DonaldFisk

That particular quote attribution is, literally, halfway around the world: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

Some of the Lisp features that people don't like are built into the language. If you don't like them, there are other languages you can use instead. If you're already using a language you prefer, why are you complaining about Lisp?

Some features are dialect dependent. If you like the idea of a Lisp, but specifically don't like e.g. Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure are alternatives. If you don't like these either, nothing is stopping you from writing your own Lisp and using that instead. I have. Lisp is one of the easiest languages to implement and there are two excellent books explaining how to do just that.

And if your problem is just with formatting or getting the parentheses right, you're probably using the wrong editor. You won't have these problems with EMACS.

It isn't Prograph, but there are some similarities.

I don't think it's right but if it got as far as it did it could be corrected after several rewrites, so not a complete failure and not bad for a first attempt given the limited documentation I put on my web pages.

If I'm reading it correctly, polar is a function which is supposed to convert from polar to Cartesian coordinates, and rayPolygon seems to convert a list of polars to a list of Cartesians. But it's unclear exactly what it's doing. Also, there is no fillPolygon or fillEllipse.

Not sure that's right in general. Steam trains -> electric trains, ICE cars -> electric cars, thermionic valves -> transistors, copper wire -> optical fibre, incandescent bulbs -> LEDs, CRT televisions -> digital televisions, film cameras -> digital cameras. Same sort of thing with more efficient technology.

For software, we've gone from machine code to high level languages, but were still writing algorithms, which is the important thing as you still use your brain for that. Until vibe coding came along.

Thanks. The code (here: https://fmjlang.co.uk/fmj/tutorials/TOC.html) isn't text, it's directed graphs.

I've avoided using LLMs. You might not have the option of doing this in paid employment, but you certainly can in your spare time, and if you don't you'll gradually lose the ability to think in a programming language. This applies similarly to any other cognitive skill too: writing music or playing a musical instrument, speaking and reading a foreign language, doing cryptic crosswords, playing chess or go, etc. You wouldn't stop playing chess just because computers are now much better at it. The point is learn, understand, and do those things yourself.

Here's my advice, based on what I have done: implement a programming language yourself, from scratch, without using an LLM, and then program in that. Don't release your implementation, or any code you've written in it.

Most (almost all) of my programming at home has been done in a Lisp dialect I designed and wrote myself, which is superficially similar to Common Lisp, but with subtle differences, including some deficiencies that I have to work around. And in my Lisp dialect, I implemented a visual dataflow language. Code samples are on my web site, but they're PNG images, so are safe from LLMs (I think). The language was designed to run on MIMD hardware, which doesn't exist in the real world. I've also implemented a Prolog which doesn't use Edinburgh syntax, which I use for type checking, and for parsing a controlled English implementation. So the temptation, and also the option, of using an LLM was never there.

In the course of doing all this, I've learned a lot along the way, which I wouldn't have if I'd used an LLM.

Dirac was talking about the fundamental laws. In favour of his point, and not known at the time he gave the talk, the standard model of particle physics is based on the symmetry groups U(1), SU(2), and SU(3), so Lie groups (which mathematicians find interesting) appear to have been chosen by nature.

Correct (but now we know it should be somewhat higher than that), and 1039 should be 10^39, one of Dirac's Large Numbers, the size of the observable universe in atomic units, and also the ratio of electromagnetic to gravitational forces in the hydrogen atom.

> Why can't a computer program have those?

Because it isn't a physical object capable of sensing the physical environment, the way the brain is via the sense organs. I don't rule out the possibility that a robot, equipped with with a camera and microphone and processing the information it receives from them might be conscious of sight and sound, but not a program. If I read and execute a computer program in my head, I'm conscious of my thoughts while doing that, but are those thoughts themselves conscious?? I don't think so. What would they be conscious of, anyway?

> You have yet to clearly articulate what this magical pixie dust of consciousness is supposed to be.

Nobody has an explanation of consciousness, so the magical pixie dust remains a mystery. I think it's fundamental. Nobody has proven the opposite: that it arises from things (e.g. information processing) happening in matter.

Sorry for the late reply.

> If consciousness is fundamental (ie substance dualism) then how is it exerting influence over our behavior?

If I understand you correctly, it might not be exerting influence over our behaviour.

By influence, are you referring to free will rather than just the illusion of it? That's precluded by classical physics, and quantum mechanics just adds randomness. You can make a measurement, but there's no evidence you can influence the result you get.

> Isn't it the equivalent of watching a movie at that point?

Yes.

There's some simplification. I was initially puzzled about why it was United Kingdom and not Great Britain, as part of UK is on the island of Ireland. Also absent are countries that aren't fully independent, the largest being Greenland. Singapore is plain wrong. It doesn't share a land border with Malaysia.

> I'm asking on what basis you claim it to be categorically impossible.

Because the neural correlates of consciousness wouldn't exist in their brain. I've even looked into what happens if someone, blind from birth, takes LSD. There aren't any large scale studies as it's very difficult to get approval for them, but the short answer appears to be that they don't see things: https://www.livescience.com/62343-psychedelics-lsd-effects-b...

> How is a multimodal LLM taking in RGB data fundamentally different than what your eyes are doing?

The multimodal LLM is a program run as a process on a computer, which isn't aware of what it's running: it's just blindly, repeatedly, executing whatever instruction is at its program counter. The LLM itself isn't doing anything. It's just sitting somewhere in memory being executed by the computer. Brains, on the other hand, don't run programs. Each part of the brain has a special purpose, and somewhere in it there are neurons which correlate with what is being experienced whenever something is looked at.

> Aren't you inventing that whole cloth?

I should have said, "I think that consciousness ..."

> So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step ...

I should have said, "The conscious experience (of qualia) is an extra step, and if consciousness is fundamental then that's a kind of substance dualism.

Thanks for pointing these out - I should have proof-read my reply before posting.

> On what basis could you possibly make this claim?

People with absent qualia have been asked, e.g. Knut Nordby: https://www.consc.net/misc/achromat.html

"Although I have acquired a thorough theoretical knowledge of the physics of colours and the physiology of the colour receptor mechanisms, nothing of this can help me to understand the true nature of colours. From the history of art I have also learned about the meanings often attributed to colours and how colours have been used at different times, but this too does not give me an understanding of the essential character or quality of colours."

Knut Nordby was in the same position as an LLM as far as colours are concerned. He learned all he could but words didn't give him any idea of *what it's like to see them". LLMs have access to everything that's written about colours, but that didn't help Nordby.

Nordby's no longer around to ask about image files, but how do you think reading thems would help? He might then have been able to say, e.g. "This pixel is orange," but he still wouldn't have known what it's like to see orange. The same applies to a multimodal LLM.

> Aren't those two statements at odds?

Sensing (i.e. picking up information about its environment through sense organs) is a physical phenomenon and is reasonably well-understood. Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it. Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism.

So what's conscious? People and other animals with sense organs and nervous systems. It's even possible that anything which senses its environment could be conscious: https://organism.earth/library/document/what-is-it-like-to-b... . That might include a robot connected to a camera and other sensory apparatus. Now you could argue that a computer running an LLM can pick up what its user types, and might therefore be conscious of which keys are being pressed. But not of the colours, sounds, smells, and other things described by human authors in its training set.

I've already answered this. There's no way someone deaf from birth could know what it's like to hear sounds, by looking at the pixels in a sound recording they know the format of, and if you don't believe me you can ask them. Or by looking at a speech spectrogram (which, with practice, are more easily readable).

Or you can ask yourself what ultraviolet looks like, or what it's like to sense a magnetic field. Lots of animals can do these, and would know what it's like, but people can't.

Quite a lot has been published about neural correlates of consciousness, so I'll go with whatever the evidence suggests.

There are literally hundreds of attempted explanations of phenomenal consciousness, none of which is generally accepted. For what it's worth, I think it's fundamental, i.e. not an emergent property of matter. At the very minimum, I think to be conscious of anything (other than nothing) requires the ability to sense the physical environment.

What's your position?

People aren't just consciousness, they're conscious of things. Of course a deaf or blind person is conscious, even if they've been deaf or blind since birth. But they aren't conscious of hearing or seeing things, and if you ask them they'll tell you that.

I'm not conscious of magnetic fields, or ultraviolet light, but other animals are, and no amount of study will overcome that deficit.

I just explained this. If someone looks at the contents of an image file without displaying it, they don't experience the colours either. So how can LLMs experience them?

My training data on qualia is actually seeing, hearing, and otherwise sensing things, not just reading about them.

That's the definition that matters. And as it's impossible to describe in words what it's like to experience qualia, and LLMs are trained on words, they cannot know what it's like. Even if images and sounds are included in their input training data, those are just arrays or sequences of numbers, not the experience of seeing and hearing.

A Portuguese Jesuit, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Pina

I initially responded to CSMastermind whose post explicitly mentioned LLMs and the Turing test, which involves interacting with a computer solely by typing and reading text. You first mentioned consciousness.

We can tell that other people are intelligent and conscious because they're like us in important ways and we are intelligent and conscious. I haven't ruled out intelligent machines in general. My point was about the inadequacy of the Turing Test.

> If something is indistinguishable from a human in its outward behavior, then I'd be forced to admit that it's as intelligent/conscious/sentient/whatever as a human, regardless of how it works internally. It's not like I make my friends take an MRI before I decide whether they're intelligent.

You can be reasonably sure about your friends, as they're sufficiently like you to leave little doubt. I disagree but can understand you thinking that LLMs are intelligent, but unless by conscious you mean something like being self-aware, I don't understand how you could conclude LLMs are conscious. For example, although LLMs can tell you what colours things are, how the visual system distinguishes colours in humans and other animals, and what wavelength mixtures different colours are, they don't know what it's like to see colours because they cannot see colours. All the input of LLMs is text, and you can't describe, in words, what it's like to see colours, or hear sounds, or feel pain, in a way that someone incapable of these sensations would understand. And to remove any remaining doubt, there was an expert in colour vision (Knut Nordby) who, as he could not see colours because his retinas lacked cones, could not imagine what it's like to see colours, despite all his knowledge.

I think that recent LLMs do pass the Turing test, but I don't think it is a good test for intelligence, for two reasons: emergent complexity and pareidolia.

Arguably, ELIZA passed the Turing test ca. 1967: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... and not that long ago, ELIZA was still more convincing: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/real-...

The Turing Test can be gamed. This was done in some Loebner Prize entries: see https://www.behavior.org/resources/325.pdf and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Goostman

To determine whether a machine is intelligent, I think it's necessary to understand how it works internally and not just take a black-box approach. This was already understood when Alan Turing wrote his 1950 paper. Elmer and Elsie, William Grey Walter's tortoise robots built during the preceding two years, appeared to behave as if they had some degree of self-awareness. But their "brains" consisted of only two thermionic valves, so self-awareness can be ruled out.

The breathing marks are clear in the Ancient Library texts (e.g. St John's Gospel), but difficult to make out on Hacker News.

A propos of breathing marks, iota subscripts, and the three different accent marks of Classical Greek, when I learned it at school we had to remember the breathing marks and iota subscripts, and would lose marks if we omitted them, but we didn't need to learn the accents. Modern Greek now has only (acute) accents, which you need to know to stress the correct vowels, exactly where the accents were in the equivalent Classical Greek words.

I have always assumed that Alan Kay compared Lisp to Maxwell's Equations because of the similarity between the interplay of eval and apply in Lisp on the one hand, and the interplay of the electric and magnetic fields in Maxwell's equations on the other.

I'm unsure what to make of the post you're replying to, but the idea that there's a connexion between consciousness and quantum phenomena isn't just a New Age idea. Eugene Wigner wasn't New Agey, and he wrote Remarks on the Mind-Body Question, suggesting that wave function collapse only occurs when the consciousness of an an observer becomes aware of the result of a measurement, not the measuring apparatus, which is entangled with whatever is being measured, records it.

People smoke a lot less. We have antibiotics. Life expectancy is up.