Although GPT-3 was released ages ago (in AI time), it continues to generate interesting conversations, particularly with regard to the path toward general artificial intelligence. Building off a discussion of some others in the field (centered around the potential upside of scaling deep learning models), Scott Aaronson (a quantum computing expert who writes Shtetl-Optimized) and …
Consciousness is a difficult problem to grapple with, mainly due to its inherently subjective nature. We don’t yet understand the brain well enough to say much about how it does anything, let alone to describe how it gives rise to (or doesn’t give rise to) conscious experience. Due to this limitation, we’re currently reliant on …
A Different Perspective on Searle’s Chinese Room Read More »
2040: “Hm, that’s odd,” thought Dr. Newerton. He peered back over his notes, trying again to make sense of the study he had just reviewed on cortex function. Two years ago, his group had thought they were on the cusp of understanding the brain, but now that goal was feeling more and more elusive. The …
Humans (and all other brain-having organisms) interact with the world in a hierarchical manner, starting from the top and working down. When we decide to engage in an action, we make the decision at the highest level (for example, deciding to write a blog post), and then break up that action into its lower level …
I recently shared my last post on the Chinese room to Reddit, which led to some productive discussions in the comments. I thought it may be helpful to share some excerpts from one of those threads here, as it provides a slightly different way of thinking about the issue. Hope you find this discourse interesting …
The Chinese Room Argument is a thought experiment designed by John Searle to show why computers are not capable of consciousness or intentionality. For those unfamiliar, Searle’s concise version of the argument goes: “Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) …
We’ve now touched on the idea of general artificial intelligence (i.e. above human level) in a couple posts, and so it seemed time for a more thorough examination of how we might get there, and of what this type of “superintelligence” might look like. We’ll start out by taking a step back, and looking at …
A number of other posts so far have touched on what it is that brains do – and for the most part, it’s been summarized as “creating a model of the world”. By this, we’ve meant that certain patterns of neural activity can be understood as representing or standing for some observed pattern of material …
Consciousness is, and may always be, a slightly thorny subject to discuss. For many people, no physical explanation is suitable, as it never seems to address questions along the lines of “but why does it feel like something to be me? I can think and see things and do things – we need to explain …
“Open your eyes, Harry.” The noise wakes me up, and I open my eyes. The light from the room floods my eyes, and then I begin to make sense of my bearings, remembering with a jolt where I am. Has the experiment worked? I see Dr. Chet looking at me intently, jotting down notes, with …