Adam Shai

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Introduction to Computational Mechanics

Wiki Contributions

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This is not obvious to me. It seems somewhat likely that the multimodaility actually induces more explicit representations and uses of human-level abstract concepts, e.g. a Jennifer Aniston neuron in a human brain is multimodal.

This is the standard understanding in neuroscience (and for what its worth is my working belief), but there is some evidence that throws a wrench into this idea, and needs to be explained, for instance this review "Consciousness without a cerebral cortex: a challenge for neuroscience and medicine" where evidence towards the idea that consciousness without a cortex can occur. in particular this is a famous case of a human with hardly any cortex that seemed to act normally, in most regards.

I think the issue is that what people often mean by. "computing matrix multiplication" is something like what youve described here, but when (at least sometimes, as you've so elegantly talked about in other posts, vibes and context really matter!) talk about "recognizing dogs" they are referring not only to the input output transformation of the task (or even the physical transformation of world states) but also the process by which the dog is recognized, which includes lots of internal human abstractions moving about in a particular way in the brains of people, which may or may not be recapitulated in an artificial classification system.

To some degree it's a semantic issue. I will grant you that there is a way of talking about "recognizing dogs" that reduces it to the input/output mapping, but there is another way in which this doesn't work. The reason it makes sense for human beings to have these two different notions of performing a task is because we really care about theory of mind, and social settings, and figuring out what other people are thinking (and not just the state of their muscles or whatever dictates their output).

Although for precisions sake, maybe they should really have different words associated with them, though I'm not sure what the words should be exactly. Maybe something like "solving a task" vs. "understanding a task" though I don't really like that.

Actually my thinking can go the other way to. I think there actually is a sense in which the computer is not doing matrix multiplication, and its really only the system of computer+human that is able to do it, and the human is doing A LOT of work here. I recognize this is not the sense people usually mean when they talk about computers doing matrix multiplication, but again, I think there are two senses of performing a computation even though people use the same words.

I think I am the one that is misunderstanding. Why doesn't your definitions work?

For every Rilke that  that can turn 0 pages into 1 page, there exists another machine B s.t. 

(1) B can turn 1 page into 1 page, while interacting with Rilke. (I can copy a poem from a rilke book while rilke writes another poem next to me, or while Rilke reads the poem to me, or while Rilke looks at the first wood of the poem and then creates the poem next to me, etc.)

(2) the combined Rilke and B doesnt expend much more physical resource to turn 1 page into 1 page as Rilke expends writing a page of poetry. 

I have a feeling I am misentrepreting one or both of the conditions.

Instead of responding philosophically I think it would be instructive to go through an example, and hear your thoughts about it. I will take your definition of physical reduction  (focusing on 4.) and assign tasks and machines to the variables:

Here's your defintion:

A task  reduces to task  if and only if...

For every machine  that solves task , there exists another machine  such that...

(1)  solves task  by interacting with .
(2) The combined machine  doesn't expend much more physical resources to solve  as  expends to solve .

Now I want X to be the task of copying a Rilke poem onto a blank piece of paper, and Y to be the task of Rilke writing a poem onto a blank piece of paper. 

so let's call X = COPY_POEM, Y = WRITE_POEM, and let's call A = Rilke. So plugging into your definition:

A task COPY_POEM reduces to task WRITE_POEM if and only if...

For every Rilke that solves task WRITE_POEM, there exists another machine  such that...

(1)  solves task COPY_POEM by interacting with Rilke.
(2) The combined machine  doesn't expend much more physical resources to solve COPY_POEM as Rilke expends to solve WRITE_POEM.

This seems to work. If I let Rilke write the poem, and I just copy his work, the the poem will be written on the piece of paper., and Rilke has done much of the physical labor.  The issue is that when people say something like "writing a poem is more than just copying a poem," that seems meaningful to me (this is why teachers are generally unhappy when you are assigned to write a poem and they find out you copied one from a book), and to dismiss the difference as not useful seems to be missing something important about what it means to write a poem. How do you feel about this example?

Just for context, I do strongly agree with many of your other examples, I just think this doesn't work in general. And basing all of your intuitions about intelligence on this will leave you missing something fundamental about intelligence (of the type that exists in humans, at least). 

Like, seriously? What do you mean when you say Google Maps "finds the shortest route from your house to the pub"? Your phone is just displaying certain pixels, it doesn't output an actual physical road! So what do you mean? What you mean is that, by using Google Maps as an oracle with very little overhead, you can find the shortest route from your house to the pub.

This is getting at a deep and important point, but I think this sidesteps an important difference between "writing poetry" (like when a human does it) and "computing addition" (like when a calculator does it). You get really close to it here.

The problem is that when the task is writing poetry (as a human does it), what entity is the "you" who is making use of the physical machinations that is producing the poetry "with very little overhead"? There is something different about a writing poetry and doing addition with a calculator. The task of writing poetry (as a human) is not just about transforming inputs to outputs, it matters what the internal states are. Unlike in the case where "you" make sense of the dynamics of the calculator in order get the work of addition done, in the case of writing poetry, you are the one who is making sense of your own dynamics.

I'm not saying there's anything metaphysical going on, but I would argue your definition of task is not a good abstraction for humans writing poetry, it's not even a good abstraction for humans performing mathematics (at least when they aren't doing rote symbol manipulation using pencil and paper). 

Maybe this will jog your intuitions in my direction: one can think of the task of recognizing a dog, and think about how a human vs. a convnet does that task. 

I wrote about these issues here a little bit. But I have been meaning to write something more formalized. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f6nDFvzvFsYKHCESb/pondering-computation-in-the-real-world

I really appreciate this work and hope you and others continue to do more like it. So I really do mean this criticism with a lot of goodwill. I think even a small amount of making the figures/animations look nicer would go a long way to making this be more digestible (and look more professional). Things like keeping constant the axes through the animations, and using matplotlib or seaborn styles.  https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.set_context.html and https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.set_style.html

apologies if you already know this and were just saving time!

I thought it was a great way to put it and I appreciated it a lot! I'm not even sure the post has more value than the summary; at the very least that one sentence adds a lot of explanatory power imho.

Well I don't know SAS at all but a quick search of the SAS documentation for dirilecht calls it a "nonparametric Bayes approach"...

 

https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/casactml/8.3/casactml_nonparametricbayes_details12.htm

I don't know if I'm missing something, but it sounds like you are discussing for a particular method of picking a prior within a Bayesian context, but you are not arguing against Bayes itself. If anything, it seems to me this is pro-Bayes, just using DIrilecht Processes as a prior.

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