possible thoughts for random thought generation to ever arrive at something the prune filter would accept. Instead, the babble is the output of of a pattern matching process. That’s why computers have become good at producing babble: neural networks have become competent pattern matchers.

  This means that the algorithm is essentially the hypothetical-deductive model from philisophy of science, most obvious when the thoughts you’re trying to come up with are explanations of phenomena: you produce an explanation by pattern matching, then prune the ones that make no goddamn sense (then if you’re doing science you take the explanations you can’t reject for making no sense and prune them again by experiment). That’s why I’ve been calling your babble-prune algorithm “psychological adbuctivism.”

  Your babble’s pattern matching gets trained on what gets accepted by the prune filter, that’s why it gets better over time. But if your prune filter is so strict that it seldom accepts any of your babble’s output, your babble never improves. That’s why you must constrain the tyranny of your prune filter if you find yourself with nothing to say. If you never accept any of your babble, then you will never learn to babble better. You can learn to babble better by pattern matching off of what others say, but if your prune filter is so strict, you’re going to have a tough time finding other people who say things that pass your prune filter. You’ll think “thats a fine thing to say, but I would never say it, certainly not that way.” Moreover, listening to other people is how your prune filter is trained, so your prune filter will be getting better (that is to say, more strict) at the same time as your straggling babble generator is.

  I’ve had success over the past year with making my prune filter less strict in conversational speech, and I think my babble has improved enough that I can put my prune filter back up to its original level. But I need to do the same with my writing and I find it harder to do that. With conversational speech, you have a time constraint, so if your prune filter is too strict you simply end up saying nothing — the other person will say something or leave before you come up with a sufficiently witty response. In writing, you can just take your time. If it takes you an hour toncome up with the next sentence, then you sit down and wait that god-forsaken hour out. You can get fine writing out with that process, but it’s slow. My writing is good enough that I never proofread (I could certainly still get something out of proofreading, but it isn’t compulsory, even for longer pieces of writing), but to get that degree of quality takes me forever, and I cant produce lower quality writing faster (which would be very useful for finishing my exams on time).

• adrusiDec 23, 2017, 6:19 PM

  1 point

  in reply to: tempus’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ist Politicians

  If a nerd won the presidency, it wouldn’t be great because they would say “true” things. It would be great because they would actually be concerned with figuring out what is true. They might actually change their minds if they realized they were wrong.

  If you agree with Trump, then let’s allow that he “says true things.” That doesn’t mean that he embodies what would be great about a nerd in the Oval Office. If Trump says true things, it’s because it gets him the support of certain segments of the population. If he had evidence that one of his beliefs was false, but his base still believed it, I’m quite certain he would go on professing the false belief. Now I don’t actually think Trump would even recognize his belief to be wrong in the presence of evidence, and I think a substantial fraction of politicians are little better than he.

  The article didn’t claim that Obama was — rather, it claimed that Obama’s path to the presidency could be emulated by nerds.