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Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

I don't think anything like the singularity will ever be possible, because the ability to speak language for oneself and invent complex reasoning is spiritual, not merely physical. Humans can do it because we are inherently spiritual beings, a union of body and spirit. (I know most folks here don't subscribe to that assertion... I'm not here to argue it anyway.)

But even if that isn't true, humans are not merely the product of our biology. Each of us has undergone an $age-year period of training, 18 years of which was on someone else's effort and time. I doubt someone is willing to put in that much personal investment to raise a neural net like his/her own child.

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Your unusual argument recalls a discussion I once had with members of the Go club at my alma mater, nearly 10 years ago. On the question of whether Go would ever be mastered by a computer, one asserted that the game needed to be understood at a spiritual level - not simply as a computational problem - and that’s why computers would never reach the level of humans. The game was simply too sublime and complex, came the claim.

At the time this might have seemed reasonable - after all, Go software struggled mightily for years to achieve even beginner levels of play, and seemed incapable of mastering the intricacies of high-level play.

Well, we know now in retrospect that spirit was unnecessary to play Go. We know now that it was, in fact, a computational problem. There’s really no reason to expect that “spirit” is necessary to perform the tasks of language or cognition - tasks which are demonstrably executed by impulses of chemicals and electricity pulsing through the brain.

I know spiritual reality is sometimes invoked in discussions about things we haven't yet mastered or understood in science and engineering (one might even accuse me of doing that). But your story is kind of a straw man example, because even 50 years ago we knew of algorithms that could theoretically render Go a solved game, given enough computing resources. You could just as easily say modern cryptography is spiritual in its essence, which would be nonsensical.

Emulating a human mind with computers is an entirely different class of problem. We don't even have a mathematically rigorous definition of what constitutes a mind, much less know of any algorithm that could implement or solve it, even with any given supply of computing resources.

But we do know there must be algorithms capable of solving the Turing test, since there are only finite questions you could ask and only finite answers you could get back (just like how we know Go is solvable). Whether or not that's equivalent to emulating the human mind is unknown, but what's the difference in practice? Anything that could solve the Turing test is necessarily equally as powerful as humans at the use of language, which was the original problem being addressed in your post.

> But we do know there must be algorithms capable of solving the Turing test, since there are only finite questions you could ask and only finite answers you could get back

Only if the algorithm itself encodes the entirety of those finite questions and answers. You might as well say that pi (or any irrational number) is intelligent, since every sentence ever spoken by any human is encoded therein somewhere.

The problem is that intelligently selecting the index of pi to use at a given time (or writing the algorithm that knows what to say in advance) is an act that itself requires a human mind's intelligence. You're only moving the problem one step back. You might as well reverse engineer every possible AES-128 output for every possible key and input (up to a certain length) and declare the cipher broken. It might be possible given infinite computing resources, but doing so wouldn't offer any insight.

Having insight is different than solving the problem. For example, developing AlphaGo didn't give us any insight into how to play Go (besides through watching it play). Similarly, it might be the case that developing a software which passes the Turing test gives us no insight into the nature of language. Nonetheless the problem would still be solved.

> You might as well reverse engineer every possible AES-128 output for every possible key and input (up to a certain length) and declare the cipher broken.

But we don't say that AES is impossible to crack. We only say that it's infeasible to crack. Just like with Go, where we had algorithms to solve it even 50 years ago, but it was just infeasible at that time. If what you are saying is that solving the Turing test is possible, but infeasible, then that is a more agreeable position to me. Regardless, I don't see how you can say that the Turing test is "spiritual in nature" while AES isn't.

> Each of us has undergone an $age-year period of training, 18 years of which was on someone else's effort and time. I doubt someone is willing to put in that much personal investment to raise a neural net like his/her own child.

Unlike humans, software is reproducable and doesn't expire. So even if such a software took 18 years to develop, it is still a worthwhile endeavor since it has the potential to be used by countless people well into the future. Furthermore it is not necessary that it is developed by just one person, nor is it necessary that it is developed at the same speed that humans develop. The creation of such a software could take 100 years and it would still be worthwhile.

But if something is spiritual, there must be some way for it to interact with the physical world, otherwise you would not know about it. Then that way can be measured, which makes it physical...

Unless you are calling spiritual those things that can't be measured, yet?

> there must be some way for it to interact with the physical world

that's the body

For the sake of argument, "spiritual" could be a class of physical objects that can only be produced by other spiritual objects. This is the old "vitalism" argument, which is generally considered discredited, but as the "hard problem of consciousness" is still unanswered, this is a small loophole that proponents can use to hang on to it.

I don't subscribe to the "vitalism" argument. I am only equipped to assert that "spiritual" (as opposed to physical) primarily constitutes the use of language as a form of unique self-expression. It can be imitated in machines, but never duplicated.

(There's a good reason the Turing test involves language, and that computers can't form meaningful intent on their own.)

I don't know enough to extend the definition any further, though I'm sure it's not limited to merely that.

As far as we know, human language is generated by the brain, and the brain is made of parts that can in principle be simulated. If other parts of the body also turn out to be essential, there's no known physical limitation on simulating those either. This doesn't mean it will actually be practicable to do so, only that it's not theoretically impossible. By what mechanism does your idea of "spirituality" make it impossible to simulate human brains with sufficient accuracy to pass a Turing test? (or any other language generator not necessarily modeled on humans)

We humans are blackbox physical machines that processes physical inputs to produce physical outputs.

Whether that input goes through processing that is "spiritual" is besides the point. Reproducing "spirituality" is not the goal. The goal is to replicate what is "observable." To produce a machine that when given the same inputs as that given to a human will produce identical (or "better") outputs as the human.

This is definitely an achievable goal as for every set of inputs and output pairs in existence an infinite amount of different machines can be constructed to replicate that exact input/output functionality.

The "spirituality" that goes on within this blackbox machine or humans is irrelevant. It's not even a word that is clearly defined. We aren't trying to replicate "spirituality." We are trying to make a machine that only from an observational standpoint is clearly superior or indistinguishable to a human intelligence.

The understanding the theoretical possibility of singularity is purely within the grasp of a typical person.

Imagine a chat bot designed to be indistinguishable from a human chatter. The inputs are text queries and the outputs are text queries. The domain is every possible text query and the range is every possible text response.

For purposes of simplicity lets say the text input and output is limited to 500 chars. This makes the possible input and output pairs finite. To create a chat bot identical to a human you simply need to create a machine that maps all inputs to certain outputs. Think of it like a giant hash map of strings to strings. Given enough time and enough memory this can be done.

The goal of current AI is to solve this problem more efficiently. To produce logical cores that can dynamically generate outputs from inputs rather than following a gigantic mapping. It can be thought of as form of data compression. The data is the mapping; the compression of that data is the logical core.

The fact that a mapping can even be constructed at all is by logical induction, a proof that a singularity is possible and thus completely invalidating your initial statement of:

>I don't think anything like the singularity will ever be possible

Only that the chat response is not just function of the 500 character query but also of all previous queries:

You could ask the bot things like "Did I ever tell you about [...]?" or "What was the last time we talked about X?"

Yeah I left that out to simplify the explanation. In this case, the mapping would just be more complex. Lets say we limit the memory of the machine to just 10 million of the previous queries.

Then the hash map could have keys equivalent to the concatenation of 10 million previous queries + current query. This increases the domain to 500^26 * 10 million possible keys. The underlying machine is still a hash map and you can build something equivalent or greater than human intelligence using this technique alone.

If you feel 10 million queries aren't enough we can increase the space to 10 billion queries thereby covering every possible range of textual inputs that can be achieved in a human lifetime. I think this is more than adequate for the mapping to cover a chatbot that is equivalent to human intelligence.

Again the goal of AI would not be to build such a machine but to compress the data. Essentially converting hard data into logic or in other words trading space at the cost of greater processing time. The theoretical exercise is just to show that intelligence and spirituality at a fundamental level is just a giant data mapping of inputs to outputs.

Thereby even under this scenario, a singularity is still possible.

eh math is wrong... its (500*10 million)^26 possible keys if anyone still cares

Raising a kid without having to change diapers sounds pretty cool.

But a fan will be there for sure.

hardware - the body.

software - the mind aka the spirit.

hardware together with software is the runtime

the body with the mind make a human person, maybe that's the soul?? ‍️

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