mabub24

There are a lot of responses to the philosophical zombie argument. Some of which cut it off at the legs (they don't know to aim for the head! sorry bad pun). For instance some, like those descended from the work of Wittgenstein, argue that it relies on an inside-mental vs. outside-body type of model, and by offering a convincing alternative, the entire premise of the skeptical position the zombie argument embodies, is dissolved as irrelevant. (I'll add that the AGI argument, often also relies on a similar inside outside model, but that'd take a lot longer to write out.) My point being, the zombie argument isn't some checkmate most people think it is.

The wiki page has a lot of the responses, some of which are more convincing than others. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie#Respons...

Right, if you setup the intelligence and the brain to be computational in nature of course they will appear seamlessly computational.

But there are obvious human elements that don't fit into that model, yet which fundamentally make up how we understand human intelligence. Things like imagination, the ability to think new thoughts; or the fact that we are agents sensitive to reasons, that we can decide in a way that computers cannot, that we do not merely end indecision. We can also say that humans understand something, which doesn't make any sense for a computer beyond anthropomorphism.

> If intelligence is actually just information processing, then a computer intelligence really is doing exactly what our brains are doing. It’s misdirection to characterise it as modelling it.

Sure, but if it's not, then it's not. The assumption still stands.

> Basically what I'm trying to say is how can anyone who believes the brain is purely physical (not spiritual), believe that we just simply cannot achieve human-level intelligence by machine (no matter how complex the machine gets).

Obviously the brain is physical. But is consciousness? Is consciousness a thing in a physical sense, or an "experience", or something like a collection of powers and abilities? The two poles in the argument aren't between physical machine or religious spiritualism. There are other options, alternative positions that don't rely on Cartesian demons at the wheel, or souls, or even an inside-mental vs. outside-body distinction.

One thing my initial comment was pointing out was that the argument in favour of AGI, and which you're presenting, relies on an assumption: that computational intelligence, what you might describe as the intelligence of machines, is the same as the intelligence of humans. But that is just an assumption when you get down to it based on a particular kind of model of human intelligence. There are certain logical consequences of that assumption, and I've just pointed some out as probable roadblocks to getting to AGI from there. Many of those alternative positions, a lot from philosophy of mind, have raised those exact critical arguments.

> I’m afraid all those arguments boil down to “we don’t know how to do it yet, therefore it can’t be done”, which is absurd.

I'm not saying that. What I'm pointing out is that most arguments in favour of AGI rely on a crucial assumption: that computational intelligence is not just a model of a kind of intelligence, an abstraction in other words, but intelligence itself, synonymous with human intelligence. That's a bold assumption, one which people who work and deal in CS and with computers love, for obvious reasons, but there is no agreement on that assumption at all. At base, it is an assumption. So to leap from that to AGI seems in that respect simply hypothesizing and writing science fiction. Presenting logical reasons against that hypothesis is completely reasonable.

> If a robot can do that, too (what you call "convincing as AGI") then we must assume it is also conscious, because if we don't, we'd have a logical inconsistency on our hands. If I am allowed to safely assume you are sentient, then I must also be allowed to safely assume a robot is sentient if it can convince me, because in both cases I have no method of falsifying the claim to sentience.

Let's, for the sake of your argument accept that even though I disagree, is that AGI? AGI on the one hand seems to mean convincing even though the people who made it know otherwise or essentially alive and sentient in a way that is fundamentally computational, that is, utterly alien to us, even the people who made it. There is no reason to think that that computer intelligence should it even be possible to exist, would be even be intelligible to us as sentient in a human or even animal sense.

> What are the common secular arguments against AGI?

There is an entire sector of Philosophy of Mind that is a convincing argument against AGI. Neuroscience is also pretty skeptical of it.

Part of it comes down to what you mean by AGI. Is it a computer that is convincing as AGI? Or is it AGI that is essentially like human consciousness in nature?

The former is probably possible, given enough time, computational resources, and ingenuity. The latter is generally regarded as pretty nonsensical. In general, I think you're implying the gap between the AI we have now, and animals, and humans, is way smaller than it really is. The gap between computer AI and even some intelligent animals is enormous, let alone humans. And many would not even say computers are intelligent in a human sense. Computers don't think, or imagine in any intelligible sense. They compute. That's it. So the question that really should be asked is whether computation alone can lead to something that is recognizably an AGI in the human sense? I would say no, because that requires abilities that computers simply do not and cannot have. But it might achieve something that is convincing as AGI, something like Wolfram or Siri but much more convincing.

Part of it comes down to the fact that the term AI for ML is generally just marketing speak. It's a computational model of a kind of intelligence that is computational in nature, with all the limits that entails. Part of it also comes down to people who love computers thinking computers will ultimately be able to do anything and everything. That feels cool, but it doesn't mean it's possible.

edit:

There is also Erik J Larson's book "The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do" from 2021 which is an interesting argument against AI -> AGI. He has a pretty good grasp on CS and Philosophy.

Are they allergic to water, or what's in the water?

Actually, scratch that. Before that --- are they allergic or psychosomatically allergic to it?

Have you ever been bit by the bug of absolutely needing to get something done and finished just so you can keep riding the high of finishing something? You chase that feeling into the next thing, and the next thing, and so on.

They were doing that. Finishing and shipping anything feels really really good. If you're a small team and you feel a deep personal investment in the product then shipping becomes addictive.

Brandon Sanderson and writing is a similar example. Is the quality always there? No. But, the guy is very very good at finishing and clearly rides to wherever his passion takes him. His output is, in comparison to other authors writing in similar genres, incredible.

Also, games were much simpler and players had much simpler expectations.

> Our goal is to have technology companies, research labs, and similar organizations sponsor contests about their respective fields.

Sci-Fi has a strong vein of criticism throughout it's history. A lot of Sci-fi is a critique of modern society, including the potential consequences of a technology, the overreach of business/companies, and failed ethics in research labs.

If there is a sponsor, how separate will the judging of the story be from the topic of story and the sponsors? If the sci-fi story is very critical of something like CRISPR, if a CRISPR related company is the sponsor, how will the sponsorship play into judges decisions? Do judges have complete discretion on what they pick, or is there a final selection that ultimately happens?

"If a lion could speak, we could not understand (verstehen)[0] him."

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations

[0] Ironically, there is disagreement over the best translation of verstehen. Understand and comprehend have some conceptual overlap, but also some distinctions. The general idea is, though, of understanding in a greater, more all encompassing sense that is only possible when someone/something is no longer alien.

I agree. The quality of his writing and output is generally on par with someone like Clive Cussler, or Joyce Carol Oates. The method is pretty simple: write a lot and see what sticks. Updike was probably the best writer in the modern era to have used that method.

Sanderson generally has some interesting concepts but his characters are pretty simplistic, and he puts an extreme emphasis on "systematic worldbuilding," to the detriment of their plot. His style is really starting to show its limits in the Stormlight books, which are very long, which have some neat scenes, but which are also in incredible need of an editor.

This is a well studied phenomenon in literature. Some books we regard as classics today sold relatively little upon release, while authors in the past were incredibly popular then, upon the author's death usually, the name was utterly forgotten from aesthetic appraisals. Ideas of a "canon" are much less stable than people think.

I find, in general, that philosophy tends to have the best overall quality of writing in academic writing. There are still examples of bad writing, but when it's good, the writing is crystal clear and a joy to read.

It's an evolution on the Chattering Classes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattering_classes

Yeah, I think most people look at the endless 1v1 party sparring of America's political system and just see a recipe for unending revenge and bitterness.

Most parliamentary systems, or multi-party systems, do not have the same amounts of longstanding political polarization that has come to grip America, where every issue must be divided along party lines or you're a "traitor to the cause".

Pierce can get some good ones off, but I find his writing often lacks the laconic elegance or sheer surrealism of some of PJ or Thompson's writing. Sometimes he veers into old-man-yells-at-cloud territory, and too be fair it feels like most political commentary from a certain generation has succumbed to that amidst and post Trump.

This is a topic where having knowledge of art history helps quite a lot. One could make an entire university course around the ways artists have grappled with perspective over time. Just coming to grips with the fact that linear perspective is something we learn to understand as "natural", as communicating a scene or image in such and such a way, despite it being an artistic technique for representing 3d shapes on a 2d surface from a fixed point(s) of view, can be a big way to get people over the hump and to appreciate non-representational art, or even just the works of 20th and 19th century modernist painters like Picasso or Cezanne.

I think with something like Icelandic, your best bet is to find a teacher, be it online or in person.

Because Icelandic has a small population of speakers, and less of a global reach compared to languages like French, Mandarin, or English, there will be less easily available resources. It will also be very distinct. I don't believe Icelandic is a part of common language families, like a romance language, or a germanic language.

It is well known that having an SO that speaks your learning language is a huge help. Every older french lady has always told me to "get a french gf if I really want to learn." The same is true for programming. Very common to hear of people learning programming later in life with the help of an SO. The quicker and more personalized the feedback you can get when learning anything is always the better.

You might be thinking of Bon Cop Bad Cop which is all about the differences between Franco-Ontarian and Quebecois French, or Standard French versus Quebecois. Where I live I hear a ton of Quebecois but even with knowing B2 level French I find the accent very hard to parse out.

Here's a funny scene from the movie on Quebecois swearing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUGW0jszPzo

Reading and conversing are really almost like two different skills.

A lot of learning how to speak a language is ear-training. With French, I started much more with speaking so now I can make out a lot of what people say. But, the big challenge with French is that, like in English, native speakers "break" the rules or use subtle turns of phrasing that are very culturally specific, usually they're collocations that don't exactly translate (but luckily for English they actually commonly do thanks to the Norman mixing in English).

It gets even more complicated when French has different formal and casual registers that are much more distinct than in English. So when you're reading Le Monde, or Flaubert, you're getting the literary, fancy, French. Most people speak in a much more argot mixed way.

Now add onto that different regional dialects like Quebecois (really really fast, distinct, french from them), Belgian, Swiss, different parts of France, etc...and it's even more difficult. (Personally I find Parisian French, ou francais standard to be the easiest to understand).

The best solution is just immersion. And constant use. Language is used, and use is the best method for improvement. You can't really think of it like a logical code. It's more like behavior for communicating. You have to learn the right rules in the language game for things to "make sense".

That's the big thing with me as well. I would comfortably say I'm at a B2 level, but the french from native speakers in casual conversation is so fast sometimes. It gave me a new appreciation for how fast I probably speak english.

This was why I decided to not go for my PhD. I looked at the latest hires for tenure track positions from my graduating year and saw that essentially all of them came from the same 6 "top tier" schools for my program/field of study. That meant I had to get into those schools if I wanted to end up a professor. Then I looked at the incoming class of PhD candidates for those schools from that year. They all also came from those 6 schools.

It was especially disappointing when I found incredible research being done in "less elite schools", which I was explicitly told to not apply to or "I would have no chance getting to tenure track interviews." But, guess where those professors at those "less elite schools" came from? Those same 6 schools! It was absurd.

At my own B-tier undergrad school, which I went to because it was affordable and offered me a lot in scholarships, all of the new hires were also from those schools. The whole system was absurd.

I was recommending Henry James in reference to readers attention spans, who often balk at the idea of reading anything quite as dense as from James' writings. But they're missing out. His famous Chp. 42 from Portrait of a Lady is the single best articulation of personal reflection on a failed marriage I have ever read - ever. [0] Losing out on that simply because it's a big imposing paragraph suggests an unwillingness to challenge oneself, which, I think at least, is only to our loss as our attention spans wane.

Specifically for non-fiction, I would recommend R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher of ordinary language who was writing in the late 1930's. His writing, like many philosophers from that time, balances depth with clarity with stunning skill. His introduction to his book "The Principles of Art"[1] is one of my favorite bits of writing ever because of just how clear it is. The paragraphs are often long, but they are meticulously edited to keep forward momentum, and a sense of dawning awareness of a problem which he is solving, present without dragging the reader down. Most of all they are calm. It never seems rushed, or forced, or over-pruned. It's a rhetorical style of instruction that only works when you incorporate length into your writing.

As an aside, the first sentence in the introduction is one of my favorite openings of all time. "The business of this book is to answer the question: What is art?"

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[0]: http://www.online-literature.com/henry_james/portrait_lady/4...

[1]: https://books.google.ca/books?id=SXpMC9416y4C&printsec=front...

Wealthy individuals during and around the gilded age had a view of charity that was in some senses very similar to modern charity by the super-wealthy, but also quite different. Like today's wealthy, they often used charity as a mechanism for social climbing, and as a dick-measuring contest. They also used it to try and fend off criticism that is usually directed at them when income inequality gets very high.

However, they were also often guided by a strict idea of noblesse obliger, which we would consider patronizing and archaic today, but which was considered an extremely serious task for them. It was fundamentally their role in society, as they saw it. They were also quite a bit more religiously motivated. This extended to the idea of public service and holding public office (of course they also held those positions as a way to help themselves to the pot, but the two ideas were often present at the same time). They saw charity as an act of duty before as an act of kindness in many instances.

The modern super wealthy no longer think of themselves as constrained by a notion of "duty", for better and for worse.

IMO, this style is most effective on a screen, and on a phone screen at that. This style does not fare well on the page, nor if you're trying to write on a complicated subject. It has the unfortunate feeling of superficiality. Many ideas or points require more than 2 or 3 sentences of explanation. And some ideas require many, many, sentences to present and explain. Worse, too many paragraph breaks can disrupt the flow and rhythm of an argument or article and create the expectation that you are once again introducing a new idea before the last one was allowed to reach a satisfying point. What can seem more direct for the writer, can equally come across as annoying for the reader.

I also think this style is based on the incredible low expectations we now have for the ability of readers to keep their attention, but that's another argument all together. Read some Henry James and you'll see walls of text that achieve a stunning clarity all their own.

Short, standalone paragraphs are very emphatic, though, if used sparingly.

The best explainer for sentence construction, structure, and flow through paragraphs, I've ever read was in Joseph M Williams Style: Towards Clarity and Grace[1]. In it, he works methodically from word choice, to sentence, to paragraph, then to chapter, in order to explain clear and graceful writing, with excellent examples. Anyone can read it and come away a much better writer. In particular, chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6, are very helpful for explaining the uses of emphasis and how to write coherent and clear paragraphs.

[1]: https://sites.duke.edu/niou/files/2014/07/WilliamsJosephM199... (direct PDF link to an older version)

McCarthy's other brilliant book, Suttree, is like Faulkner on acid with incredible prose and a grotesque sense of humour (there's an infamous scene with a melon and a desperate man). I've never read a man describe trash and filth quite so beautifully.

The "legion of horribles" sequence is also incredibly sticky, just some of the phrases like 'death hilarious" stick around for years...

"A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools."

The author mentions that they've contributed to Puck, which is a comical example of this: https://puck.news/

Open up the side menu and you'll see you can select each of Puck's area of interest:

- Hollywood

- Wall Street

- Silicon Valley

- Washington

It would be easier to describe these as "bubbles".