CeffTheCeph

My favourite part of that book is where Penrose perfectly describes what today we call AI deepfakes and how the ‘bottom-up’ algorithms that run all our AI tech today will never lead to actual consciousness, or sentience in machines.

His arguments do still hold up today, and give an interesting perspective on our current AI bubble that keeps promising AGI is just around the corner.

Several years ago I was taking economic classes at my local university out of interest and to be more informed about intentions in our geopolitical world.

A few years after those classes I ran as a candidate for city council in my local municipal elections on a platform based on sound economic policy. I did not get elected, not even close, as I was running opposite an incumbent.

A few years after that I saw this man at a coffee shop that I knew I recognized from somewhere, but had no chance of remembering him on my own. He came up to me and prompted me, and I then realized that he was one of my economic profs, retired now, from when I was taking courses all those years ago.

After brief pleasantries he said: “I recognized your name in the last election. I wanted to say that I voted for you.”

Quite surprised, I managed to respond with a sincere smile on my face: “coming from an economist, that really means a lot to me, thank you”.

I mean, it’s the same question as Plato’s cave

Did you read Penrose’s “Shadows of the Mind”? The ‘shadows’ is a specific reference to Plato’s cave.

No, what sets human apart is how we can communicate in detail and specifics. A single human conciouness sucks, it needs to learn from others. Just like a well trained dog will seem smart. It can’t speak, but it can listen if someone teaches it.

I would suggest that, even though they can’t speak using words, dogs most certainly can communicate in details and specifics.

It is our failure, our inability to interpret what the dog is communicating that just makes us feel like we are better at communicating than dogs. The whole point of my piss story is that some animals communicate complex ideas through their pee, a form of communication that we have no ability to properly interpret. Dogs have no ability to interpret the detail and specifics in our words, but they do communicate detail and specifics through pee. There is no distinction in the communication process there, the distinction is that our brains have the ability to create abstractions using words and symbols, and dog brains do not have that ability.

Which is why shit gets so fucked up when people stop communicating and get tribal about shit.

I don’t disagree with you at all that there is a big difference in how humans and dogs communicate. My intention isn’t to ‘argue’ with you or quibble over the semantics surrounding the relationship between consciousness and communication. I just want to point out here that when I saw the word “No,” above I instinctively felt as though I was on the defensive. This defensive reaction to the word “no” is actually “why shit gets so fucked up” and people “get tribal about shit”.

Maybe!

When my dog sniffs a pee stain out in the bush he instantly knows what species left it there, how long ago it was left there, whether there is a threat to him, whether whoever left it is in heat, a whole bunch of actual information useful for his survival. I can only smell stale piss.

My dog knows whether it was an other dog that peed, or a fox, or a wolf, or a lynx, or a marten, he knows there is a difference between them and knows how to react to those differences. He can map their geographical movements over time and establish patterns of his own movements that could give him the advantage in the event that their path crosses his at some point. But he isn’t aware enough to know that that is what he is actually doing when he smells pee.

I can recognize and taxonomically label all of the potential piss perps, look through their geneological history and map out their ancestors over millions of years, and I can describe in detail the fur trade history in the region and how it impacted the European economy over the past 300 years. But no matter how hard I try, it still just smells like stale piss to me.

Haha! Thank you so much for this comment!

I am currently writing a Master’s thesis on complex adaptive systems and have been having such a hard time coming to terms with how the reductivist worldview completely dominates western science, including neurobiology.

To be fair, I think even Penrose still holds this Platonic view and is desperate to find the mechanistic process of wavefunction collapse through gravity, somehow suggesting that gravity is responsible for the appearance of our conscious thoughts in our heads?? I don’t know, I’m probably interpreting it all wrong, I’m not an expert on Quantum Gravity.

I’ve just been convinced by my dog that I have a more developed level of conciseness compared to him, just as he has a more developed sense of smell compared to me.

Your circumstances are different, but consider the lyrics to the song “Almost Summer” by Jason Collett for a typical experience… https://youtu.be/xVnF0GsiwoY

However, their argument rely on that ”quantum gravity” is what makes the universe uncomputable. I’m not sure how valid this statement is.

Here is the assumption the authors use that brings quantum gravity into the proof:

As we do not have a fully consistent theory of quantum gravity, several different axiomatic systems have been proposed to model quantum gravity [26–32]. In all these programs, it is assumed a candidate theory of quantum gravity is encoded as a computational formal system F_QG = {L_QG, ΣQG, R_alg} .

I interpret their assumption to mean that describing quantum gravity in this way is how it would be defined as a formal computational system. This is the approach that all of the other leading theories (String Theory, Loop Quantum Gravity) have taken, which have failed to provide a fully consistent and complete description of gravity. I think the proof is saying that non-computational components can be incorporated into a fully consistent and complete formal system and so taking a non-computational approach to quantum gravity would then incorporate gravity into the formal system thereby completing the theory of everything.

Does that make sense? I am not a logician by any extent and I have no idea how robust this proof really is. I do think the bold claims the authors are making deserve heavy scrutiny, but I am not the one to provide that scrutiny.

Disproving the ‘matrix theory’ is just the catchy headline to garner clicks. The results of the research are beyond just the matrix. For example, this proof means that non-algorithmic determinism isn’t something that represents a lack of deeper theoretical understanding. There are theories that consciousness is non-algorithmic. In that case, this proof means that AGI is also impossible.