You should also read the relevant sequence about dissolving the problem of free will: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/p3TndjYbdYaiWwm9x
Davidmanheim
Karma: 4,692
You believe that something inert cannot be doing computation. I agree. But you seem to think it’s coherent that a system with no action—a post-hoc mapping of states—can be.
The place where comprehension of Chinese exists in the “chinese room” is the creation of the mapping—the mapping itself is a static object, and the person in the room by assumption is doing to cognitive work, just looking up entries. “But wait!” we can object, “this means that the Chinese room doesn’t understand Chinese!” And I think that’s the point of confusion—repeating someone else telling you answers isn’t the same as understanding. The fact that the “someone else” wrote down the answers changes nothing. The question is where and when the computation occurred.In our scenarios, there are a couple different computations—but the creation of the mapping unfairly sneaks in the conclusion that the execution of the computation, which is required to build the mapping, isn’t what creates consciousness!
Good point. The problem I have with that is that in every listed example, the mapping either requires the execution of the conscious mind and a readout of its output and process in order to build it, or it stipulates that it is well enough understood that it can be mapped to an arbitrary process, thereby implicitly also requiring that it was run elsewhere.
That seems like a reasonable idea. It seems not at all related to what any of the philosophers proposed.
For their proposals, it seems like the computational process is more like:
1. Extract a specific string of 1s and zeros from the sandstorm’s initial position, and another from it’s final position, with the some length as the length of the full description of the mind.
2. Calculate the bitwise sum of the initial mind state and the initial sand position.
3. Calculate the bitwise sum of the final mind state and the final sand position.
4. Take the output of state 2 and replace it with the output of state 3.
5. Declare that the sandstorm is doing something isomorphic to what the mind did. Ignore the fact that the internal process is completely unrelated, and all of the computation was done inside of the mind, and you’re just copying answers.
I agree that’s a more interesting question, and computational complexity theorists have done work on it which I don’t fully understand, but it also doesn’t seem as relevant for AI safety questions.
Regarding Chess agents, Vanessa pointed out that while only perfect play is optimal, informally we would consider agents to have an objective that is better served by slightly better play, for example, an agent rated 2500 ELO is better than one rated 1800, which is better than one rated 1000, etc. That means that lots of “chess minds” which are non-optimal are still somewhat rational at their goal.
I think that it’s very likely that even according to this looser definition, almost all chess moves, and therefore almost all “possible” chess bots, fail to do much to accomplish the goal.
We could check this informally by evaluating the set of possible moves in normal games would be classified as blunders, using a method such as the one used here to evaluate what proportion of actual moves made by players are blunders. Figure 1 there implies that in positions with many legal moves, a larger proportion are blunders—but this is looking at the empirical blunder rate by those good enough to be playing ranked chess. Another method would be to look at a bot that actually implements “pick a random legal move”—namely Brutus RND. It has an ELO of 255 when ranked against other amateur chess bots, and wins only occasionally against some of the worst bots; it seems hard to figure out from that what proportion of moves are good, but it’s evidently a fairly small proportion.
Most Minds are Irrational
We earlier mentioned that it is required that the finite mapping be precomputed. If it is for arbitrary Turing machines, including those that don’t halt, we need infinite time, so the claim that we can map to arbitrary Turing machines fails. If we restrict it to those which halt, we need to check that before providing the map, which requires solving the halting problem to provide the map.
Edit to add: I’m confused why this is getting “disagree” votes—can someone explain why or how this is an incorrect logical step, or
OK, so this is helpful, but if I understood you correctly, I think it’s assuming too much about the setup. For #1, in the examples we’re discussing, the states of the object aren’t predictably changing in complex ways—just that it will change “states” in ways that can be predicted to follow a specific path, which can be mapped to some set of states. The states are arbitrary, and per the argument don’t vary in some way that does any work—and so as I argued, they can be mapped to some set of consecutive integers. But this means that the actions of the physical object are predetermined in the mapping.
And the difference between that situation and the CNS is that we know he neural circuitry is doing work—the exact features are complex and only partly understood, but the result is clearly capable of doing computation in the sense of Turing machines.
I think this was a valuable post, albeit ending up somewhat incorrect about whether LLMs would be agentic—not because they developed the capacity on their own, but because people intentionally built and are building structure around LLMs to enable agency. That said, the underlying point stands—it is very possible that LLMs could be a safe foundation for non-agentic AI, and many research groups are pursuing that today.
The blogpost this points to was an important contribution at the time, more clearly laying out extreme cases for the future. (The replies there were also particularly valuable.)
I think this post makes an important and still neglected claim that people should write their work more clearly and get it published in academia, instead of embracing the norms of the narrower community they interact with. There has been significant movement in this direction in the past 2 years, and I think this posts marks a critical change in what the community suggests and values in terms of output.
“the actual thinking-action that the mapping interprets”
I don’t think this is conceptually correct. Looking at the chess playing waterfall that Aaronson discusses, the mapping itself is doing all of the computation. The fact that the mapping ran in the past doesn’t change the fact that it’s the location of the computation, any more than the fact that it takes milliseconds for my nerve impulses to reach my fingers means that my fingers are doing the thinking in writing this essay. (Though given the typos you found, it would be convenient to blame them.)they assume ad arguendo that you can instantiate the computations we’re interested in (consciousness) in a headful of meat, and then try to show that if this is the case, many other finite collections of matter ought to be able to do the job just as well.
Yes, they assume that whatever runs the algorithm is experiencing running the algorithm from the inside. And yes, many specific finite systems can do so—namely, GPUs and CPUs, as well as the wetware in our head. But without the claim that arbitrary items can do these computations, it seems that the arguendo is saying nothing different than the conclusion—right?
Looks like I messed up cutting and pasting—thanks!
Thanks—fixed!
Yeah, perhaps refuting is too strong given that the central claim is that we can’t know what is and is not doing computation—which I think is wrong, but requires a more nuanced discussion. However, the narrow claims they made inter-alia were strong enough to refute, specifically by showing that their claims are equivalent to saying the integers are doing arbitrary computation—when making the claim itself requires the computation to take place elsewhere!
Seems worth noting that the claims of most of the philosophers being cited here is (1) - that even rocks are doing the same computation as minds.
I agree that this wasn’t intended as an introduction to the topic. For that, I will once again recommend Scott Aaronson’s excellent mini-book explaining computational complexity to philosophers.
I agree that the post isn’t a definition of what computation is—but I don’t need to be able to define fire to be able to point out something that definitely isn’t on fire! So I don’t really understand your claim. I agree that it’s objectively hard to interpret computation, but it’s not at all hard to interpret the fact that the integers are less complex and doing less complex computation than, say, an exponential-time Turing machine—and given the specific arguments being made, neither is a wall or a bag of popcorn. Which, as I just responded to the linked comment, was how I understood the position being taken by Searle, Putnam, and Johnson. (And even this ignores that one implication of the difference in complexity is that the wall / bag of popcorn / whatever is not mappable to arbitrary computations, since the number of steps required for a computation may not be finite!)
I’ve written my point more clearly here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zxLbepy29tPg8qMnw/refuting-searle-s-wall-putnam-s-rock-and-johnson-s-popcorn
Strongly agree that there needs to be an institutional home. My biggest problem is that there is still no such new home!