If someone is unable to examine the available evidence and come to a sane conclusion on a particular topic, this makes it less likely that they are able to examine the available evidence and to sane conclusions on other topics.
I don’t take Goertzel seriously for the same reason I don’t take young earth creationists seriously. It’s not that I disagree with him, it’s that his beliefs have almost no connection to reality.
(If it makes you feel better, I have read some of Goertzel’s writing on AGI, and it’s stuffed full of magical thinking.)
And computer scientists haven’t understood the self – because it isn’t about computer science. It’s about the emergent dynamics that happen when you put a whole bunch of general and specialized pattern recognition agents together – a bunch of agents created in a way that they can really cooperate – and when you include in the mix agents oriented toward recognizing patterns in the society as a whole.
and
The goal systems of humans are pretty unpredictable, but a software mind like Novamente is different – the goal system is better-defined. So one reasonable approach is to make the first Novamente a kind of Oracle. Give it a goal system with one top-level goal: To answer peoples’ questions, in a way that’s designed to give them maximum understanding.
It’s possible that with sufficient real-world intelligence tends to come a sense of connectedness with the universe that militates against squashing other sentiences.
I mostly disagree with Ben, but I don’t think judging him based on that paper is fair. It’s pretty bad, but it was also written in 1996. Fourteen years is a lot of time to improve as a thinker.
I had that thought too, and I was thinking of retracting or amending my comment to that effect, but looking at some of his later publications in the same journal(?) suggests that he hasn’t leveled up much since then.
“The Futility Of Emergence” really annoys me. It’s a perfectly useful word. It’s a statement about the map rather than about the territory, but it’s a useful one. Whereas magic means “unknowable unknowns”, emergent means “known unknowns”—the stuff that we know follows, we just don’t know how.
e.g. Chemistry is an emergent property of the Schrodinger equation, but calculating anything useful from that is barely in our grasp. So we just go with the abstraction we know, and they’re separate sciences. But we do know we have that work to do.
Just linking to that essay every time someone you’re disagreeing with says “emergent” is difficult to distinguish from applause lights.
Saying the word “emergent” adds nothing. You’re right that it’s not as bad as calling something magic and declaring that it’s inherently unknowable, but it also offers zero explanatory power. To reword your example:
Chemistry is a property of the Schrodinger equation, but calculating anything useful from that is barely in our grasp. So we just go with the abstraction we know, and they’re separate sciences. But we do know we have that work to do.
There is absolutely no difference in meaning when you take the word “emergent” out. That’s why it isn’t useful, which Eliezer was pointing out.
Nitpick: I don’t think that is exactly what EY was pointing out. Take a look at the comments and the general response of “Huh? Who makes that mistake?” It seems EY was complaining about the tendency of AGI researchers to use “emergence” as if it were an explanation, not ordinary use of the word that doesn’t pretend it is one but just, say, points out that the behavior is surprising given what it’s composed of, or that your current methods aren’t powerful enough to predict the consequences. He didn’t seem to have realized that particular mistake was mostly localized to AGI people.
It seems more likely that when the cited people said “intelligence is an emergent phenomenon”, they were misunderstood as proposing that as a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon.
There is absolutely no difference in meaning when you take the word “emergent” out. That’s why it isn’t useful, which Eliezer was pointing out.
I’m not entirely sure this is correct. I wouldn’t call the trajectories of planets and galaxies “properties” of Relativity, but I would call it emergent behavior due to Relativity. It’s a stylistic and grammatical choice, like when to use “which” and when to use “that.” They may seem the same to the uninitiated, but there’s a difference and the initiated can tell when you’re doing it wrong.
So, I agree with David Gerard that trying to eradicate the use of the word is misplaced. It’d be like saying “the word ‘which’ is obsolete, we’re only going to use ‘that’ and look down on anyone still using ‘which’.” You lose far more by such a policy than you gain.
I don’t take Goertzel seriously for the same reason I don’t take young earth creationists seriously. It’s not that I disagree with him, it’s that his beliefs have almost no connection to reality.
From what I’ve seen, the people who comment here who have read Broderick’s book have come away, if not convinced psy describes some real physical phenomena, convinced that the case isn’t at all open and shut the way young earth creationism is. When an issue is such that smart, sane people can disagree then you have to actually resolve the object level disagreement before you can use someone’s beliefs on the issue in a general argument about their rationality. You can’t just assume it as you do here.
Goertzel’s paper on the subject is about extending the de Broglie Bohm pilot wave theory in a way that accounts for psi while being totally consistent with all known physics. Maybe it is nonsense, I haven’t read it. But you can’t assume it is.
Maybe it is nonsense, I haven’t read it. But you can’t assume it is.
I disagree. I do not need to (and should not) discard my priors when evaluating claims.
It would be an error in reasoning on my part if I did not account for the low prior (to reading it) probability of a psyonics theory being sane when evaluating the proponents other claims. For emphasis: not lowering my confidence in Goertzel’s other beliefs because he is a proponent of psi without me having read his paper would be an outright mistake.
I also note that you defending Goertzel on the psi point is evidence against Goertzel’s beliefs regarding AI. Extremely weak evidence.
Could you unpack your reasoning? Do you mean that Jack defending Goertzel on psi discredits defense of Goertzel on AI because it shows such defense to be less correlated to the validity of the opinion than previously thought? Or did you drop a negation or something and mean the opposite of what you wrote, because Jack defending Goertzel on psi is very slight evidence of Goertzel’s opinion on psi not being as crazy as you previously thought?
If someone is unable to examine the available evidence and come to a sane conclusion on a particular topic, this makes it less likely that they are able to examine the available evidence and to sane conclusions on other topics.
I don’t take Goertzel seriously for the same reason I don’t take young earth creationists seriously. It’s not that I disagree with him, it’s that his beliefs have almost no connection to reality.
(If it makes you feel better, I have read some of Goertzel’s writing on AGI, and it’s stuffed full of magical thinking.)
I’d be interested to hear more about that.
From Ten Years to a Positive Singularity:
and
From The Singularity Institute’s Scary Idea (And Why I Don’t Buy It):
From Chance and Consciousness:
And pretty much all of On the Algebraic Structure of Consciousness and Evolutionary Quantum Computation.
This is all just from fifteen minutes of looking around his website. I’m amazed anyone takes him seriously.
Oh...
wow.
I think that paper alone proves your point quite nicely.
I mostly disagree with Ben, but I don’t think judging him based on that paper is fair. It’s pretty bad, but it was also written in 1996. Fourteen years is a lot of time to improve as a thinker.
I had that thought too, and I was thinking of retracting or amending my comment to that effect, but looking at some of his later publications in the same journal(?) suggests that he hasn’t leveled up much since then.
“The Futility Of Emergence” really annoys me. It’s a perfectly useful word. It’s a statement about the map rather than about the territory, but it’s a useful one. Whereas magic means “unknowable unknowns”, emergent means “known unknowns”—the stuff that we know follows, we just don’t know how.
e.g. Chemistry is an emergent property of the Schrodinger equation, but calculating anything useful from that is barely in our grasp. So we just go with the abstraction we know, and they’re separate sciences. But we do know we have that work to do.
Just linking to that essay every time someone you’re disagreeing with says “emergent” is difficult to distinguish from applause lights.
Saying the word “emergent” adds nothing. You’re right that it’s not as bad as calling something magic and declaring that it’s inherently unknowable, but it also offers zero explanatory power. To reword your example:
There is absolutely no difference in meaning when you take the word “emergent” out. That’s why it isn’t useful, which Eliezer was pointing out.
Nitpick: I don’t think that is exactly what EY was pointing out. Take a look at the comments and the general response of “Huh? Who makes that mistake?” It seems EY was complaining about the tendency of AGI researchers to use “emergence” as if it were an explanation, not ordinary use of the word that doesn’t pretend it is one but just, say, points out that the behavior is surprising given what it’s composed of, or that your current methods aren’t powerful enough to predict the consequences. He didn’t seem to have realized that particular mistake was mostly localized to AGI people.
It seems more likely that when the cited people said “intelligence is an emergent phenomenon”, they were misunderstood as proposing that as a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon.
Nitpick accepted.
I’m not entirely sure this is correct. I wouldn’t call the trajectories of planets and galaxies “properties” of Relativity, but I would call it emergent behavior due to Relativity. It’s a stylistic and grammatical choice, like when to use “which” and when to use “that.” They may seem the same to the uninitiated, but there’s a difference and the initiated can tell when you’re doing it wrong.
So, I agree with David Gerard that trying to eradicate the use of the word is misplaced. It’d be like saying “the word ‘which’ is obsolete, we’re only going to use ‘that’ and look down on anyone still using ‘which’.” You lose far more by such a policy than you gain.
IIRC, that post was adequately dismantled in its comments.
From what I’ve seen, the people who comment here who have read Broderick’s book have come away, if not convinced psy describes some real physical phenomena, convinced that the case isn’t at all open and shut the way young earth creationism is. When an issue is such that smart, sane people can disagree then you have to actually resolve the object level disagreement before you can use someone’s beliefs on the issue in a general argument about their rationality. You can’t just assume it as you do here.
Yes, here WrongBot is safe to assume basic physics.
Edit for the sake of technical completeness: And biology.
Goertzel’s paper on the subject is about extending the de Broglie Bohm pilot wave theory in a way that accounts for psi while being totally consistent with all known physics. Maybe it is nonsense, I haven’t read it. But you can’t assume it is.
I disagree. I do not need to (and should not) discard my priors when evaluating claims.
It would be an error in reasoning on my part if I did not account for the low prior (to reading it) probability of a psyonics theory being sane when evaluating the proponents other claims. For emphasis: not lowering my confidence in Goertzel’s other beliefs because he is a proponent of psi without me having read his paper would be an outright mistake.
I also note that you defending Goertzel on the psi point is evidence against Goertzel’s beliefs regarding AI. Extremely weak evidence.
Huh?
I mean what is written in the straightforward English sense. I mention it to emphasize that all evidence counts.
Could you unpack your reasoning? Do you mean that Jack defending Goertzel on psi discredits defense of Goertzel on AI because it shows such defense to be less correlated to the validity of the opinion than previously thought? Or did you drop a negation or something and mean the opposite of what you wrote, because Jack defending Goertzel on psi is very slight evidence of Goertzel’s opinion on psi not being as crazy as you previously thought?