That assumes the random process by which vectors are generated places them at random angles to each other, it doesnt, it places them almost always very very nearly at (high-dim) right angles
The underlying geometry isnt random, to this order, it's determinstic
I don't see any sense in which the EU has fewer capabilities. It has, say, a smaller number of businesses with smaller market dominance.
It isnt clear to me what capability the EU would gain by having a monopolist social network, a monopolist search engine, a monopolist advertising trader
> In a sample of 17 large American cities, the lethality of violent offenses increased 31% from 2019 to 2020 and was 20% higher in 2024 than in 2018. Thirteen of the 17 cities had higher lethality levels in 2024 than in 2018.
Yes, the only explanation for why people endorse political hyperbole is that they know its misinformation and they're doing so for the symbolic power of believing a falsehood.
Or, ya know, maybe a rise in the lethality of crime in a society already one of the most profoundly violent in the world has too little hyperbole associated with it.
But when Greta Thunbery uses hyperbole that's politcal rallying to a cause and colition building for a serious threat. But when trump mobilizes resources for police funding in cities with absurd levels of violence, now anyone who endorses this must be really an authoritarian dupe who delights in being mislead.
It's naive to think people interpret the claims literally. Their political interpretation doesn't change if Trump had instead said, "the crime levels are serious and urgent"
Emotional valence is communicated at a literal level in hyperbole. "You're the best mum in the world" isnt misinformation
> "You're the best mum in the world" isnt misinformation
To use the original article's language, the sentence "you're the best mum in the world" and "you're an exemplary mother because you take care of your children's emotional and material needs" are symbolically equivalent, even though the former is clearly a hyperbole.
The more formal point you're making here is that the survey data social psychologists work with can be explained by an infinite number of hypothesis, and the "statistical testing" they do is basically pseudoscience. All they ask is "is my favoured hypothesis more likely than random?" and that's true, but it says nothing about lots of other explanations.
Here everything can be explained by lines of trust, and resilience to information from low-trust sources.
Indeed, it's highly rational to highly doubt sources you do not trust, because you are almost never in a position to validation information.
Either way, the explanations they choose lead to a clearly partisan political narrative, way outside of the scope of their survey studies, that science washes attacks on trump and his supporters.
It's a shame they detoured from social psychology into politics. The claim that false information has social value, and therefore symbolic value, is easy to substantiate without the partisan political analysis which amounts to, "and that's why our political enemies do it!". Very childish.
Disagree, it is important to point out the tactics people use against each other, if we do not demonstrate and point out the weaponry in the world then we normalize servitude to the abusers. Arm and defend yourself against your abuser and know their game.
How did they detour into politics? They are addressing events in the real world, which is what science is about, and for social psychologists that definitely includes politics.
The whole thing is just "here's a narrow result in psychology" connected to grand theories about contemporary politics which implicate the current administration and its supporters into a reductionist explanatory analysis that is widely out of the scope of what they've actually studied.
They did not study trump, trump supporters, trump's political project, its motivations, their motivations, authoritarianism, etc. All of that analysis in this article is partisan politics with sciecne-washing.
If they are studying universal features of human psychology, their analysis should pertain to these features.
By wading into contemporary politics and attributing "authoritarian" psychology to people who want to believe, e.g., what trump says -- you're only making a partisan political statement. This hypothesis is one amongst an infinite number, and has nothing to do with their study.
"Oh but it feels true!" is exactly the opposite of science. They did not study Trump, nor his political strategies, not their supposed underlying psychological motivations.
One can find in every government in the world so-called "misinformation", and find in people who support those governments, credulity about this misinformation. They havent studied any of the relevant domains to make any of these partisan political claims, even if they are true.
By wading into contemporary politics, they are giving the veener of science to highly partisan claims about the supposed psychology of political actors. That isnt what they have studied.
Could you cite at least something in the article that you are referring to? What you say doesn't match what I read. It becomes misinformation itself otherwise.
> "Oh but it feels true!"
Where is that said or implied? They did research and described it.
> attributing "authoritarian" psychology to people who want to believe, e.g., what trump says -- you're only making a partisan political statement. This hypothesis is one amongst an infinite number, and has nothing to do with their study.
They did indeed study that and discussed the research. We need to study partisan behavior without being dismissed as partisan ourselves - otherwise, we just operate in the dark, shut down by partisan attacks.
> One can find in every government in the world so-called "misinformation", and find in people who support those governments, credulity about this misinformation.
There is precipitation everywhere, but some places are deserts and some are rainforests and there is everything in between, and there are many patterns and causes, from monsoons to mist from SF Bay. To dismiss all precipitation research because 'rain is everywhere' is meaningless.
You're making many claims, but have nothing to back it up.
> They did not study Trump, nor his political strategies
Studying the widespread beliefs in misinformation about COVID-19 is perfectly valid, and important. It just so happens that the beliefs in question were overwhelmingly held by members of a very specific political group. The research described in the article helps explain this connection.
> this simulation of a brain, which wouldn't think, to a simulation of a fire, which can't burn down a real building
> with no clear reason whatsoever as to why
It's not clear to me how you can understand that fire has particular causal powers (to burn, and so on) that are not instantiated in a simulation of fire; and yet not understand the same for biological processes.
The world is a particular set of causal relationships. "Computational" descriptions do not have a causal semantics, so aren't about properties had in the world. The program itself has no causal semantics, it's about numbers.
A program which computes the fibonacci sequence describes equally-well the growth of a sunflower's seeds and the agglomeration of galactic matter in certain galaxies.
A "simulation" is, by definition, simply an accounting game by which a series of descriptive statements can be derived from some others -- which necessarily, lacks the causal relations of what is being described. A simulation of fire is, by definition, not on fire -- that is fire.
A simulation is a game to help us think about the world: the ability to derive some descriptive statements about a system without instantiating the properties of that system is a trivial thing, and it is always disappointing at how easily it fools our species. You can move beads of wood around and compute the temperature of the sun -- this means nothing.
Because simulated fire burns other things in the simulation just as much as “real” fire burns real things. Searle &co assert that there is a real world that has special properties, without providing any way to show that we are living in it
> Because simulated fire burns other things in the simulation just as much as “real” fire burns real things.
What we mean by a simulation is, by definition, a certain kind of "inference game" we play (eg., with beads and chalk) that help us think about the world. By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation.
If the claim is that an electrical device can implement the actual properties of biological intelligence, then the claim is not about a simulation. It's that by manufacturing some electrical system, plugging various devices into it, and so on -- that this physical object has non-simulated properties.
Searle, and most other scientific naturalists who appreciate the world is real -- are not ruling out that it could be possible to manufacture a device with the real properties of intelligence.
It's just that merely by, eg., implementing the fibonacci sequence, you havent done anything. A computation description doesnt imply any implementation properties.
Further, when one looks at the properties of these electronic systems and the kinds of causal realtions they have with their environments via their devices, one finds very many reasons to suppose that they do not implement the relevant properties.
Just as much as when one looks at a film strip under a microscope, one discovers that the picture on the screen was an illusion. Animals are very easily fooled, apes most of all -- living as we do in our own imaginations half the time.
Science begins when you suspend this fantasy way of relating to the world, look it its actual properties.
If your world view requires equivocating between fantasy and reality, then sure, anything goes. This is a high price to pay to cling on to the idea that the film is real, and there's a train racing towards you in your cinema seat.
> By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation.
This is kind of a no-true-scotsman esque argument though, isn't it? "substantial properties" are... what, exactly? It's not a subjective question. One could, and many have, insist that fire that really burns is merely a simulation. It would be impossible from the inside to tell. In that case, what is fantasy, and what is reality?
Define any property of interest. Eg., O = "reacting with oxygen"
S is a simulation of O iff there is an inferential process, P, by which properties of O can be estimated from P(S) st. S does not implement O
Eg., "A video game is a simulation of a fire burning if, by playing that game, I can determine how long the fire will burn w/o there being any fire involved"
S is an emulation model of O iff ...as-above.. S implements O (eg., "burning down a dollhouse to model burning down a real house").
If P successfully produces the relevant behaviors of O (burning, light, etc), then P is an implementation of O. There's no separate "real O" floating out there that P fails to capture. In other words, when you are playing the game, there _is_ fire involved.
You define a 'real' implementation to exclude computational substrate, then use the very same definition to prove that computational substrate cannot implement 'real' implementations. It's circular!
> Searle &co assert that there is a real world that has special properties, without providing any way to show that we are living in it
Searle described himself as a "naive realist" although, as was typical for him, this came with a ton of caveats and linguistic escape hatches. This was certainly my biggest objection and I passed many an afternoon in office hours trying to pin him down to a better position.
There is a massive difference between chemical processes, like fire, and computational processes, which thinking likely is. A computer can absolutely be made to interact with the world in a way that assigns real physical meaning to the symbols it manipulates, a meaning entirely independent of any conscious being. For example, the computer that powers an automatic door has a clear meaning for its symbols intrinsic in its construction.
Saying that the symbols in the computer don't mean anything, that it is only we who give them meaning, presupposes a notion of meaning as something that only human beings and some things similar to us possess. It is an entirely circular argument, similarly to the notion of p-zombies or the experience of seizing red thought experiment.
If indeed the brain is a biological computer, and if our mind, our thinking, is a computation carried out by this computer, with self-modeling abilities we call "qualia" and "consciousness", then none of these arguments hold. I fully admit that this is not at all an established fact, and we may still find out that our thinking is actually non-computational - though it is hard to imagine how that could be.
There are no such things as "computational processes". Any computational description of reality describes vastly different sets of casual relata, nothing which exists in the real world is essentially a computational process -- everything is essential causal, with a circumstantially useful computational description.
The only thing that can accurately simulate a process or system is the real process or system. Any simulation that perfectly simulates something becomes that something. Everything else contains simplifications and approximations and is an imperfect simulation.
Fire is the result of the intrinsic reactivity of some chemicals like fuels and oxidizers that allows them to react and generate heat. A simulation of fire that doesn't generate heat is missing a big part of the real thing, it's very simplified. Compared to real fire, a simulation is closer to a fire emoji, both just depictions of a fire. A fire isn't the process of calculating inside a computer what happens, it's molecules reacting a certain way, in a well understood and predictable process. But if your simulation is accurate and does generate heat then it can burn down a building by extending the simulation into the real world with a non-simulated fire.
Consciousness is an emergent property from putting together a lot of neurons, synapses, chemical and physical processes. So you can't analyze the parts to simulate the end result. You cannot look at the electronic neuron and conclude a brain accurately made of them won't generate consciousness. It might generate something even bigger, or nothing.
And in a very interesting twist of the mind, if an accurate simulation of a fire can extend in the real world as a real fire, then why wouldn't an accurate simulation of a consciousness extent in the real world as a real consciousness?
On the contrary, computation is a very clear physical phenomenon, well understood and studied, so well understood that we can build machines to do it. And, again, those machines don't need any interpretation - they do measurable things in the real world, such as opening doors and cutting parts.
I have never encountered this physical process. Here I am typing on a keyboard which is powered through an electrical field that is guided by a peice of wire under each key -- whose operation, when mechanically activated, is to induce some electrical state in some switches it is connected to, and so on.
I associate the key with "K", and my screen displays a "K" shape when it is pressed -- but there is no "K", this is all in my head. Just as much as when I go to the cinema and see people on the screen: there are no people.
By ascribing a computational description to a series of electrical devices (whose operation distributes power, etc.) I can use this system to augment by own thinking. Absent the devices, the power distribution, their particular casual relationships to each other, there is no computer.
The computational description is an observer-relative attribution to a system; there are no "physical" properties which are computational. All physical properties concern spatio-temporal bodies and their motion.
The real dualism is to suppose there are such non-spatio-temporal "process". The whole system called a "computer" is an engineered electrical device whose construction has been designed to achive this illusion.
Likewise I can describe the solar system as a computational process, just discretize orbits and give their transition in a while(true) loop. That very same algorithm describes almost everything.
Physical processes are never "essentially" computational; this is just a way of specifying some highly superficial feature which allows us to ignore their causal properties. Its mostly a useful description when building systems, ie., an engineering fiction.
Right, and I seem to remember this sort of point in Wittgenstein as well in his rule-following argument where, to make an adjustment to his question, what would it mean for a computer to be miscomputing other than bucking our expectations for what a system should produce; all computers clearly are performing exactly as our physics describe them, even if they produce 2 * 2 = 5 on a screen.
And yet you can build a device with the exact same functionality using vacuum tubes, semiconductor transistors, field effect transistors, water pipes, ant molehills, and any other substrate - and you could even replace some of the components with a software-defined hardware component that does the same thing. The computation is the thing that is objectively the same between all of these different realizations of the same device - the software that they are running. And for many of these, the software is indeed a physical object, one whose presence you can precisely measure. A hard disk containing a copy of quicksort has different physical properties that the same hard-disk containing a copy of Windows. A CPU currently running quicksort is likewise different from a CPU currently running ChatGPT, in perfectly measurable and observable ways.
A computational description of a system is no more and no less rigurous than any other physical model of that system. To the same extent that you can say that billiards balls interact by colliding with each other and the table, you can say that a processor is computing some function by flipping currents through transistors.
> software-defined hardware component that does the same thing
No, you cannot.
A hard-drive needs to a have a physical hysteresis. An input/output device needs to transmit power, and be powered, by an electrical field. A visual device needs to emit light on electrical stimulation, and so on.
The only sense, in the end, in which a "computer" survives its devices being changed is just observer-relative. You attribute a "3" to one state and a "1" to another, and "addition" to some process. By your attribution, does that process compute "4".
But it computes everything and computes nothing. If you plug in a speaker to VGA socket, the electrical signal causes an the air to move, sound.
The only sense in which a VGA signal is a "visual" signal is that we attach an LCD to that socket, and we interpret the light from the LCD semantically.
The world is a particular way objects in space and time move, those exhaust all physical properties. Any other properties are non-physical, which is why this kind of computationalism is really dualism.
You suppose it isnt your physical mechanism and its relationship to your environment which constitutes your thinking -- rather it's your soul. A pure abstract pattern which needs no devices with no specific properties to be realised.
Whatever this pattern is, if you played it through a speaker, it would just be vibrations in the air. Sent to an LCD, whitenoise. Only realised in your specific biology is it any kind of thinking at all.
Again, this is simply and provably false. I can build a system that opens a door when I'm near it using a photodiode connected to a measurement pin and have the CPU trigger the door opening motor if the diode is indicating no light, and the door closing motor if it indicates light. Or, I can buy a camera and build a complex software solution to analyze the output of that camera, and open the door if the software sets the "is_present" bit and otherwise closes the door.
In either case, the door will open if you're in front of it, and close after you've gone. This will happen regardless of whether you undertsand what it represents, it will open for a basic robot as well as for a human or a squirrel or a plant growing towards it very slowly or a rock rolling downhill.
Of course, you can't replace every single piece of hardware with software - you still need some link with the physical world. And of course, there will be many measurable differences between the two systems - for a basic example, the camera-based system will give off a lot more heat than the photo-sensitive diode one. I'm not claiming that they are perfectly equivalent in every way, not at all. I am claiming that they are equivalent in some measurable, observer-independent ways, and that the specific way in which they are equivalent is that they are running the same computation.
Yes, you can intepret systems as having a goal and realise that goal using a vareity of different devices.
Reality itself doesnt have purposes, there are no goals. "A device that opens a door" isnt a physical process, it's a goal.
Go do the same with chemistry, physics, biology -- no, actual relaity doesnt have purposes. Hexane isnt methane, gravity isnt electromagnetism, the motion of air molecuels isnt the emission of light.
Any time "one thing can serve the purpose as another" you are, by definition, working in the world of human intention.
Your entire observer-relative purpose-attributing "engineering mania" here is anti-naturalistic dualism. Reality is a place of specific causes, not of roles/pruposes/goals/devices
Fire is the thing which is a plasma disposed to burn in oxygen which results from a specific chemical/etc. process etc. etc. There is no "water fire".
Insofar as an object can causally interact with another such that it "pushes it out of the way" -- the property had by all such objects relates to the pauli exclusion principle (essentially) and refined by surface area, volume, density and the like. To "open a door" is to displace wood in a certain location, to do that is to exist such that the femionic structure of the wood is excluded from that place.
There is a clear physical reality to the door opening, the steel and glass being displaced. The computer does that triggered by certain conditions, that you can determine by experiment. There is no goal being assigned here - I'm merely stating that the system goes through a certain series of states that depend on both the raw hardware, and the programmed instructions, probably so.
Lets put it another way. Say you are some alien being trying to study the inner workings of a system like this with no prior knowledge of how it arose in nature. You will apply the principles of empiricism and try to determine the workings of this physical system through repeated experiments, measurements of the electrical and chemical characteristics of various parts, etc. If your experimentation is sophisticated and complete enough, it will necessarily have to include a representation of the software running in this processor, and of the algorithms it encodes - the behavior of the system cannot be explained without that. An outwardly similar system, built with the exact same "parts" (in the traditional sense, i.e. the same model of processor, motor etc), but programmed with different software, will behave entirely differently. This clearly proves that the software is a physical object that is part of the system and is necessary to fully account for its behavior.
Ah, seems like you folks arguing from two different Epistemologies? [1]
We already know that two different Epistemologies won't necessarily map perfectly to each other, though you might get close.
Might still be interesting to compare notes on what you can and can't predict/achieve with each!
[1] Edit : I can't quite lay my finger on which epistemologies exactly. Tsimionescu is using strong Empirical arguments, while mjburgess is inspired on Searle, which is pretty apt here, of course!
>A "simulation" is, by definition, simply an accounting game by which a series of descriptive statements can be derived from some others -- which necessarily, lacks the causal relations of what is being described.
This notion of causality is interesting. When a human claims that he is conscious, there a causal chain from the fact that they are conscious to their claiming so. When a neuron-level simulation of a human claims it is conscious, there must be a similar causal chain, with a similar fact at its origin.
There we go again. You claim that thinking is a biological process by definition, and use your definition to "prove" that software cannot be thinking. What if instead of software simulation of thinking we would have an actual software thinking? Your point would be to disregard it, not based on behaviour, but based on whatever your idea of "propper hardware for thinking" is. Pure troll and sophist, that Searle
You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem.
Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher
> You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population.
I'm not assuming anything. I literally explained that the only way it's possible is for someone to avoid the general population and only socialize in environments with extreme bias.
The more important point is that diagnosing autism is not something you can do by simply meeting people in social situations. It's something that takes training and experience by professionals, not an untrained person who sizes people up as they meet them in a social capacity.
Again, psychiatry is in its infancy. Many professionals use outdated models or stereotypes in practice. Living as an autistic individual can make it easier to clock other autistic people, because it's rare to meet someone who functions or thinks the same way you do and sticks out like a sore thumb. For example, "thinking in pictures" is not a universal autistic trait, but it's a pretty well known one.
The underlying geometry isnt random, to this order, it's determinstic
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