AnarchoEngineer
@AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants 16 hours ago:
I definitely don’t think the human brain could be modeled by a Turing machine.
In 1994, Hava Siegelmann proved that her new (1991) computational model, the Artificial Recurrent Neural Network (ARNN), could perform hypercomputation (using infinite precision real weights for the synapses)
Since the human brain is largely comprised of complex recurrent networks, it stands to reason the same holds for it.
The human brain is an analog computer and is—as far as I’m aware—an undecidable system. As in you cannot algorithmically predict the behavior of the net with certainty. Predictable behavior can arise but it’s probabilistic not certain.
I also think I see what you’re saying with the thermometer being “conscious” of temperature, but that kind of collapses the definition of conscious to “influenced by” which makes the word superfluous. Using conscious to refer to an ability requiring learning of patterns of different sources of influence seems like a more useful definition.
Also in the crazy unlikely event in which I actually end up creating a sentient thing, I’ll be hesitant to publish any work related to it.
If my theory about how focus/attention work is correct, anything capable of focus must be capable of experiencing pain/irritation/agitation. I’m not fond of the idea of going “hey here’s how to create something that feels pain” to the world since a lot of people around me don’t even feel empathy for their own kind
- Comment on Some big black corn 1 day ago:
Wait wtf? When did they add corn to the community icon? This is getting out of hand…
- Comment on It will be great, they said... 2 days ago:
It is definitely both.
The tie pattern is probably the most obvious artifact, but the lighting and focus being inconsistent is what kicks off the intuitive “this is definitely GenAI” sense
- Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants 3 days ago:
if you don’t think my framework is useful, could you provide a more useful alternative or explain exactly where it fails? If you can it’d be a great help.
As for “skill issue” while I think generalized comparisons of brains are possible (in fact we have some now) I think you might be underestimating the nature of chaotic systems or have a belief that consciousness will arise with equivalent qualia whenever it exists.
There is nothing saying that our brains process qualia in exactly the same way, quite the opposite, and yet we can reach the same capabilities of thought even with large scale neurodivergences. The blind can still experience the world without their sense of sight, those with synesthesia can experience and understand reality even if their brain processes multiple stimuli as the same qualia. It is very possible that there are multiple different paths to consciousness which will have unique neurological behaviors that only makes sense within their original mind and may have no analog in another.
The more I look into the functions of the brain—btw I am by no means an expert and this is not my field—the more I realize many of our current models are limited by our desire to classify things discreetly. The brain is an absolute mess. That is what makes it so hard to understand but also what makes it so powerful.
It may not be possible to isolate qualia at all. It may not be possible to isolate certain thoughts or memory from other circumstances in which it is recalled. There might not be elemental/specific spike trains for a certain sense that are disjoint from other senses. And if this is the case, it is likely possible different individuals may have different couplings of qualia making them impossible to compare directly.
The idea that other processing areas of the brain (which by the way we do see in the brain (place neurons remapping is a simple example)) may be entangled in different ways across individuals means that even among members of the same species it likely won’t be possible to directly compare raw experiences because the required hardware to process a specific experience for one individual might not exist in the other individual’s mind.
Discrete ideas like communicable knowledge/relationships should (imo) be possible to isolate well enough that you could theoretically implant them into any being capable of understanding abstract thought, but raw experiences (ei qualia) most likely will not have this property.
Also, the project isn’t available online and is a mess because it’s not my field and I have an irrational desire to build everything from scratch because I want to understand exactly how it is implemented and hey it’s a personal hobby project, don’t judge lol
So far I’ve mostly only replicated the research of others. I have tried some experiments with my own ideas, but spiking neural nets are difficult to simulate on normal hardware, and I need a significant number of neurons, so currently I’m working on designing a more efficient implementation than the ones I’ve previously written.
After that, my plan is to experiment with my own designs for a spiking artificial hippocampus implementation. If my ideas are sound I should be able to use similar systems to implement both short and long term memory storage.
If that succeeds I’ll be moving onto the main event of focus and attention which I also have some ideas for, but it really requires the other systems to be functional.
I probably won’t get that far but hey it’s at least interesting to think about and it’s honestly fun to watch a neural net learn patterns in real time even if it’s kinda slow.
- Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants 3 days ago:
if you don’t think my framework is useful, could you provide a more useful alternative or explain exactly where it fails? If you can it’d be a great help.
As for “skill issue” while I think generalized comparisons of brains are possible (in fact we have some now) I think you might be underestimating the nature of chaotic systems or have a belief that consciousness will arise with equivalent qualia whenever it exists.
There is nothing saying that our brains process qualia in exactly the same way, quite the opposite, and yet we can reach the same capabilities of thought even with large scale neurodivergences. The blind can still experience the world without their sense of sight, those with synesthesia can experience and understand reality even if their brain processes multiple stimuli as the same qualia. It is very possible that there are multiple different paths to consciousness which will have unique neurological behaviors that only makes sense within their original mind and may have no analog in another.
The more I look into the functions of the brain—btw I am by no means an expert and this is not my field—the more I realize many of our current models are limited by our desire to classify things discreetly. The brain is an absolute mess. That is what makes it so hard to understand but also what makes it so powerful.
It may not be possible to isolate qualia at all. It may not be possible to isolate certain thoughts or memory from other circumstances in which it is recalled. There might not be elemental/specific spike trains for a certain sense that are disjoint from other senses. And if this is the case, it is likely possible different individuals may have different couplings of qualia making them impossible to compare directly.
The idea that other processing areas of the brain (which by the way we do see in the brain (place neurons remapping is a simple example)) may be entangled in different ways across individuals means that even among members of the same species it likely won’t be possible to directly compare raw experiences because the required hardware to process a specific experience for one individual might not exist in the other individual’s mind.
Discrete ideas like communicable knowledge/relationships should (imo) be possible to isolate well enough that you could theoretically implant them into any being capable of understanding abstract thought, but raw experiences (ei qualia) most likely will not have this property.
Also, the project isn’t available online and is a mess because it’s not my field and I have an irrational desire to build everything from scratch because I want to understand exactly how it is implemented and hey it’s a personal hobby project, don’t judge lol
So far I’ve mostly only replicated the research of others. I have tried some experiments with my own ideas, but spiking neural nets are difficult to simulate on normal hardware, and I need a significant number of neurons, so currently I’m working on designing a more efficient implementation than the ones I’ve previously written.
After that, my plan is to experiment with my own designs for a spiking artificial hippocampus implementation. If my ideas are sound I should be able to use similar systems to implement both short and long term memory storage.
If that succeeds I’ll be moving onto the main event of focus and attention which I also have some ideas for, but it really requires the other systems to be functional.
I probably won’t get that far but hey it’s at least interesting to think about and it’s honestly fun to watch a neural net learn patterns in real time even if it’s kinda slow.
- Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants 3 days ago:
I think you’re getting hung up on the words rather than the content. While our definitions of terms may be rather vague, the properties I described are not cyclically defined.
To be aware of the difference between self means to be able to sense stimuli originating from the self, sense stimuli not from the self, and learn relationships between them.
As long as aspects of the self (like current and past thoughts) are able to be sensed (encoded into a representation which the mind can work with directly; in our case neural spike chains) exist and senses which compare those senses with other senses or past senses and finally that the mind can learn patterns in those encodings (like spiking neural nets) then it should be possible for conscious awareness to arise. (If you’re curious about the kind of learning that needs to happen you should look into Tolman-Eichenbaum machines, though non-spiking ones aren’t reallly capable of self learning)
I hope that’s a clear enough “empirical” explanation for you.
As for qualia, you are entirely wrong. What you describe would not prove that my raw experience of green is the same as your green, only that we both have qualia which can arise from the color green. You can say that it’s not pragmatic to think about that which cannot be known, and I’ll agree that qualia must be represented in a physical way and thus be recreatable in that persons brain, but the complexity of human brains actually precludes the ability to define what actually is the qualia and what are other thoughts. The difference between individuals likely precludes the ability to say “oh when these neurons are active it means this” because other people have different neural structures, similar? Absolutely, similar enough that for any experience you could find exactly the same neurons that would fire the same way as in someone else? Absolutely not.
Your last statements make it seem like you don’t understand the diffference between learning and knowledge. LLMs don’t learn when you use them. Neither do most modern chess models. They actually don’t learn at all unless they are being trained by an outside source who gives them an input, expects an output, and then computes the weight changes needed to get closer to the answer via gradient descent.
A typical ANN trained this way does not learn from new experiences furthermore, it is not capable of referencing its own thoughts because it doesn’t have any.
The self is that which acts, did you know LLMs aren’t capable of being aware they took any action? Are you aware chess engines can’t do that either? There is no comparison mechanism between what was and what is and what made that change. They cannot be self aware the same way a program hardcoded to kill processes other than itself is unaware. They literally lack any sense of their own actions directly. Once again, you not only need to be able to sense that information, but the program then needs a sense which compares that sensation to other sensations and learns the differences, changing the way it responds to those stimuli. You need learning.
I don’t reject the idea of machines being conscious, in fact I’m literally trying to make a conscious machine just to see if I can (which yeah to most people sounds insane). But I do not think we agree on much else because learning is absolutely essential for any thing to be capable of a conscious action.
- Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants 4 days ago:
Anything dealing with perception is going to be somewhat circular and vague. Qualia are the elements of perception and by their nature it seems they are incommunicable by any means.
Awareness in my mind deals with the lowest level of abstract thinking. Can you recognize this thing and both compare and contrast it with other things, learning about its relation to other things on a basic level?
You could hardcode a computer to recognize its own process. But it’s not comparing itself to other processes, experiencing similarities and dissimilarities. Furthermore unless it has some way to change at least the other processes that are not itself, it can’t really learn its own features/abilities.
A cat can tell its paws are its own, likely in part because it can move them. if you gave a cat shoes, do you think the cat would think the shoes are part of itself? No, And yet the cat can learn that in certain ways it can act as though the shoes are part of itself. The same way we can recognize that tools are not us but are within our control.
We notice that there is a self that is unlike our environment in that it does not control the environment directly, and then there are the actions of the self that can influence or be influenced directly by the environment. And that there are things which we do not control at all directly.
That is the delineation I’m talking about. It’s more the delineation of control than just “this is me and that isn’t” because the term “self” is arbitrary.
We as social beings correlate self with identity, with the way we think we act compared to others, but to be conscious of one’s own existence only requires that you can sense your own actions and learn to delineate between this thing that appears within your control and those things that are not. Your definition of self depends on where you’ve learned to think the lines are.
If you created a computer program capable of learning patterns in the behavior of its own process(es) and learning how those behaviors are similar/dissimilar or connected to those of other processes, then yes, I’d say your program is capable of consciousness. But just adding the ability to detect its process id is simply like adding another built in sense; it doesn’t create conscious self awareness.
Furthermore, on the note of aliens, I think a better question to ask is “what do you think ‘self’ is?” Because that will determine your answer. If you think a system must be consciously aware of all the processes that make it up, I doubt you’ll ever find a life form like that. The reason those systems are subconscious is because that’s the most efficient way to be. Furthermore, those processes are mostly useful only to the self internally, and not so much the rest of reality.
To be aware of self is to be aware of how the self relates to that which is not part of it. Knowing more about your own processes could help with this if you experienced those same processes outside of the self (like noticing how other members of your society behave similarly to you) but fundamentally, you’re not necessarily creating a more accurate idea of self awareness just be having more senses of your automatic bodily processes.
It is equally important, if not more so, to experience more that is not the self rather than to experience more of what would be described as self, because it’s what’s outside that you use to measure and understand what’s inside.
- Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants 5 days ago:
Yes most definitely, I’d imagine most animals are conscious.
In fact my definition of sapience means several animals like crows and parrots and rats are capable of sapience.
- Comment on The Sensory Biology of Plants 5 days ago:
Personally, I’m more a fan of the binary/discrete idea. I tend to go with the following definitions:
- Animate: capable of responding to stimuli
- Sentient: capable of recognizing experiences and debating the next best action to take
- Conscious: aware of the delineation between self and not self -Sapient: capable of using abstract thinking and logic to solve problems without relying solely on memory or hardcoded actions
If you could prove that plants have the ability to choose to scream rather than it being a reflexive response, then they would be sentient. Like a tree “screaming” only when other trees are around to hear.
If I cut myself my body will move away reflexively, it with scab over the wound. My immune system might “remember” some of the bacteria or viruses that get in and respond accordingly. But I don’t experience it as an action under my control. I’m not aware of all the work my body does in the background. I’m not sentient because my body can live on its own and respond to stimuli, I’m sentient because I am aware that stimuli exist and can choose how to react to some of them.
If you could prove that the tree as a whole or that part of a centralized control system in the tree could recognize the difference between itself and another plant or some mycorrhiza, and choose to respond to those encounters, then it would be conscious. But it seems more likely that the sharing of nutrients with others, the networking of the forest is not controlled by the tree but by the natural reflexive responses built into its genome.
Also, If something is conscious, then it will exhibit individuality. You should be able to identify changes in behavior due to the self referential systems required for the recognition of self. Plants and fungi grown in different circumstances should respond differently to the same circumstances.
If you taught a conscious fungus to play chess and then put it in a typical environment, you would expect to see it respond very differently than another member of its species who was not cursed with the knowledge of chess.
If a plant is conscious, you should be able to teach it to collaborate in ways that it normally would not, and again after placing it in a natural environment you should see it attempt those collaborations while it’s untrained peers would not.
Damn now I want to do some biology experiments…
- Comment on Cherry Flavour! 1 week ago:
This isn’t my field but like it shouldn’t be horrible to drink a little sip of this right? It’s just salts and amino acids and sugar, so I’d expect worst case scenario you majorly throw off your electrolyte balance and possibly give your kidneys and liver a lot of amino acids to get rid of. But that’d probably require drinking a significant amount yes?
Anyone with more bio knowledge want to correct or confirm this hypothesis?
- Comment on Anon's solution for first date nerves 1 week ago:
Fake: anon gets frequent tinder dates? Doubt.
Gay: while on said dates he’s thinking about another man… also like the worst man to think of for both for the object of attraction and for the confidence trick.
Talking like Cave Johnson would be a much better option all around. Then you’re not drooling over or mimicking a pedophile AND you can make vaguely ominous jokes about science, so it’s clearly the better choice
- Comment on Anon is British 2 weeks ago:
Fake: no cockney slang
Gay: porn bruv sounds like a name for a gay Brit incest porn channel
- Comment on British plugs 2 weeks ago:
You just brought back memories of my siblings and I walking around outside barefoot to the point these things penetrated our shoes more easily than our feet.
In rural southern Utah these things are literally everywhere. If you go out with cheap foam flip-flops, the entire bottom of the shoe will embedded with dozens of these seconds after you start walking around lol
Kind of oddly satisfying to pull them out of the soles of shoes tbf
- Comment on Jeopardy wall calendar pretending that the coastline paradox doesn't exist 2 weeks ago:
The cardinality of the two intervals [0,1] and [0,2] are equivalent. E.g. for every number in the former you could map it to a unique number in the latter and vice versa. (Multiply or divide by two)
However in statistics, if you have a continuous variable with a uniform distribution on the interval [0, 2] and you want to know what the chances are of that value being between [0,1] then you do what you normally would for a discrete set and divide 1 by 2 because there are twice as many elements in the total than there are in half the range.
In other words, for weird theoretical math the amount of numbers in the reals is equivalent to the amount of any elements in a subset of the reals, but other than those weird cases, you should treat it as though they are different sizes.
- Comment on Anon has a bully 3 weeks ago:
Fake: you think someone would just sit there and wait for you to light your fist on fire with the obvious intent to punch them?
Gay: dude wanted to “smash” his bully
- Comment on Anon reaches their breaking point 4 weeks ago:
I don’t know man, I’m reasonably certain I’m not the only person without blood on their monitor
- Comment on Anon reaches their breaking point 4 weeks ago:
Fake: no blood on the monitor
Gay: why protest/focus-on “many cases” of short-tempered, thin wristed men if not out of the desire for a yandere twink boyfriend? I mean that’s what we’re all thinking about right? …right?
- Comment on Anon gets his life in order 4 weeks ago:
Fake: anon has girlfriend Gay: motivated by sticks
- Comment on Anon likes a girl 4 weeks ago:
Thankfully I’m slightly shorter than that, but not by enough that there are many women as tall or taller than me. I think the z-score of a girl in America being as tall as me is like 3.9, so only approximately 0.004% of women are as tall or taller than me.
If you’re over 2.1m you have my sympathies
- Comment on Anon likes a girl 5 weeks ago:
But I want a very tall person to cuddle with me so that I can feel smol :(
- Comment on Anon likes a girl 5 weeks ago:
Okay I can’t say I wouldn’t like but I guess I really just wish someone much larger than me would cuddle with me so that I could feel small I guess or like protected? Idk it’s hard to explain
- Comment on Anon likes a girl 5 weeks ago:
I’m not sure it’s really spooning if she can’t bend at the hips because the end of my back is far below them and basically at the height of her knees. Not sure having to lay down completely straight is a comfortable position lol
I suppose a short girl could spoon me traditionally if she wants to be facing my lower back but that’s not really what I want either
- Comment on Anon likes a girl 5 weeks ago:
Bro if I could only find a woman who’s like >2m…
I would love to be the little spoon for once :(
- Comment on GET THAT BREAD 1 month ago:
Wait didn’t Reddit have its own .onion domain? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the hypocrisy at this point lol
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 1 month ago:
I know :( the issue is I’m in ME and school is fucking expensive. Oh and I am working in a research lab getting paid for my work, not much though.
I would love nothing more than to stay in school and get like 82 different degrees in various topics. I would love to do a PhD in math, and one in physics, and one in cs, and linguistics, and psychology…
But the world forces me to specialize if I want to have enough money to live well. I chose ME because I knew it had a lot of overlap with a bunch of different fields. And yeah I’m taking grad level math and cs courses, but like you said, lots of the stuff I’m interested in is PhD level stuff.
Also Idk if you’re in America, but the money for research here is getting scarcer every day. It could likely be more effective for me to sell my soul to a defense company and then build my own personal lab with that blood money to do research I want to do than it would be to get a PhD and be a professor and simply hope the projects I want to work on will get funding.
Of course that’s assuming the country doesn’t fully collapse (or kill me) before I enter the job force. And assuming I could work for a defense company without deciding to kill myself out of guilt of building civilian killing murder machines.
Anyway, point is that you are right but I lack the financial security to justify trying to get a PhD in math right now.
- Comment on Easy choice 1 month ago:
Lead solder
Probably not good, but also why does my university have lead solder in all the design labs in the first place? Lol
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 1 month ago:
Ah I think I know what this is about now. If you come from a country like Canada where “Engineer” is a protected designation, then I can understand you thinking it’s a lie and I apologize for that misunderstanding.
In America and my state specifically, the word “professional engineer” is protected and requires certification, but “engineer” does not. There were several people in the civil engineering firm in my hometown who were called engineers and only had highschool diplomas, but that didn’t change the fact they were experienced engineers and called engineers.
In other fields of engineering, like software engineering, you’ll find lots of people with the title of engineer without a degree.
I’m sorry that you felt mislead by me calling myself an engineer despite the fact I’m still in school and only an engineer by title for my research. But that was not an intentional deception, simply a discrepancy between our cultural definitions of the term/title.
Also, I have made it far and will likely continue to push on in academia (though I’d like to get out of this country before starting a PhD so that complicates things).
Anyway, I’m sorry that I’ve offended you and that my attempts to explain/defend myself have come off as petulant. I’ll stop engaging with your comments and you should feel free to block me if you don’t want to come across my posts and comments again.
I’m sorry I wasn’t able to explain things more clearly/calmly sooner and for what it’s worth I’ll try to avoid calling myself an “engineer” without a qualifier stating I’m a student or researcher now that I know some places are more strict about the term.
- Comment on Intelligent Design 1 month ago:
Necrobumping this because @chloroken@lemmy.ml linked to it with a misleading description.
TL;DR: @chloroken@lemmy.ml purposefully misrepresented the argument in his link. I didn’t lie nor did he ever prove me wrong, nor was I talking out of my ass in this thread or the other. I share science I think is cool and I find all sorts of science cool even if the research is outside my main field of study. I’ll even admit when my claims are proven wrong or are less certain than I thought (which you can see if you read this full comment section about liver vitamin A).
I’m not “talking out of my ass” in this thread. (Read it btw I mention interesting science) I was doing the research, just like I said, for a personal project on trying to structure a Spiking Neural Net more similarly to human vision, just like I said. This lead me to look into visual processing in the brain and to the structure of the eye since the initial pre-processing of vision actually might start within the retina.
I never mentioned “cuttlefish” but I guess that’s the only cephalopod he thinks of because this was the initial theory of @chloroken@lemmy.ml.
Did you just see that other post about Cephalopod eye anatomy and write this?
I ask because you have a poor grasp of how evolution actually is when you say “evolution makes a mistake”. The truth is that our eyes are one of many layouts in the animal kingdom, it’s not some binary thing like you’re making it out to be.
This was in response to my casual comment about how evolution fucked up our eyes. Obviously evolution can’t really make mistakes because it isn’t conscious but it is the general consensus that our eyes are “inverted” because by the time it became an issue, the system was too complex to easily flip back around (the recurrent laryngeal nerve is another good example of this kind of “fuck up”).
Also obviously there are more kinds of eyes, I never said there weren’t nor did I mean to imply (or think I even accidentally implied) this was binary. Idk why chloroken got the impression that’s what I was saying…?
Anyway, I actually am (and was) doing graduate level research despite being an undergrad. And guess what: you don’t need to have a degree to learn things or read research papers.
I do not write bullshit for people to “be dazzled by the academic tone” (in fact I’ve heard I write to casually in my papers), I “write bullshit” because science is cool and I want to share what I’ve learned with others. Who cares what field of science it’s in, it’s fascinating no matter what.
Do science. Share what you learn. Tell people like @chloroken who just want to be mad at you to fuck off instead of engaging them like I have lol
Oh and to defend myself (and actually brag a little haha) as of now I’ve officially prototyped a real, novel, mechatronics system for use in prosthetics and augmented reality systems, and there’s now a paper in the works with my name first. Point is I don’t think it’s wrong to call myself an engineer. Especially to strangers on the internet who don’t need to know whether I’m a grad researcher or working for a company.
Also I’d go into more detail about my research (the federally funded ones not the hobby ones) but @chloroken@lemmy.ml seems like the kind of person who’d stalk/doxx me. So I really should be more careful about what I say about my personal life.
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 1 month ago:
I haven’t intentionally misrepresented myself in this comment section or the previous one or any others as far as I can think of.
I also have not lied.
So, what is the real reason for the aggression mate?
- Comment on We gotta be more encouraging 1 month ago:
Ah yes my wildest fantasy: to find out that the ideas I think are new and original have been studied well beyond my level of understanding by other people lol
I hope you’ve never worked in academia. You sound like you really like discouraging people from enjoying science unless they meet your arbitrary education standards.
Anyone can do science. Sure, sometimes people who don’t know a lot learn a little and think they know a lot, but you shouldn’t just shut them down. If someone has a passion for exploration you should encourage them to keep going, catch their mistakes sure, help them question their thought process, but remind them that making mistakes or thinking an idea is novel when it isn’t is something everyone does and they shouldn’t be ashamed for it.