gnramires
In fact I think this is a particularly important distinction right now, that intelligence seems (to me somewhat unexpectedly/counterintuitively) somewhat independent from consciousness, at least as far as artificial systems go (for example, old school chess engines are much capable than humans at chess but are definitely not sentient or conscious).
I think offline exams already work pretty well for this, although I think they do tend to favour a bit much a specific kind of student, so other types of exams could be mixed in, like the proposed digestions of Tao et al, maybe giving a lecture and have a student/professional panel give it a pass/fail, and so on (just throwing a few ideas!).
At least, as far as I can tell this is the urgent matter, along with convincing students that being a mathematician is still a valid choice, and funding agencies that mathematicians should still be funded. That last point is where I think the general public should speak in support of keeping funding, I am not sure at what level. I know there are many other issues in society, like people with food insecurity or just hunger in many parts of the world, preventable disease, etc., but I think it's worthwhile to keep professional mathematics (not sure at what level?) because of how much our complex society benefits if not relies on it still.
Please an expert chime in to complement, but I believe simulation in quantum mechanics is a quite interesting and not so simple topic.
I believe the more correct thing to say is that quantum mechanics is approximable than simply computable. Don't forget, QM and current physical theories use real numbers, which are not digitally representable; although it seems also the case that information is locally bounded. The finite distribution of states and probabilistic dynamics is I believe is fundamentally what makes information bounded, (which forbids for example naive hypercomputation and I think several paradoxes that might arise from unbounded local information) but don't forget in general the dynamics is still based on continuous quantities as far as we know, not discrete quantities like in a computer. QM is about discrete states within a continuum set interacting with continuum dynamics, I think is accurate to say. Quantum field theory probably complicates things more but similar conclusions might be valid. This continuum dynamics can't be computed exactly, at most you could achieve a pretty good approximation; you'd also need to provision probabilities, either from pseudorandomness (which technically would invalidate the probabilistic model, although in practice this invalidation is not feasibly distinguishable by an observer of current human-scale computing power) or gathering environmental noise.
It's really interesting to me how nature is kind of surprising and defiant of simple hypothesis we come up with. But I think each of those characteristics plays a role, is an important part of existence somehow, and we should keep trying to understand why each aspect of nature is the particular way it is for their numerous insights into our condition and existence.
I believe pretty much the same thing. It probably isn't all or nothing.
But for me personally I'm really interested not only in what it is (although I'm very much interested in that), but because the problem is so thorny (as you mention subjective), I am first centrally interested in how (or if) we can actually know it reliably. So subjectivity is part of reality, as the mind is part of reality. In principle, it seems we should be able to understand quite a bit about subjectivity because of this, because it is part of reality. For example, the mind clearly obeys causality and all other principles (that I know of) we observe (elsewhere) in reality.
So I've been studying this along side with ethics, as the two are deeply interrelated, and I think ethics is an important field to develop, and to develop additional certain around (many people find difficulty in finding meaning in life). By ethics I mean what we should do, what is good, and from that also of course how we should behave toward each other.
You can read some of my studies here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Dxco4XDttx5cNWjfj/how-to-dis...
and here: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1iv1x1m/the...
I believe in a very open science way of working, feel free to contribute :)
That said, I have no formal philosophical training (although I did study so philosophers), but I believe for philosophy as for math and science the soundness of the arguments (as well as consistency with reality/experimental verification) are what is fundamental.
> was it a slow awakening to the world bit by bit (this is my take)
Yes, I usually have been facing this kind of problems using some tools inspired by math and logic. For example, take some supporting arguments (1) it is known that humans undergo significant changes throughout our lives, we gain neurons and neural connection in childhood, and lose those throughout our lives (although I believe the brain as a whole is very dynamic throughout). There didn't seem to be any turn on/off of sentience in my own life; (2) Even my earliest memories point to a gradual awakening; (3) In my discussion with Dagon, he brought I think a central point: probably sentience isn't a single phenomenon or something you turn on/off. It's probably more a whole array of inner sensations (that may compose greater structures, longer lasting sensations), kind of like a zoo of experiences. It's us that desperately want to be a single, or singular thing, which I believe is related to our instincts and notion of ego. So the self or ego seems like it is not a fundamental thing, but simply a way we understand or organize our society, and I do think it's important in practice. I think we're more like a collection of interrelated internal phenomena, which can probably significantly vary in intensity, duration, how good they are (this is a key and tricky point I believe!), etc.. This might be analogous to fields and particles in physics. As far as we currently know, it seems fields are arguably more fundamental than particles (or rather a possible distinct and complete interpretation), and fields are extended and not discrete phenomena. Particles are useful approximations or abstractions of field behavior in this sense. In closure, indeed sentience does not seem like anything like an on-an-off, 0/1 phenomenon, as explained in the cases above.
I really want to know how much can we know about sentience. If my hypotheses above are true, then I think we can establish some elementary facts only about sentience, like you mentioned it seems clear to me as well you need some kind of information processing system, the volume of information probably matters, and its internal structure probably matters as well. Consider that in any object at a temperature above 0K, there is an enormous flux of information corresponding to interaction between particles, essentially thermal flow or local kinetic information. Clearly any piece of matter is not sentient. So clearly what information is being exchanged and how, how it is processed and transformed matters. I think a useful principle in this regard is simply that the information should (as a sufficient, and maybe almost necessary condition) represent certain things and form networks of representation or meaning. Basically, sentience (which gives meaning to life) seems pretty much built on meaning: in the sense of representation and interrelation of abstract concepts, for example, like the state of your body, known persons and ideas, places, and so on (some of this meaning seems quite instinctive and non-verbal, I do not believe human language is a total necessity for those experiences to manifest, I think there are proto-linguistic representations in our minds; so I do believe animals probably do have varying degrees of sentience; indeed many of those meaningful representations many times are just bodily signals like pain, relief (like when you drink water after being thirsty), taste from food, or abstract feelings from music, and so on).
So as we require a more and more complete (e.g. finding more specific necessary conditions for them to manifest, and also more detailed sufficient conditions) conditions for those sentience phenomena, we will I think meet a vast array, a huge number of distinctive phenomena, and those phenomena manifest in different character, intensity and frequency depending on the individual (like comparing what a human experiences with some animal of other species). I think that will find close associations with the study of art. Like we know there is more energetic or more relaxed music, or more melancholic or more upbeat, and those feel different. We already know a whole lot about sentience :)
Now we do come back to the question of whether we can tell say an LLM manifests those phenomena internally. Beside everything I said, I think it's a matter of studying its structure and seeing comparatively how much it transforms and analyzes information (with a certain originality, perhaps, i.e. non-memorization) versus how much its answers are simply kind of rote and non-transformative (basically a high degree of memorization) (like the lookup table example I gave previously). Those are all observations built on our first hand experience of being sentient beings, and couldn't be otherwise -- the "laws of the mind" are not provable in elementary systems of logic (somewhat like the laws of physics are not either). Logic is able to tell only which of a number of candidate theories is internally consistent (note logical consistency itself has an experimental motivation from observing nature! (e.g. logic is related to causality in nature)), but it cannot tell which of candidate consistent theories is the case. For example, someone can claim sentience simply does not exist. There is nothing logically inconsistent in that theory by itself, but its inconsistent with our own experience of the world (I think, therefore I am). I've seen some pretty wild claims on the internet :) which I don't believe are true -- you can find propositions that the meaning of life is this or that (for example, to have power or wealth) -- I reject those propositions in a similar manner to stating "I think, therefore I am" -- sentience is evidently true from personal experience, and it being true, and us essentially being "made out of" sentience or sentient phenomena, all that matters must concern that, and not any external objects like wealth or power. It's clear to me wealth does not automatically determine the character of your sentience, and neither does power.
Another central interest of studying sentience is understanding whether some experience (or set thereof) is good or bad -- for the lack of being aware of a better term, I call this valence (i.e. how much value it has). That is important of course to us, because we don't want to just live, we want somehow to have good lives. This is something else that is experimentally true, I believe: when you suffer or feel intense pain, for example, you can verify that indeed there are bad feelings; and likewise when you have gone through good moments, afterwards you become convinced of their existence. This is kind of tricky because I don't think what we desire is necessarily good, or things we don't desire necessarily bad (i.e. it seems motivation, which is a lot driven by instinct, is distinct from genuine valence). And in general this self-knowing process has many important personal limitations like our limited memories and limited capacity to compare different feelings.
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Finally, it is not clear to me this project (for example, of being able to have some rough scientific measure of how intense and frequent are sentient phenomena (or qualia) of an LLM versus a typical or given human -- say e.g. 50,000x more or less intense) is at all feasible, given the limitations of humanity and technology, it's not clear we can do more than handwave "Something, something information processing, something something meaning!" :) But I do think it's worthwhile to try and see what we can find.
> it sets up a future conflict based upon the state that a human has
It's not clear to me it does.
> It's based on a number of presumptions that only a particular set of arrangements of matter, well, matter.
Well, this premise must be true, I think. How could it be otherwise?
> And those that matter happen to be watery sacks of meat.
This I disagree with. My comment contains no such claims that only humans matter.
> So in your framework you setup a definition of what an external measurement of someones sentience state... Now, someone makes a machine that outputs those states and externally behaves as if it has sentience.
So, this is something we need to be very cautious about, I think. First, we don't really know what makes someone sentient. I do not claim to know, and certainly not know with a high degree of certainty (I may have a few incomplete hypothesis).
First, it's clear to me that someone's external behavior does not dictate sentience (positively or negatively). I gave some examples, but I think this can be pretty reliably established. To make things simpler, divide the candidate sentient systems by their "output quantity/quality", from less to more. (1) On the "no output side", it's clear that someone can think a lot and have a wonderful inner life without being able to speak. There are (some medical) cases of people going long periods without speaking by choice or by medical condition. Those people can be sentient just fine, obviously you shouldn't need to speak or "output" anything to be considered having an inner life. (2) On the "human-like output" (or superhuman), the argument becomes more involved. First, clearly just the output itself being indistinguishable from human is not sufficient because it could be for example a simple program that just pastes some verbatim copy of a never seen dialogue. Or very simple chatbots that are quite convincing at appearing human (can fool many judges for a while), but clearly also are not sentient. Even for a for a system that genuinely resembles a real human even with under scrutiny, (with all sorts of similar abilities across all fields), consider the case that this system could be simply one astronomically large (unrealistic, I know) lookup table. Basically, it simply works inside by fetching an indexed piece of data and returns it. This is possible, although this machine would need to be astronomical in scale (so it's more of a thought experiment). It shows to me, convincingly, the actual "internal" or "microscale" even implementation of your thoughts matter critically for sentience. I presume, for example, that even if some small portion of your mental activity (i.e. a kind of "subcircuit" in your brain) were replaced by something like a lookup table, you would lose part of the experience of that mental activity. This is clear when the content of your mind differs when you're trying a (kind of) problem for the first time and when you're solving one for the umpteenth time. The latter (possibly, not necessarily) feels more boring, also normally more automatic with less thinking required as you've built habitual responses.
> What do you then? Upturn the table and get mad because your classification system no longer just contains humans?
I would do no such thing. I would welcome any other kinds of sentience. But it would be important to me to carefully establish and understand what kind of systems are sentient, indeed in large part to protect them.
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My main point is that you kind of need to start with sentient minds to understand what sentience is (and of course, not only that, but sentient minds that are aware of their sentience and willing/keen to study it). If you start without sentience, it doesn't seem like this particular concept would form a necessary basis for a theory of action or motivation. Like you can't prove from elementary mathematical premises that sentience is important, I don't think. We need to start from some knowledge that derives from first-hand experience of being an actual sentient being, and expand, solidify or formalize this knowledge to be able to understand it with scientific precision (or anything close to it).
The way I've been thinking about it is not that internal experience is unfalsifiable, along with the modern science connotation that everything that is unfalsifiable is automatically irrelevant (which would be quite absurd, as everything that is dear and meaningful to humans are all simply cognitive phenomena in the end!). It's that it is externally, naively and a-priori unfalsifiable. That is, you can't externally measure or prove it, without having an a-priori theory of what it is and how it happens in the first place. But it is internally falsifiable, in the sense that if we have it, then we know we have it. Note that it's not that "If I have it, then I say I have it", or that "I one has it, he says he has it"; those are all communication to the external world, and for example machines can clearly say they have it without having it, or you can have it before even learning the words that represent it. But if you have it, you can know you do. This actually creates some potential for expanding this knowledge, maybe, in the future, to allow for external verification. We can internally investigate properties associated with consciousness, and from those properties (along with scientific knowledge), maybe one day we will know more about the objective basis which affords consciousness/sentience manifesting or emerging. So I see it like an experimental field where the component of self-assessment or self-experimentation or self-measurement is essential (again along with more conventional scientific notions).
I have been thinking the same way about all properties of life/consciousness, in particular if we think of ethics as a property of (even if you consider the ethics or ideals only pertaining to how it would be ideal to lead your own life) the mind, or of sentience in general. I think of ethics as an inherent property of existence: it stems from the fact that internal experiences/internal life/sentience/etc. are the only thing that could have value, that in fact sentience is experimentally (again taking the point of view of experimental sentience) the only thing that truly matters or has value. If we are minds, we know that only the content of minds can matter; it cannot matter, for example, that a lone rock in some place no one can know about has this or that fate, because there is no mind to interact or perceive and be affected in any way by it. So all of ethics can probably be founded or based upon this kind of observation, and the act of experimental self-observation of consciousness. And I think it's quite important that we collectively recognize those values and what matters to make our lives better (better yet, as good as it can be!) :)
In particular I associate '*' (used as *ptr, i.e. content that ptr points to), with content, as opposed to '&' (from &var, address of var), so again '*' means content thing points to. But in declaration, when you declare 'char *ptr', which is a pointer to a char, you clearly can't read it exactly the same way ("char with content of a pointer"? More like, the content of a pointer is char). So maybe another symbol like @ (denoting "is a pointer"), or just the keyword pointer, might make things clearer, so you'd have 'char pointer ptr' (ptr is a pointer to a char, read backwards) or simply 'char @ ptr'. The shorter '@' would be justified when you have multiple pointer e.g. when working with multidimensional arrays (which are often @@@float, something like that). Just an idea that occurred me ;)
(Although I hadn't thought about pcfwik's principle that it's written as used, that makes somewhat more sense to me)*
Edit: Said otherwise, in usage syntax the convention (or at least my way of thinking) may be left-to-right, "content of" or "address of", while in declaration we read right-to-left, "is an int", or "is a pointer", and it would make sense to me that the symbol for "is a pointer" is different than the symbol for "content of"/"address of".
> The logical steps that proofs are built on all have that common foundation. Our concept of logic based on our subjective experience of "truth." We've built machines that reproduce our subjective processes mechanically, but there is no sense in which this idea of "true" is truly objective. It happens to be computationally convenient, and it has some relationship to experience, but that doesn't make it an independent reality that all possible observers, human and otherwise, would agree on.
I continue to think extensively about truth, but currently I disagree. There are senses in which truth can be well established, and those are quite important. I think the basic essence of truth is how we can make a statement (or a model), and have a system for measuring either reality or just mathematical/abstract objects, and verify the statement through this measurement.
As you note, for current mathematics it seems like all of it (all things we call mathematics at the moment) can in principle be formalized in a logic that is machine-verifiable, that is, essentially objective. We're well on our way to demonstrating this for most of mathematics (already most undergraduate curriculum). I think that's because almost the definition of math is that is has this property: in my opinion mathematics has distinguished itself as being the "science of certainty" as applied to language and abstract thought. The way this certainty is achieved is through agreeing on some fundamental assumptions and how certain rules (which are also assumptions themselves) can act on those assumptions to constitute theorems. Theorems are not necessarily physical-world truths/properties (at least not in a simple way in the universe we currently inhabit), you can study alternate physical laws that aren't compatible with our (approximately) Newtonian world, for example. They are logical/abstract-world truths that result from your assumptions. Pretty much by definition (and in a somewhat limited), then, mathematics (at least as far as things like truth of theorems in certain axiomatic systems) is inherently objective, machine-verifiable even.
What's left to be subjective, I would say, isn't really the notion of truth in mathematics, it's which assumptions we should elect to investigate, and which theorems should we elect to prove within those assumptions. Some mathematicians also have some notion of "absolute truth", and tend to reject systems of assumptions (axioms) that don't match what they regard as true -- basically going in reverse and searching for assumptions that can enable a theorem (which effectively acts as an additional assumption).
This activity needs certain basic premises to make sense, for example if a set of assumptions proves that a property holds, and also that a property doesn't hold; or if they predict a certain value X is the result of a dynamical model, and also predict that a different value Y is the result of such a model/equation, then we reject those premises. In a certain sense we are most interested in premises that have, even if a very weak, correspondence to reality.
I think it's more informative to recognize that it's not that everything is subjective[1], it's that everything is experimental. For example, the claim above that measurements and correct predictions can only have a singular valid value, corresponds to our experience with reality, in which in a certain way is singular; there are not multiple realities; objects have definite positions. Even if you think of quantum mechanics, in which we may say particles follow a distribution instead, we still say then there's a singular distribution a particle might have at any single time. Logic itself isn't random, it's connected to empirical observations about reality, which tends to increase the chance that conclusions for logic (which is made to share some properties with reality) tend to be valid in the physical world, of course often dependent on what additional statements you pile on top.
There is also another interesting lens that mathematics is artistic (and I think this will become increasingly important) -- making maths and learning maths is a kind of satisfying cognitive activity in its own right, and we also tend to chose what to explore mathematics on those grounds (in fact historically, pre-18th century say, this might be one of the main drivers of mathematical development, I believe[2]). But of course this is again just a reflection of the actual real properties of human cognition, and also this interest and satisfaction often becomes connected, if sometimes faintly, with the ability of math to represent reality (in a particularly satisfying way) and its objects of interest (for example patterns in nature). Another description for this aspect is maths as being hobby-like, about solving puzzles, or like a (hopefully enjoyable) game.
Note that for this particular "game", the objectivity (or if you prefer, machine-objectivity or consensus-machine-verifiability) of the rules and their application is a significant bonus, it makes the game much more interesting, increases its potential when everyone can agree and the rules and not "capricious" (simply dependent on whims of other people and judges); this gives practitioners safety and security and enables a wide social reach -- most games strive to have objective rules.
Arguably this kind of activity is valuable for the cognitive and subjective development of people that has lasting importance.
> Animal brains can't abstract like (some of) our brains can. What are the odds our brains are limitless and don't have some similarly crippling limitations from a couple of levels up?
Well, this happens sometimes. In cases where there are phenomena like universality. For example, in any computation machine model (state machines, pushdown automata, etc.) has limitations that we can say makes them less powerful then Turing Machines. But then Turing machines can simulate any other machine, becoming a kind of ultimate or last stage (at least in terms of abstract capability) machine. It may be that our cognition has some bounded universality properties (I think it's likely it does).
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In summary, I still think mathematics has a lot of human potential in terms of (1) high level human guidance, (2) an internal artistic/subjective sensibility to the subject, (3) safeguarding human understanding of the world and associated individual intellectual development.
[1] Again, I just argued that there is a strong sense in which for example mathematics isn't subjective at all, but sure I do believe in a weak sense everything is subjective in the sense that everything is known or filtered or sensed through our minds which have limitations and aren't simple deterministic machines.
[2] For example, I believe for the Greeks geometry was intimately connected to philosophy/aesthetics (e.g. Platonism) and very little to applications. In ancient times and middle ages maths developed a lot from astronomical observations that had some applications but I think were largely cultural and ritualistic. In the late middle ages European aristocracy would fund mathematics largely for its inherent interest as an intellectual activity, and many nobleman enjoyed mathematics as a past time and would challenge each other to puzzles. Japan had Sangaku, in which mathematics was made for fun, aesthetic purposes and possibly bragging rights. No one actually needed to build say spheres in obtuse constructions with certain radii :)
Side note: if we needed more reasons to conserve the amazing and enormous spectrum of life, one more reason is this kind of discovery that might enable better understanding (and maybe enhancement one day) of cell growth and regeneration in humans. Also showing that biology in many ways is extremely far ahead of what humans can achieve with current technology or will for the foreseeable future (as much as the automata example is very neat, it's nowhere near self-assembling full working and self-reproducing creatures from a compact genetic code!).
It seems you can donate directly to help Axolotl conservation (which again is critically endangered), seems really important if you can help! [2] (although there are of course many other means to help if you're interested in conservation in general!)
[1] https://youtu.be/7cLaU_agj6k?&t=86
[2] https://www.moja.ong/programs/axolotl-habitat-conservation/ https://www.moja.ong/donar/
Now if you had a very good chess program running in very constrained (dynamic/RAM) memory, then that'd be partially more revealing. From a cursory search there's a 1800 ELO engine for the C64, which seems very impressive but very far from the best human players.
I'd be interested to see a curve of ELO x Avaliable RAM for the best chess engines (up to given RAM), and how that compares to other games and activities.
On RAM vs ROM (program size) memory, I think at a high level dynamic memory helps you keep track of search paths in a large tree search, saving you some computation. Program size tends to enable improving the effectiveness of your search heuristic, as well as pre-computing e.g. initial and final game optimal moves (potentially saving arbitrarily much compute). I like thinking about those things because I think the search paradigm is pretty informative of computation (and even intelligence) in general. Almost every problem is basically some kind of heuristic search in some kind of space. And you tend to get better at things by refining your heuristics (usually through some experimental training process or theoretical insight), considering more options, exploring deeper consequences, etc..
I think what really defines humans isn't really our ability to solve problems or play chess well etc. (although that's extremely useful and also enjoyable most of the time), it's really our emotions and inner world. We are not really Thinking Machines in essence, we're Feeling Machines most significantly. The thinking part is a neat instrumental part :) We can delegate thinking to machines but what we cannot extinguish is feeling or the human "soul", because that is the source of all meaning.
I think equally important is algorithmic transparency, that is, that the algorithm be publicly disclosed (although I think simplicity is a component of transparency: if you just dump a huge incomprehensible algorithmic mess somewhere that's not very helpful), so that you at least know what you are getting into, and better yet have some ability to choose and make educated critique of the current state of things (i.e. does the algorithm just maximize engagement like a slot machine? or does it optimize for some kind of helpfulness?).
If folding@home helps to understand and model this behavior of molecules (which I guess tends to be difficult and unreliable to do without the aid of computers), it is extremely helpful. Now I don't know other details like, perhaps molecular biology is the bottleneck and there is scant available molecules to analyze (reducing its impact/marginal sensitivity), or perhaps compute really is a bottleneck in this particular problem. But nonetheless it seems like a great project for which contributions do make a difference.
(Note: although, that said, if you were expecting something like 'compute->miracle drug comes out', I believe that's not quite how it works; research in general rarely works that way, I think because the constraint space and problem space that would require this approach is too large and complicated; and in fact I believe many if not most significant discoveries have resulted from playing around and investigating random molecules, often from (nonhuman) animals, plants and bacteria[1]; although molecular sciences (molecular biology) seem to enable a slightly more methodological approach)
[1] The GLP-1 based weight loss drugs for example came from investigating the Gila monster lizard venom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLP-1_receptor_agonist#History
First, art is, I think, one of the most enjoyable activities we have. One evidence is a lot of people forego higher salaries to choose an art job (although being a job carries additional responsibilities and some inconveniences compared to doing it as a hobby). It's a shame to see it diminished, when I believe we should be diverting efforts to automate other stuff.
Second, most AI art I've seen has been quite substandard compared to human art. We still don't know very well what human emotions are, the origin of sentience and qualia, etc.. But I think humans still lead here in having and probably understanding emotions. While for other tasks most implementation detail is irrelevant (e.g. in code, that it works tends to be most important, vs. minute choices in style), in art every detail is particularly relevant. Knowing this, it bothers me usually when I see this art that it doesn't carry the same knowledge of context and nuance a human would have.
Third, There's also the effect of making me question whether each piece of artwork was made by a human or AI, that didn't exist before. It does carry a bit of a magical feeling I think knowing a real person made every piece of artwork prior to 2018 or so (I think algorithmic art[1] is fine in this regard, because it tends to be more clearly algorithmic, and the involvement of the artist in coding is significant), that is now gone or at risk. Even the thought of imagining say their work day or what they had for lunch or talked to coworkers or friends is pleasant to me (at the risk of romanticizing it too much).
I suppose if AI art actually understood human nature, and specially the specific context of each art piece, better than us some of my arguments might be diminished. But the negatives so far seem to outweigh the positives, and I would like to e.g. give preference to content that doesn't use AI art.
(It is, admittedly, also the case that we lost a similar amount of craftsmanship when the industrial revolution happened, and in return we were able to support a larger population, and greater material conditions for most people. Every object now isn't carefully handcrafted. I think it's different because well, now material conditions are relatively abundant, and second there's no such insatiable, significant and irreplaceable demand for art as there were to common industrialized objects (take shoes for example), at least not to the same extent or vital significance. That is, the ability to have a shoe at all far outweighs it being carefully handcrafted, I believe; while experiencing a poorly made AI movie or artwork might be actually worse than none at all (or simply an older human made movie), and it also gets more cumbersome to evaluate for ourselves whether AI was employed or not. Also, while say shoes only last a limited time and need to be constantly produced, good artwork can last indefinitely (using digital storage), and even if you account for cultural change and relevance, can still last a really long time, motivating investing more into it.)
I'm quite sure that if we're still around in 500 or so years, we'll still be enjoying say Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh (probably as a digital reproduction). Current AI art will probably be largely discarded, so seems largely an unwise investment. Actually this kind of applies to code as well. It seems plausible Linux could still be used in 500 years from now (see how we still value finding Unix v4 50 years after), or at least of some interest. Those durable intellectual goods don't seem like wise places to invest anything but the best of us :) (at least in the cases it's not disposable)
The arguments above also don't seem to apply say in concept stages, or say for bland corporate diagrams that will be disposed of in 1 day, and which a huge quantity is needed. I think the main criteria I would evaluate is (1) Was it enjoyable to produce (for the artist(s))?; (2) Will it have a significant (artistic) impact on who is experiencing it?; (3) Will it last a long time?
[1] W.r.t. algorithmic art (and digital in general) (take bytebeat[2] for example), which is a field I really love, I am not any kind of absolutist about it. I know there tends to be extremely more degrees of freedom for human expression in a manual piece than in an algorithmic piece, so I see it more as a complement and not a substitute for more conventional art. I'd never give up ever hearing human musician player music for bytebeat, just bytebeat is a lovely experimental other dimension of expression. Writing a prompt seems a too few degrees of freedom and context, and too much of an uniform context that is less rich than humans can provide.
I think without open source something similar might have happened to a lot of software, but instead of becoming Open, they'd become gratis (free/zero cost), or almost so. The heart of the matter is that software has near-0 cost of distribution, so making 1 trillion is basically the same cost (to the developer) as making 1 unit. So since developers have free economies of scale, they are highly incentivized to lower the price to capture most of the market, I think. Software also requires relatively little maintenance, it doesn't rot[1] -- good software basically lasts forever with some minor up-keeping. Add in competition, and the tendency is for cost to go to near 0, at least for relatively popular software. But then there are two problems:
(1) If the company goes under, the software is lost, or rather it could be reverse engineered with huge difficulty and some information loss about the actual code.
(2) The incentives are still not well aligned with users. The makers are incentivized to rely on advertisements, get (and sell) user data, make their software addictive, and more.
On (1), FOSS software guarantees the source will be available and can be ported to new systems, basically becoming a common good. On (2), the incentives are very well aligned for FOSS, development can become a community effort, and in the rare case a developer would turn to collecting and selling user data or dark patterns, the software can be forked for example. In particular Open source funded by grants, donations and community/voluntary work is very aligned with public interest.
I get the downside that it could be unfair that developers aren't being paid as much, but I believe it wouldn't be much of a difference in income (for those kinds of software), and we can and should as a community donate to open source efforts (and since it's clearly in the public benefit I think governments, companies and all sorts of organizations would be wise to do so).
Finally, you're basically still free to create and sell closed source software, you just have to compete with community and volunteer efforts. I think it's well within your right (and it might make sense in some cases, say niche software). But I think it's worth considering carefully wether it's best for the product, for you and for the community to have it closed or open.
(also, indeed you can sell FOSS, but to be honest I don't know of many success stories in this regard (anyone share some examples?); I know arduino which is open software/hardware was very successful selling their genuine boards/having a pay request on download that you can dismiss. On Linux package managers make this difficult, although Flathub recently added donation buttons!).
[1] There are some issues popularly called "software rot", but it's basically some relatively minor (compared to the rot of many physical goods) compatibility issues when interacting systems change.
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?"
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
So there isn't necessarily some huge crisis that you need to justify: in some ways reality just is (and this includes subjective reality;).
Say if you ask why do the laws of physics conserve energy locally, you can actually argue that if it were otherwise actually life would be extremely more unlikely, as that tends to increase instability in various systems (both energy divergence and going to 0 makes life unlikely); but still I'm almost certain you could conceive of forms of life in non-energy-conservative systems (something like Conway's Game of Life, but maybe with more advance rules if you prefer). So while it makes sense that the physics in our universe is approximately locally conservative (maybe not exactly in GR?), in totality it's just kind of a brute fact, an experimental observation. Our theories help us devise say better experiments to test e. conservation, and in a way map out the landscape of consistent physical laws. But they don't tell you which realization of consistent or admissible laws you'll find yourself in.
Other way to phrase it, what you feel is in a way real. So if you feel in some fundamental way better reading A than B, then that simply reflects a property of reality and needs no further explanation. The only problem is that in some cases our judgement can be distorted, like by substances or maybe overwhelming blinding desires (that fail to reflect fundamental experiences) or by limitations of our memory, etc.. But if we assume this isn't the case (i.e. some pathological reason for your preference), then your feeling is valid irrespective of a wordy justification. I think some things really are subjective, but also believe in a fundamental and very complex way subjectivity is actually as objective as anything else. I think the fact that one experience is actually (with some important caveats and necessary context) better than another in what might be called essentially an objective sense, is one of the most counterintuitive things we will come to accept about the human mind. We tend to mistaken complexity (it's very complex to compare experiences) to impossibility (it's impossible to judge experiences objectively).
I believe in principle there might be the equivalent Laws of Physics (say Newtonian mechanics) for the human mind, but I suspect we're still very far from it, because it might require analyzing the network of n=100 trillion synapses in our brain. I think one day we might get there, but that would probably require something like a computational effort maybe at least several times n, or even on the order of n², or some other poly(n), and also poly(n) memory. If we think of one of the major objectives of physical law is to make predictions, and explain behavior, and say to aid in engineering and designing structures, I think one of the main objective of the laws of the mind would be say to predict whether say an experience or mental state is good or not, and explain why it is so; and then perhaps allow improving a little the design of things so that we have better experiences, that is, a better life. I guess this is already what say psychology, various spiritual traditions, philosophy and arts try to achieve (and I think gets already in many cases pretty close, maybe increasingly closer, to the still inaccessible extremely complicated reality of the human mind and brain).
Regardless, we often have to do our best with what we have today, which is our best-effort subjective judgement, aided by language various human disciplines :)
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1n6j1jg/pur...
The way I've been thinking about it is about organization. Organize code like we should organize our house. If you have a collection of pens, I guess you shouldn't leave them scattered everywhere and in your closet, and with your cutlery, and in the bathroom :) You should set up somewhere to keep your pens, and other utensils in a kind of neat way. You don't need to spend months setting up a super-pen-organizer that has a specially sculpted nook for your $0.50 pen that you might lose or break next week. But you make it neat enough, according to a number of factors like how likely it is to last, how stable is your setup, how frequently it is used, and so on. Organizing has several advantages: it makes it easier to find pens, shows you a breath of options quickly, keeps other places in your house tidier and so less cognitively messy as well. And it has downsides, like you need to devote a lot of time and effort, you might lose flexibility if you're too strict like maybe you've been labeling stuff in the kitchen, or doing sketches in your living room, and you need a few pens there.
I don't like the point of view that messiness (and say cognitive load) is always bad. Messiness has real advantages sometimes! It gives you freedom to be more flexible and dynamic. I think children know this when living in a strict "super-tidy" parent house :) (they'd barely get the chance to play if everything needs to be perfectly organized all the time)
I believe in real life almost every solution and problem is strongly multifactorial. It's dangerous to think a single factor, say 'cognitive load', 'don't repeat yourself', 'lesser lines of code', and so on is going to be the single important factor you should consider. Projects have time constraints, cost, need for performance; expressing programs, the study of algorithms and abstractions itself is a very rich field. But those single factors help us improve a little on one significant facet of your craft if you're mindful about it.
Another factor I think is very important as well (and maybe underestimated) is beauty. Beauty for me has two senses: one in an intuitive sense that things are 'just right' (which capture a lot of things implicitly). A second and important one I think is that working and programming, when possible, should be nice, why not. The experience of coding should be fun, feel good in various ways, etc. when possible (obviously this competes with other demands...). When I make procedural art projects, I try to make the code at least a little artistic as well as the result, I think it contributes to the result as well.
[1] a few small projects, procedural art -- and perhaps a game coming soon :)
I think one example might be that in medieval times maximizing joy and comfort could be a pretty good heuristic in a harsh life of labor. Those days we actually perhaps have to seek out some discomfort now and then, otherwise we'd be locked in our homes or bed ridden with all affordances some of us have; we have to force ourselves to exercise and not eat comfort food all the time; etc.. I think some hard drugs are a good example as well, a kind of technology that allows maximizing desire/pleasure in a way that is clearly void and does not seem associated with overall good experiences long term. An important fact is that our desires do not necessarily follow what is good; our desires are no omniscient/omnibelevolent oracles (they're simply a limited part of our minds).
We need to put thought/effort into discovering and then enacting what is good in robust, wise, careful (but not too careful), etc. ways. Let's build an awesome society and awesome life for all beings :)
It led me to investigate formalizing ethics and if that would be even possible (so we don't fall into traps like you've mentioned)
I think I've gotten pretty good results which I've sketched here: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1iv1x1m/the...
More to come. In summary, I became confident that we can, if we're careful, know those things and do something like 'maximize happiness' (as I said, I prefer more general terms than happiness! There's a whole universe of inner experiences beyond just the stereotypical smiley person, I think -- I tend to think of 'maximizing meaning' or 'maximizing well-being').
The basic fact that allows this process to make sense, I guess, is that our inner experiences are real in some sense, and there are tools to study them. Not only are our inner lives real, they make part of the world and its causal structure. We can understand (in principle almost exactly, if we could precisely map our minds and brains) what causes what feelings, what is good and what isn't (by generalizing and philosophically querying/testing/red teaming/etc.), and so on for every facet of our inner worlds.
In fact, this (again in principle) would allow us to make definite progress on what matters, which is our inner lives[1]. I think Susanne Langer put it incredibly well: (on the primacy of experiences as the source of meaning)
"If nothing is felt, nothing matters" (Susanne K. Langer)
This is an experimental fact, we as conscious beings experimentally see this fact is true. So in a way the mind/brain is kind of like a tool which allows us to perceive (with some unreliability and limitations that can be worked with) reality, in particular inner reality.
We can actually understand (with some practical limitations) the world of feelings and what matters. To that we simply experiment, collect evidence and properties about feelings and inner lives, try to build theories that are consistent, robust to philosophical (that is, logical in a high level sense) objections; and then we simply do what is best, or if necessary try out a bunch of ways of life and live out the best way according to our best theories.
---
Addendum: Let's take the benzene ring as an illustrative example of our procedure. Someone claims 'a benzene ring is the happiest thing in the Universe, and we therefore must turn everything into a sea of benzene rings. Destroy everything else.'. Is that claim actually true? Let's explore.
It isn't, I claim: if "Nothing is felt, nothing matters". When you are asleep (and not dreaming or thinking at all, let's suppose) or dead, you don't feel anything. No, thoughts are, and must be, associated with activity in our brain. No information flowing and no brain activity, no thoughts. No thoughts, no inner life. Moreover, thoughts require a neural (and logical) infrastructure to arise. It's logically consistent with how we don't observe ourselves as rocks, gas clouds, mountains, benzene molecules, or anything else: we observe ourselves as mammals with actually large brains. There are immensely more rocks, gas particles, benzene molecules, etc.. then there are mammals in the universe. Yet we experience ourselves as mammals. Benzene molecules, rocks and gas clouds just don't have enough structure to support minds and experience happiness.
However, the premise seems a bit wrong (or at least the narrator is wrong). If your brain actually degenerates from usage of the ring (and is no longer used in daily life, acting only reflexively), the premise that you are the happiest from following the ring might be flat out wrong. I think happiness (I tend to think in terms of well-being, which let's say ranks every good thing you can feel, by definition -- and assume the "good" is something philosophically infinitely wise) is probably something like a whole-brain or at least a-lot-of-brain phenomenon. It's not just a result of what you see or what you have in life. In fact I'm sure two persons can have very similar external conditions and wildly different internal lives (for an obvious example compare the bed-ridden man who spends his day on beautiful dreams, and the other who is depressed or in despair).
What the ring seems to do is to put you in situations where you would be the happiest, if only you were not wearing the earring.
The earring that actually guides you toward a better inner life perhaps offers only very minimal and strategic advice. Perhaps that's what the 'Lotus octohedral earring' does :)
In particular, governments traditionally already allocate resources for the common benefit (their main function really), in public research and public science, public infrastructure, etc.. I think this is just another very significant extension of that.
Also companies benefit greatly from OS/(and OSHW in the future?), and frequently maintain private tools at significant costs. Open source can be seen as a coordination mechanism where everybody can (or rather, should) cooperate to lower costs and benefit everyone (basically, their whole industry or rather society gets more efficient) :)
I really like OpenSCAD for instance, which despite being a little difficult to do complex stuff with, is quite easy to learn (and you can indeed do complex things with a little methodology). Like, everything about the web seems a little obtuse to me. One day I'll learn a little more to hopefully make more educated comments :)
So appreciate a lot new developments in the really-easy-to-use open source and text tools that also enable more involved use case!
Admittedly I also have not tried to learn React or other frameworks (most times I got stuck on backend basics).
It would be awesome if (almost) anyone could easily type out a website using simple and open source tools (specially with a little more involved functionality than just static content, or more free looks), and it just worked (with minimal coding required for the backend -- that's what's great about plain html imo, it's just a few files that contain your whole website). I mean, meanwhile it's great that something like hosted blogs exist of course.
But really this (although I think it can be helpful and important) does not get to the heart of the matter which is good, non-dark-pattern-filled game design. Again I don't think this is just a matter or regulation, but requires both a game dev and gamer culture that favors the healthier and more full of wonder, communication and learning (opposed to just gambling addiction) kind of games.
I myself really enjoyed a game (Tibia, very popular here in Brazil) during my childhood, and, living in a large metropolis (and at the time quite violent too) and with limited opportunities for play, it was a saving grace in some ways. It really served as a playground analogue to the real world, where I could talk to people from other cultures all over the world, practice a foreign language (english), practice commerce, planning, and lots of really nice things I think it's fair to say. I think excesses of gaming were already in common consciousness at the time, and the occasional warning from my parents (in no way prohibitive) was a great reminder -- me and my older brother did check whether we were getting something good out of the experience. Specially as the dial-up internet cost was very large! (later replaced by broadband to the relief of my father). I'm also glad it didn't overwhelm my childhood.
That game has since added soft limits (already in 2006 according to the wiki), which I think are better than nothing, but probably there should be some hard limits as well (even if you're really conservative about limits... surely at least something like 8 hours a day could be universally agreed upon).
There are valid objections to those kinds of limits because there are all sorts of exceptions: bedridden people that need an activity, people that just use the game as a chatroom (quite common) to keep in touch with friends, etc.. I think those people can find other activities and other media to fill their time and chat.
It's also probably unlikely that those limits are going to be voluntarily enforced by all companies. I think regulation in this area is important -- in a way, those limits are actually good for the medium: they allow a minimally healthy baseline to exist and the market not be dominated by the worst, most damaging grindfests. But also probably just regulation has limits, and it's important for individual/collective conscience, education and cultural awareness to exist, so people pay attention that each activity is adding, to their lives, being meaningful (this includes social media usage, all sorts of games, etc. -- but could apply to doing anything too much like watching TV or talking to friends even). Boredom is the instinctive response that encourages taking other activities, but unfortunately adversarial design and dark patterns (and even just too captivating activities) have found ways to override this response simply to generate profit.
Moreover, as a game designer, we should be really be thinking about bringing worthwhile experiences into this world, things that teach (in all sorts of ways), move, challenge, captivate, inspire and connect us. Here's a heuristic I like: take your favorite memories and feelings and try to replicate, extend and generalize them in various ways for others.
I'd say that's a bit of a wrong or misleading statement. I think the correct version is "everything[1] can be encoded as a number". The concept of number is a very particular concept! It's pretty absurd to say "a screwdriver is a number" or "a word is a number". That is true for the peano axiomatization of numbers; but to me in particular, I believe numbers are a generalization (and formalization) of the idea or concept of quantity. There's a particular idea that refers to say 'two' apples, the quantity of apples. A word is not a quantity, it's a different concept. Even though each of them could be encoded as a number somehow!
[1]: Everything that we believe to be finite and of interest, that is. We don't know presently anything that could be used in reality (a music, picture, etc.) that can't in principle be encoded as a large enough number.
I think this is quite interesting, because this encoding is critical, and it completes the system. You essentially need a machine to turn things into numbers and numbers into things; and this is unavoidable. You can actually encode this machine itself with numbers! This number (which encodes this transcoding machine) can even be decoded by its own machine! But we cannot actually avoid the machine itself, some actual realization in the real world, because any number, in order to represent something, can only be translated by one "machine" (which can be essentially a computer, or a mind, etc.).
Instead of thinking of machines, you can also think of conventions. So you can have a convention that say the number '5' encodes the concept 'word', or maybe it simply encodes the string of letters "word" ("w"+"o"+"r"+"d"). But the convention interpretation isn't complete, because you still need someone, or something, to interpret this convention in practice and potentially turn concepts into reality, or simply manipulate those concepts in significant and useful ways.
Some more examples: (1) you can encode objects by describing a series of solid operations, essentially CAD modelling, so you have numbers that represent solids. The machine that interprets this number and is able to translate it for example into a picture, a series of instructions to be interpreted by a 3d printer, of performs operations (inferences) about the relevant solid model (for example, a structural analysis) is your "machine", i.e. your software, without which a number, or string of bits by itself doesn't mean anything (except the quantity associated with that binary number, perhaps), and again this encoding or number is essentially arbitrary, it could be very different. (2) a JPEG file for example encodes an image that is read by a software stack (jpeg decoder+picture viewer+operating system+display driver) and forwarded to your monitor to be viewed as a pixel array. Again the string of bits associated with any image could in principle represent anything else representable.
Information (Shannon information in particular) simply implies the encoding possible.
It's really interesting that a lot of the time we are performing essentially translations between different representations of a thing: a series of bits into states of pixels on a screen (a picture), [a series of bits] into a 3d printed object, into a visualization of an object on a screen, etc. (one way), or a reading of a camera sensor (photograph) into a series of bits, a conception of an object (3d modelling), a conception of a story (writing), etc. (the other way). We of course can (and must for them to be built of course) conceptualize those "machines" themselves (e.g. the software part), represent them in some way (our encoding), and then turn this representation into a realization of those machines (a software, a piece of hardware, or just a representation convention, etc.).
In other words, the mind or computer itself is always an integral part of the process, and information in a vacuum doesn't represent anything necessarily.
Finally, most of what we do is some kind of translation, inference, and construction -- everything to assist our lives. Of course some "machines" are capable of generating new concepts, those are very interesting "machines" :)