bloaf

Aquinas, in his Summa, makes a series of assertion-of-fact about souls. Specifically, he claims that the soul explains (or "is the principle of") certain otherwise-unexplained phenomenon.

It doesn't matter how he got there (i.e. whether he was arguing with someone online, or trying to explain catholicism in terms of Aristotle, or if he was just an LLM stochastically putting ink on parchment), the fact is that inventing a supernatural thing that explains a bunch of unexplained phenomenon is precisely what I meant by "god-of-the-gaps style reasoning."

This is simply not true, and I've quoted the passages from Aquinas that explicitly assert metaphysical differences between living and non-living matter in this very thread.

Indeed, Aquinas is using the soul the way that modern scientists use "dark matter". Except where the modern problem is unexpected rates of universal expansion, Aquinas' problem is vitalism-qua-"why are living things different than non-living things."

Once we abandoned vitalism, the conception of the soul must therefore also change. But in my reading of history, there is no clear break; no "before" and "after". Aquinas' definitions and concepts were never really abandoned, the church just retreated from the bailey of "the soul explains all the features of living matter including how it moves around" to the motte of "the soul explains intellect/reason/will since thats the only thing left thats not obviously physical."

Indeed, you will see that Aquinas' language suffuses most official Catholic teaching on the soul, even though the official teachings are usually a slightly generalized version of Aquinas's concrete assertions.

That's... not much different than what I said (which was that humans are extra special)? I think it was in the early 1900s that the church Magisterium finally said that human souls belonged to different "orders" than plant and animal souls. And hey, wouldn't you know it, but the "orders" spelled out by the Magisterium broke exactly along the lines Aquinas laid out in the Summa. That's why I singled him out.

Re evolution:

The church excommunicated at least one scientist for early work on evolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorio_Chil_y_Naranjo

I read Aquinas and realized that the whole ancient conception of a soul is tied together with the ancient concept of vitalism. Within vitalism you need something to explain why living matter is different than non-living matter, and that something is the presence of a soul! Hey presto, add a few layers of philosophy and divine revelation and you arrive at the Christian immortal soul.

(In this case "god of the gaps" does not refer to the Catholic God himself, but instead it refers specifically to the concept of the soul)

> The lowest of the operations of the soul is that which is performed by a corporeal organ, and by virtue of a corporeal quality. Yet this transcends the operation of the corporeal nature; because the movements of bodies are caused by an extrinsic principle, while these operations are from an intrinsic principle; for this is common to all the operations of the soul; since every animate thing, in some way, moves itself. Such is the operation of the "vegetative soul"; for digestion, and what follows, is caused instrumentally by the action of heat, as the Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 4).

That is to say: we cannot explain things like digestion "naturally" as we would require an "external principle" that does not exist for living things, instead because they "move themselves" they require a super-natural explanation, i.e. the soul.

Indeed, Aquinas puts the following as a potential object, which he rebuts

> Objection 1: It would seem that the parts of the vegetative soul are not fittingly described—namely, the nutritive, augmentative, and generative. For these are called "natural" forces. But the powers of the soul are above the natural forces. Therefore we should not class the above forces as powers of the soul.

> On the contrary, The Philosopher says (De Anima ii, 2,4) that the operations of this soul are "generation, the use of food," and (cf. De Anima iii, 9) "growth."

Qualia are "what it 'feels like' to experience some sensory input."

Up until recently, most LLMs were "once through" meaning that the only "sensory inputs" they "experienced" would be the raw text. So we might argue that "experiencing sensory input" means "tokenizing raw text," and that therefore the tokens that the LLM processes internally are the qualia.

But that's un-satisfying. We don't say that the impulses sent from the eye to the brain are the qualia, and the tokenization process sounds more like "eye turning light into electrical signals" than what we actually mean by qualia.

So now we focus on the "feeling" word in our definition of qualia. A feeling isn't a token or an electrical impulse, its our internal reaction to that token or electical impulse.

So because once-through LLMs have no input that corresponds to "their internal reaction to a token", they can never be said to "experience" a "feeling" using our previous definition of experience as "processing some input".

But this directly suggests the solution to the qualia problem: if we were to build an LLM that did accept an input that represented "its internal reaction to the tokens it previously experienced" then we'd have invented qualia from scratch. The qualia would be precisely the log file that the LLM generated and "sent back around" as input for the next round.

First: A lot of Catholic morality derives from the postulate that man was specially made by God and "in God's image" which gives man an inherent, unique-among-all-creation dignity. Because of this, the church is very sensitive to anything which diminishes the "specialness" of man, as they fear it will undermine people's reasons for treating each other with respect. Its part of the reason why they were initially anti-heliocentrism (man wasn't at the center of the universe) and anti-evolution (man wasn't specially created) before coming around due to overwhelming evidence. The pope is concerned that AI falls into this category of "challenge to human dignity" because it gives the sense that man's cognitive abilities are not unique.

Second: A lot of Catholic theology regarding the soul is driven by god-of-the-gaps style reasoning. Indeed, if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding, its painfully clear that his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. Obviously no one today says that the soul is in charge of the "locomotion" of living things, but up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect. AI is a direct assault on this final motte, as it is concrete evidence that many of the "intellectual" outputs of the soul could, at least in principle, have a naturalistic explanation. (There was plenty of evidence of the intellect being fully naturalistic prior to AI, but it wasn't the kind of irrefutable "here's a fully natural thing that does the thing you said natural things couldn't do" evidence).

Aquinas: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm

1. We have the sense that "science progresses one funeral at a time." An AI model could be used to recognize situations where a single viewpoint is getting a disproportionate amount of attention in the literature, and warn journals+funding agencies about any disconnects between attention and quality of work.

2. We have the sense that "It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So" An AI model could identify the most high-profile results in the literature that have contradicting evidence and call for further, decisive study.

3. Interdisciplinary translation. There are many many cases of different branches of science re-discovering each other's work. I believe I read an article a little bit ago about an academic in a somewhat softer science publishing a paper proudly claiming the discovery of linear regression. Obviously not all cases are so egregious, but an AI could advance a discipline just by pointing out areas where that discipline is using outdated/inferior methods compared to the state of the art.

Trump, the current president of the US, is. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-would-happen-us-leaves-...

Congress found the scenario credible enough to pass a law specifically making it more difficult for him to do unilaterally.

> But none of the things have happened yet, nor are there any signs they're immediately about to.

Proving the nonexistence of signs is not a position I would be willing to take as it is far too philosophically difficult to defend.

The reality is that both the Ukrainian and Iranian situations are far from an equilibrium; there don't need to be signs to know that dramatic changes are coming, we just can't tell what those changes will actually look like.

* The US is poised to strongly take Israel's side in a conflict with Iran, which could easily evolve into either a misadventure, oil shock, or WW3

* The US is poised to withdraw from NATO, ceding a significant amount of geopolitical clout to Russia in particular. This would undermine a bunch of our military efforts abroad, relegating them to the bin of "misadventure." To say nothing of the proposed acquisition of Greenland.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Decimal_Classificati...

I incorrectly assumed it would have some basic linear algebra solution because of how simple the problem seemed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXnSYfv6bCA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongkrek_acid

Obviously most of the 'AI researchers' right now are not altruistic, but it is possible to take the position that advancing AI will be sufficiently valuable to society that it overrides corporate preferences against bulk scraping.

https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html

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

The ELI5 version is that atoms are all trying to find a comfy place to be. Typically, they make some friends and hang out together, which makes them very comfy, and we call the group of friend-atoms a molecule. Sometimes there are groups of friendly atoms that would be even comfier if they swapped a few friends around, but losing friends and making new friends can be scary and seem like it won't be comfy, so it takes a bit of a push to convince the atoms to do it. That push is precisely activation energy, and the rearrangement won't happen without it (modulo quantum tunneling but this is the ELI5 version.)

In the software world, everyone is trying to make "good" software. Just like atoms in molecules, our ideas and systems form bonds with other ideas and systems where those bonds seem beneficial. But sometimes we realize there are better arrangements that weren't obvious at the outset, so we have to break apart the groupings that formed originally. That act of breakage and reforming takes energy, and is messy, and is exactly what this author is writing about.

A 50% speed boost would probably make the CPU option a lot more viable for home chatbot, just due to how easy it is to make a system with 128gb RAM vs 128gb VRAM.

I personally am going to experiment with the 48gb modules in the not too distant future.

This was/is the promise of languages like APL; those willing to invest in learning arcane and terse symbols can move mountains in a few keystrokes.

I know that for my part, when reading a language I’m familiar with, it’s usually much faster to puzzle out a concise solution than a verbose-in-the-name-of-simplicity one.

To be fair, they have mostly settled on OneDrive after the lawsuit that forced the name change.

https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

You didn't answer my questions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tel_Hai

Unilateral withdrawal from Gaza led to the tripling of rocket attacks. Multiple peace offers have been rejected. Limited Israeli retaliation and extensive international aid has meant the Palestinian civilian population is sufficiently insulated from the violence that they have no incentive to demand peace from their leaders.

When Palestine was sending children as suicide bombers, Israel decided to play defense and built walls that dramatically lowered the efficacy of suicide bombings. So the Palestinians switched to rockets. So Israel again played defense and built the iron dome. So Hamas switched to Oct. 7th. Do you think they should play defense again?

Tell me: what peace offer do you think Israel could make the Palestinians that would lead to a lasting peace? Tell me: if Israel surrendered unconditionally to the Palestinians, would the Israelis live in peace?

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

https://www.nostalgianerd.com/tomy-tutor/

So I get what you're saying, but at the same time that means your business data can't ever include formulas.

I've worked in areas where the formulas were business data (i.e. modeling). You could hard-code all your models/correlations/aggregation functions. But then it becomes much harder to make UIs that do things like "find all formulas that involve this thermometer reading" or allow a technician to make temporary edits without risking them screwing up your entire application.