[ExI] Symbol Grounding

Sun Apr 23 10:06:11 UTC 2023

On Sun, Apr 23, 2023, 12:44 AM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> *Not quite.  You represent knowledge of red things with an abstract word
> like ‘red’.  You can’t know what the word ‘red’ means without a
> dictionary.  While sentient beings represent knowledge of red things with
> physical qualities like redness and greenness.  Sentient beings don’t need
> a dictionary to know what physical redness is like.  So, we can know that
> you are abstract or not sentient. *This is why I literally hate this way
> to think about consciousness.
> The fact we experience redness is the most trivial and not essential
> component of conscious experience.
> It is just something that happens because again as animals that were
> created by the process of evolution, we need to make sense of sensory
> experiences to survive. The sensory experiences are not the hallmark of
> consciousness and they are not the atomic components of consciousness. It
> is a deep misconception that they are.
> It is actually a trick philosophers came up with to claim humans have some
> kind of superiority vs machines. It is utter bs.
>
> Abstraction is what makes us really conscious. This actually is an
> emergent property that comes out from these experiences of the world.
> Biological life needs amino acids but it is not what makes life. I can make
> artificial life that doesn't need amino acids.
>
> 1) Sentient beings make sense of redness because they have dictionaries.
> The redness is the translation of neural code. There is no difference in
> terms of the real language of the brain, the neural code of spikes between
> saying red and seeing red.
> The details of the code is maybe different but it is still code written in
> the same language. Period.
> 2) Thinking and abstracting the word red is actually a more conscious act
> than seeing red. It requires more complex code, more hierarchical
> components, and more self-referral loops. Using the fact computers do not
> have the experience of red that humans have is a TERRIBLE argument to claim
> computers are not sentient. The fact that actually can make the abstraction
> makes them conscious and maybe even more conscious than humans given their
> level of abstraction is superior to many humans.
>

I am curious now. When we ask GPT-4 to imagine red, is it able to picture
this color in it's mind's eye? Does the totality of descriptions and
knowledgeable relations concerning the color, as described by all the
humans who have ever written it, provide it with enough information to
successfully imagine (model?) the experience of color in it's head?

It's not quite Mary's room, as during its training GPT-4 effectively
performed radical brain surgery upon itself, (something Mary was never
allowed to do, and is something I think alters the outcome of the thought
experiment). If red is defined by a series of mathematical relationships,
why couldn't an AI learning what those relationships are, model them to a
sufficient fidelity to experience them?

Just some food for thought. I don't argue that it does or doesn't have this
capacity, only that it isn't definitive to me either way.

Jason

>
> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 8:25 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> *my subjective experience is a 3D model*Your subjective experience
>> happens because of a material substratum, and it is real, I agree with
>> that. There are chemical reactions, electrical pulses, ions moved from one
>> place to another, and electro-mechanical events like ion pumps closing and
>> opening.
>>
>>  But that is NOT your subjective experience. It is what supports it. It
>> is like going inside a computer and pointing to all the electrical
>> activity, all the zeros and ones going on and off, and saying this is the
>> video game I'm playing. Yes, it is but it is a trivial statement and
>> doesn't help us understand what the video is about.
>>
>>  It doesn't give us any insight on the narrative of the video game, the
>> rule of how to play it, the final objective. The material substratum is not
>> where we are going to find consciousness.
>>
>> It is in a sense irrelevant. Physiology has many alternative paths, if
>> one doesn't work it finds another way. Also, every functionalist will tell
>> you that I can substitute any of these physical processes with a digital
>> equivalent and I should be able to obtain the same result. There are a lot
>> of logical arguments and real experiments that show this is the case, it is
>> not just a nice theory.
>>
>>  I never heard of anybody that makes these crazy claims that meat brains
>> are necessary for consciousness explain exactly what is special about meat
>> brains to sustain consciousness that a digital equivalent cannot do.
>>
>> In fact, digital equivalents could do it better because they go to the
>> essence of what is important to the phenomenon. I gave you the example of
>> aerodynamics.
>>
>> To me, somebody that insists that meat brains are essential for
>> consciousness is like somebody that insists that feathers or flapping wings
>> are essential for flight. They are not, these things are some of the
>> solutions of natural selection related to the problem of flight but they
>> are not ideal or optimal. Airplanes have no feathers or flapping wings and
>> they are more efficient in flight than the best flying animals (there are
>> some niche flying applications like hovering, flying backward and so on
>> where we can learn from nature but you know what I mean).
>>
>> There is much resistance in this group toward insisting on some
>> particular material setup in the brain that is responsible for conscious
>> experience because not just our intuition but our knowledge of
>> neuroscience, physics, and computation is at odds with this particular
>> notion. It is not that we don't believe stuff happens in the brain that
>> underlies consciousness but this stuff is not essential in understanding
>> what consciousness is. The secret of consciousness is not in the glutamate
>> (or whatever) like the secret of flight is not in the feathers of birds.
>> Giovanni
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 7:34 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Hi Giovanni,
>>>
>>> Will gave some great advice.  Everything I say is just my opinion.  And
>>> I should especially be humble around all the people on this list, who are
>>> all so intelligent, in most cases far more intelligent than I.  And I am
>>> clearly in the minority.  So, what I say here, is just my opinion.  I
>>> appreciate everyone's patience with me.
>>>
>>> Giovanni, there are a bunch of ways of interpreting what you are saying
>>> here, and I don't know which interpretation to use.
>>> It seems to me, when I look at a strawberry, my subjective experience is
>>> a 3D model, composed of subjective qualities.  Are you saying that doesn't
>>> exist?
>>> Are you saying that Steven Lehar's bubble
>>> <https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness?chapter=the+world+in+your+head&format=360>
>>> world
>>> <https://canonizer.com/videos/consciousness?chapter=the+world+in+your+head&format=360>,
>>> doesn't exist?  And are you saying that when there is a single pixel, on
>>> the surface of the strawberry, switching between redness and greenness,
>>> there is not something in the brain, which is your knowledge of that
>>> change, and all the other pixels that make up the 3D awareness, which, yes,
>>> is a model that represents every pixel of the strawberry, out there?
>>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 4:36 PM Giovanni Santostasi <
>>> gsantostasi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Brent,
>>>> There is something very wrong with your drawing. The arrow from Complex
>>>> Perception Process (CPP) to the 3D model doesn't exist. I think that is the
>>>> key to all our clashes (not just mine but almost everybody else on the
>>>> list), also you don't need the language centers or just make it a bubble in
>>>> the conceptual models' cloud. Language is just another conceptual model
>>>> among the others. What you call a 3D model composed of subjective qualities
>>>> is identical to that cloud of "conceptual models". I know it sounds weird
>>>> to you but what you see with your eyes is in a sense a model, it is not
>>>> made with words but images and colors and so on but that is the vocabulary
>>>> of the visual system. It is another form of language. It is a model because
>>>> it is re-created using some algorithm that interprets and manipulates the
>>>> information received, it filters what is not needed and makes
>>>> interpolations to make sense of the data.
>>>> Giovanni
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 2:01 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Your model is based on a Naive Realism model.
>>>>>
>>>>> Here is a representational model which will actually be possible
>>>>> without magic:
>>>>>
>>>>> [image: image.png]
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 5:19 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Here is a diagram (because I'm generally a visual person, and can
>>>>>> usually understand things if I can draw them):
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A very general, high-level and crude diagram that tries to illustrate
>>>>>> the concept of 'symbol grounding' as I understand it, from these
>>>>>> discussions we've been having. Plus an arrow representing output of speech
>>>>>> or text, or anything really, that the system is capable of outputting
>>>>>> (obviously there's a hell of a lot going on in every single element in the
>>>>>> diagram, that I'm ignoring for simplicity's sake).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> As far as I understand, the 'symbol grounding' occurs between the
>>>>>> conceptual models (built up from sensory inputs and memories) and the
>>>>>> language centres (containing linguistic 'tokens', or symbols), as we've
>>>>>> previously agreed.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There are two arrows here because the models can be based on or
>>>>>> include data from the language centres as well as from the environment. The
>>>>>> symbols (tokens) in the language centres represent, and are 'grounded in',
>>>>>> the conceptual models (these are the object and action models I've
>>>>>> discussed earlier, and likely other types of models, too, and would include
>>>>>> a 'self-model' if the system has one, linked to the token "I").
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The sensory inputs are of various modalities like vision, sounds,
>>>>>> text, and so-on (whatever the system's sensors are capable of perceiving
>>>>>> and encoding), and of course will be processed in a variety of ways to
>>>>>> extract 'features' and combine them in various ways, etc.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I didn't include something to represent Memory, to keep things as
>>>>>> simple as possible.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> So, could we say that this diagram illustrates, in a very general
>>>>>> way, what's going on in a human? in a LLM AI? Both? Neither?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Would you say it's broadly correct, or missing something, or
>>>>>> incorrect in another way?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Ben
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
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