Eric Holloway
Could Our Minds Be Bigger Than Even a Multiverse?
The relationship between information, entropy, and probability suggests startling possibilities. If you find the math hard, a face-in-the-clouds illustration works tooIs Your Mind Bigger Than the Universe? Well, Look At It This Way…
Surprisingly, there is a way to measure the mind that shows it IS bigger than the universe — informationImagine you’re sitting at home, relaxing in your favorite easy chair. Go on, kick your legs up. Feel your limbs releasing the stress of the day, starting from the extremities, and progressing up your core to your head. Now, let your mind expand. Let go of what is holding your mind down. Feel it become free, outside of everything around it. Let the feeling continue until your mind is bigger than the universe. Now consider the question: if your mind is bigger than the universe, can it be within the universe? If a ball is bigger than a bag, can it be contained by the bag? Of course not. If the mind is bigger than the universe, then it must Read More ›
Why Is Theology the Most Important Empirical Science?
Arguing pro or con about the existence of God has resulted in many successful and/or widely accepted theories in scienceCan AI Really Start Doing Evil Stuff All By Itself?
We need to first talk to the man in the mirror before we go around blaming transistor circuit boards for what’s wrong in the worldCould AI get any more sinister than what we’ve been hearing recently? Now we hear about scenarios right out of a cold war spy movie: AI sleeper agents. Not only might AI do evil things once we start plugging it into our most sensitive systems, but it might hide its evilness from us, biding time until the perfect strike. You can practically hear those GPUs crackling with villainous glee! To create such a scenario for study, a group of computer science researchers first trained an AI to react maliciously when certain key words were introduced. It is as if special agent Jason Bourne suddenly recalls ninja assassin skills whenever a handler tells him, “Ginger pickle pizza rhinoplasty.” These triggered AIs Read More ›
Can There Really Be an Ultimate Happiness Machine?
Technology can do so much. Can it really provide an answer to the eternal human quest for happiness?What is the one thing that everyone in the world can agree on? Everyone wants to be happy. And everyone has a different idea as to how happiness might be achieved. But people want to be happy so much that even people who deliberately seek ways to be sad do so because it fulfills them at some level and thus makes them happy. The whole world is quite a big market. What if someone could create a machine to satisfy this entire market; that is, make everyone happy? If you think about it, that is what all machines are designed to do, but in a very limited setting. All machines are satisfying some need, and that satisfaction makes the user Read More ›
AI and the Chinese Room Argument
We still haven't cracked the mystery of human intelligence.One of the most well-known criticisms of AI is John Searle’s Chinese room argument. Published in 1980, the argument asks the reader to imagine himself a librarian in a large library full of books. These books are full of rules that convert one string of Chinese characters into another string of Chinese characters. Each day the librarian is given a paper with some Chinese characters on it, and he then looks through his books to convert the characters into a response. Throughout the whole process, the librarian does not know what any of the characters mean. He is just following rules by rote. Searle states that just as the librarian in the room has the ability to translate Chinese without Read More ›
“Ghost Work” and the Enduring Necessity of Human Labor
Contrary to popular assumptions, the greater the automation, the greater the need for human labor.Ancient Greek Philosophy and Modern Blockbuster Graphics
The amazing computer-generated effects you see in almost every blockbuster today are only possible thanks to ideas proposed over 2300 years ago.Life According to the Turing Machine
Is there more to the world than just data and digits?Does ChatGPT Pass the Creativity Test?
What does ChatGPT have to do in order to be considered creative?What is creativity? Where does it come from? Why are some things humans do considered creative, while other things mundane? Can AI be creative? To answer these questions, let’s come up with a definition. Creativity at least means something new has been done. No work that copies what has come before is considered creative. A Creativity Criteria Just doing something new is not enough either. If it were, then I can easily be creative by flipping a coin 100 times. That specific sequence of coin flips will only occur once in the entire history of humanity. But no one would say I was creative when I flipped a coin. This means creativity has to generate a new insight. However, these two criteria are not adequate, Read More ›
Can AI Create its Own Information?
The simple answer is "no," but why? Eric Holloway explainsAI is amazing. It is all the rage these days. Companies everywhere are jumping on the AI bandwagon. No one wants to be left behind when true believers are raptured to the mainframe in the sky. What makes the AI work? The AI works because of information it gained from a human generated dataset. Let’s label the dataset D. We can measure the information in the dataset with Shannon entropy. Represent the information with H(D). When we train an AI with this data, we are applying a mathematical function to the dataset. This function is the training algorithm. Labelling the training algorithm T, then we represent training as T(D). The outcome of training is a new AI model. The model generates new data. We Read More ›
Say What? AI Doesn’t Understand Anything
Is that supposed to be a cat, Mr. AI?Whenever I look at AI generated content, whether it be pictures or text, they all have the same flaw. The AI cannot comprehend what it is making. Let me explain. When we humans draw a picture, we are drawing a concept. We are drawing something like “cat climbs a tree” or “cowboy riding into the sunset”. It seems like this is what is happening with a picture drawing AI. We give it a prompt, and it draws an associated picture. On second thought, maybe not… When AI draws the picture, what is really going on is it is finding individual-colored pixels that correlate with the letters we typed in its massive database stored in the neural network. Very different than how we draw. We Read More ›
Minecraft: A World of Information
The world's bestselling video game captures the insight that information is created and consumed by human mindsWhat if I told you intelligent design theory is responsible for the most successful computer game of all time? This game is Minecraft. It has sold over 238 million copies, the highest selling game of all time. What makes the game even more extraordinary is it was created entirely by one man, Markus Persson, over a weekend, who then later sold the game to Microsoft for $2.5 billion dollars. Hard to make this sort of thing up. How does Minecraft work? You can think of Minecraft like a computer game form of Legos, the popular building block toy, with added monsters. You are dropped into an algorithmically generated world where you have to discover resources, find food, and build structures to survive the Read More ›
For BitHeaven’s Sake
A satirical short story on the transhumanist quest (and failure) to achieve immortalityBob and Sue were on their way to church one morning. On their way they ran into their friend Fred. Fred was very wealthy, a billionaire in fact. Fred waved hi. Bob and Sue waved back. They asked Fred to come with them to church. Fred said no, he had more important things to do. “What is so important,” asked Sue. “I’m off to the real deal,” beamed Fred. Bob looked confused. “Real deal about what?” “You have a fake promise of eternal life. I’m about to get the real thing.” “You can’t be serious. Start talking some sense.” “Seriously. Here’s my voucher, see it right here.” Sue grabbed the piece of paper from Fred and read it aloud. “Good for one digital immortalization Read More ›
AI and Human Text: Indistinct?
Here's a mathematical proof that challenges the assumption that AI and human-made text are the sameWhat is a poor teacher to do? With AI everywhere, how can he reliably detect when his students are having ChatGPT write their papers for them? To address this concern, a number of AI text detector tools have emerged. But do they work? A recent paper claims that AI generated text is ultimately indistinguishable from human generated text. They illustrate their claim with a couple experiments that fool AI text detectors by simple variations to AI generated text. Then, the authors go on to mathematically prove their big claim that it is ultimately impossible to tell AI text and human text apart. However, the authors make a crucial assumption. Faulty Premises The proof assumes that AI generated text will become closer and closer to Read More ›
AI vs. Human Intentionality
If ChatGPT were trained over and over on its own output, it would eventually turn to gibberishWe can do a simple experiment that demonstrates the difference between AI and human intentionality. ChatGPT and the like are a sophisticated form of a mathematical model known as a Markov chain. A Markov chain is based on the Markov assumption that the future is entirely a product of the recent past. In other words, if we know the recent past, then nothing else we learn about the more distant past will improve our ability to predict the future. In ChatGPT terms, this means ChatGPT is based on the assumption that everything we need to know to predict future words is contained within a limited window of previously seen words. ChatGPT’s window was 3,000 words, and I believe the newest version has Read More ›
We Can’t Build a Hut to the Moon
The history of AI is a story of a recurring cycle of hype and disappointmentOnce upon a time there live a tribe who lived on the plains. They were an adventurous tribe, constantly wanting to explore. At night they would see the moon drift lazily overhead, and became curious. How could they reach the moon? The moon was obviously higher than their huts. Standing on the highest hut no one could reach the moon. At the same time, standing on the hut got them closer to the moon. So, they decided to amass all their resources and build a gigantic hut. Reason being that if standing on a short hut got them closer to the moon, then standing on a gigantic hut would get them even closer. Eventually the tribe ran out of mud and Read More ›
ChatGPT Violates Its Own Model
Based on these exchanges, we can at least say the chatbot is more than just the ChatGPT neural networkHere is a quick overview of how ChatGPT operates under the hood. This will make it easier to spot suspicious behavior. The following is at a very high level. For the gory details, see the following two guides: – The Illustrated GPT-2 (Visualizing Transformer Language Models) – Jay Alammar – Visualizing machine learning one concept at a time. (jalammar.github.io) – The GPT-3 Architecture, on a Napkin (dugas.ch) What is ChatGPT? Let’s start with what ChatGPT is. ChatGPT is a kind of machine learning algorithm known as a neural network. To understand what a neural network is, recall your algebra classes. You remember being given a set of equations and being told to solve for some variables. Then you learned you Read More ›
Blinded by a Defunct Theory
The "interaction problem" is everywhere we look in physics, but the dogma of materialism remainsMaterialism. What a weird word. It sounds like a ghost, materializing in front of me. And it is sort of like a ghost, one that has mysteriously taken over the minds of many intelligent people. Because they believe in materialism, these smart people don’t believe in ghosts. Especially the ghost in the machine. The problem is there is no way for the ghost to interact with the machine. This is known as the “mind-body interaction problem”. The great thing about materialism is at least that theory doesn’t have an interaction problem. Any material thing can interact with any other material thing. Yet there is a deep irony. Let’s explore the idea of materialism to see why. Materialism is the idea that reality only consists of matter. Read More ›