The way I think about this comes from reading John Holland's "Hidden Order". If you read that book not as a book but as a way to build a Complex Adaptive System, then it comes down to a few essentials. An environment, a bunch of entities, a read/write messaging bus so the entities can interact. The entities need a set of rules and sensors. Put it together and what have you got? Thinking. Or intelligence. Try building one. Is the RIP routing protocol a complex adaptive system?
Part of our problem is the way we think. I am a person. I am not a complex adaptive system. And yet I am. I am made of entities. There is a messaging bus, the entities sense, act and interact. But I don't think of myself as a CAS or talk about We. Wecellfs?
Perhaps this a Sapir-Whorf thing. Our language limits what we can think. What is the difference between a pile of ants and an ant colony? A colony is collection of entities, but what do we call the entity that is the colony? Are the ants smart or is the colony smart.
As can be seen by the specializations between human brain hemispheres. There is a bus between them, but when that communication is cut, and you can see that a lot of what we perceive as a single thought process, is a bunch of independent computing entities with an OS layer on top creating the unity that doesn't really exist.
When Covid hit me, it felt like having a stroke and the effect was that I suddenly perceived that I don't have enough energy to sustain vision, instead I could perceive the delineation between object localization, object recognition, character-to-text conversion etc. It was like the brain was an engine that suddenly lacked fuel (I could force individual parts to "work" at the cost of immense pain) and dissolved into individual services competing for resources. The experience was both frightening and awesome. Not sure how I survived that (it took over 3 years to get back to normal). Diffuse MRI didn't find anything anyway.
had a relatable but almost opposite experience (no obvious infection, but it was winter 20/21), where I noticed that objects in my visual field seemed to be differentiating themselves away from the background and “competing” for my attention when previously I had to go hunt for them.
>a lot of what we perceive as a single thought process, is a bunch of independent computing entities with an OS layer on top creating the unity that doesn't really exist.
How else could it be? At some level, it would inevitably be a top-level aggregation "creating a unity that doesn't really exist". The alternative would be for the whole brain to be a single elementary particle!
AFAIK, the part that's been debunked is that there's a complete separation of concerns between the two hemispheres. From studies on split-brain patients, there does appear to be some specialization, but it's much fuzzier than "right brain does art, left brain does analysis" or anything like that.
Only when it comes to "left/right side analytical/creative" split, and even that mainly based in a single 2013 study, which could have all kinds of issues. Not regarding different functions in general.
>a lot of what we perceive as a single thought process, is a bunch of independent computing entities with an OS layer on top creating the unity that doesn't really exist.
As described in Marvin Minsky's fascinating book "Society of Mind" ...
> I am a person. I am not a complex adaptive system. And yet I am.
Your adaptive system has a very complex model of the environment. You can model yourself as an agent in the environment, and you identify as parts of that agent. I say “parts,” because there is a ton of thinking and actions that your adaptive system performs which you do not identify as you.
It reminds me of this paper from MIRI a few years ago discussing models which treat themselves as an explicit part of the environment. I think it's a very productive approach - https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.09469
This is wild projection, but it reminds me of the good advice I got when writing undergrad philosophy papers – map out your tree of arguments (especially if they're logically complicated), and structure your writing around that; talk in as conversational prose as you can because it mercilessly exposes jargon; highlight when you introduce new concepts.
Yes - all of our conscious reality, including both the environment and our sense of self, are experiences of perception formed inside the mind by the body and brain. Our sense of an "external" world is very much an "internal" reality, and the boundary between self and world is a mental construct.
> Part of our problem is the way we think. I am a person. I am not a complex adaptive system.
I agree that, in general, we humans, downgrade the importance of external stimulus and interactions with our environment (including other people). My two cents is that this is downplayed where we live in cities and don't move too much, once you move to very distanct places and cultures (and not assuming yours is the best one) more things tick in the brain.
it's hard to forget about others in a city though. you have neighbors, traffic, etc. that's why the whole 'cabin in the woods' experience can be sold as a relative luxury nowadays.
that said, based on the status quo we definitely don't spend enough resources on making sure we can peacefully and sustainably live next to others.
> But I don't think of myself as a CAS or talk about We. Wecellfs?
I am a collector of theories of consciousness :) assuming your quote above is making reference to the "scale" at which "self" is understood, you might be interested in this theory:
> Consciousness (at least, consciousness(es) that we are familiar with) seems to occur at a certain scale. Conscious states doesn't seem to significantly covary with noisy schocastic activities of individual cells and such; rather it seems to covary at with macro-level patterns and activities emerging from a population of neurons and stuffs. We are not aware of how we precisely process information (like segmenting images, detecting faces, recognizing speeches), or perform actions (like precise motor controls and everything). We are aware of things at a much higher scale. However, consciousness doesn't seem to exist at an overly macro-level scale either (like, for example, we won't think that USA is conscious).
However I would like to mention that sometimes we do think so, as in "the will of the party", at least in some language's context.
Fun fact, when I tried to find similar sentence like "the will of Democratic/Republican Party", google returns 5 results for the former but followed by voters/members and thus not what I want, for the latter, there is no results at all. But as I find "the will of the party", I find an abstract of some paper from my area.
Maybe party is too small for this. It seems like "the will of the nation" is widely used.
Going at it a bit sideways, there's also a sense of self that's constructed in which narratives forms around it ... and yet, there's a way of experiencing the world without that separate sense of self.
Complex adaptive systems can be nested. Human families, communities, societies, governments all form greater gestalts in which humans, themselves complex adaptive system are a part of.
So as we add layers of language, intelligence goes down. (Of course, to the residents of that layer, only the residents of that layer are intelligent. The depths are inscrutable chaos. And further layers are ... Tools? Toys?)
But a human isn't a bunch of individual cells, it is a cell that cloned itself many times. Those cells all have the same base code and can thus become an intelligent committee.
At least a committee of 10 identical members wont be dumber than a single member most of the time. A committee of clones is just scaling up compute in order to solve larger problems. Imagine if you could clone yourself with your knowledge and mental state, much more useful than trying to cooperate with another human.
No, it is because the probability of arriving to a correct answer increases when there are more members in the group, but only when the individual probability to arrive to a correct conclusion is higher than 50%. Group of smart people is smarter than an individual. The opposite is true too. If the individual probability is less than 50% then the group of people is dumber than the individual.
The answer must also be within all of their domains of expertise for the 50% to have any meaning. You can’t have a “room full of smart people” as you’ll just arrive at suboptimal outcomes because your consensus relies on the lowest common denominator of understanding, which between experts in differing fields can be pretty low.
In the context of Condorcet's jury theorem, the percentages refer to the chance of voting for the correct outcome. Think of a legal trial and there is no ambiguity about the meaning of "50%" is.
I always felt that the decrease in intelligence is a side effect of the necessary consensus mechanisms.
10 genius clones would still take on various roles/positions in the system, requiring some optimization with respect to alignment under time/energy constraints.
Part of our problem is the way we think. I am a person. I am not a complex adaptive system. And yet I am. I am made of entities. There is a messaging bus, the entities sense, act and interact. But I don't think of myself as a CAS or talk about We. Wecellfs?
Perhaps this a Sapir-Whorf thing. Our language limits what we can think. What is the difference between a pile of ants and an ant colony? A colony is collection of entities, but what do we call the entity that is the colony? Are the ants smart or is the colony smart.