Eric Holloway

Chocolate and vanilla bourbon ice creams

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
August 29, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), Featured, Information and decision-making, Mind-Brain Distinction}

How We Know the Mind Is About Information, Not Matter or Energy

_{The computer program’s world is one of binary 0 or 1 decisions but the physical world is one of many different shades of more or less} _{Eric Holloway

August 29, 2022

4

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Philosophy of Mind}

It’s really hard to picture the “mind,” isn’t it? You might think of wavy ghosts, or a spectral light. But nothing very definite. The brain, on the other hand, is very easy to visualize. Images and videos are just a Google away. That’s why it’s easy to assume that our brains are the entities that do our thinking for us. The brain is not only easy to image, it is physical. We can (in theory) touch it. Poke it. The brain even runs off electricity, just like your computer. But what makes a computer run Windows? It isn’t just the transistors on silicon wafers. It isn’t just the electricity coursing through the circuits. Windows itself is a ghostly being, like…

black metal spiral staircase in grayscale photography

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
August 8, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Programming

Tagged
AND function, Artificial neural networks (ANNs), Artificial neural networks vs. neurons, Decision regions in neural networks, Decision surfaces in neural networks, Featured, Incremental learning in neural networks, Logic functions, Logic functions and neural networks, Mind vs. brain, Mind vs. neural networks, Multilayer perceptrons, Neural networks' limitations, Neurons, Neurons vs. artificial neural networks, Perceptrons, Python (program), Truth tables, XOR function}

How AI Neural Networks Show That the Mind Is Not the Brain

_{A series of simple diagrams shows that, while AI learns faster than the human brain, the human mind tackles problems that stump AI} _{Eric Holloway

August 8, 2022

11

Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Programming}

Recently, I’ve been arguing (here and here, for example) that we can use artificial neural networks (ANNs) to prove that the mind is not the brain. To recap, here is the logic of my argument: Premise A: neural networks can learn better than the brainPremise B: the human mind can learn better than a neural networkConclusion: the human mind can learn better than the brain, therefore it is not the brain This means if we can conclusively show the human mind can learn better than a neural network, then the mind is not the brain. For Premise A, I’ve argued that the differentiable neural network is a superior learning model compared to the brain neuron’s “all or nothing principle”. The…

3D illustration, embossed mesh representing internet connections, cloud computing and neural network.

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
August 2, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience

Tagged
Artificial neural networks vs. neurons, Backpropagation algorithm, Featured, Marvin Minsky and perceptrons, Neurons (all or nothing principle), Perceptrons (all or nothing principle), Perceptrons' limitations, XOR function}

Can Computer Neural Networks Learn Better Than Human Neurons?

_{They can and do; when artificial intelligence programmers stopped trying to copy the human neuron, they made much better progress} _{Eric Holloway

August 2, 2022

5

Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience}

Neural networks are all the rage in computing these days. Many engineers think that, with enough computer power and fancy tweaks, they will become as smart as people. Recent successes playing games and predicting protein folds pour gasoline on the AI fire. We could be on the edge of the mystical Singularity, when humans and computers will merge and we become immortal gods. Or not. Let’s wind the clock back to the beginning of neural networks. In computer science terms, they are actually a very old technology. The earliest version, called a perceptron, (a single-layer neural network) was invented in the 1960s, inspired by McCulloch and Pitt’s early model of brain neurons. But, the perceptron was ignored for decades because…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
July 24, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind, Programming

Tagged
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), Artificial neural networks vs. neurons, Featured, Hodgkin-Huxley model of a neuron, McCulloch–Pitts model of neurons, Mind vs. brain, Mind vs. neural networks, Neurons vs. artificial neural networks, Perceptrons and error backpropagation, Society of Mind (book 1987)}

Artificial neural networks can show that the mind isn’t the brain

_{Because artificial neural networks are a better version of the brain, whatever neural networks cannot do, the brain cannot do.} _{Eric Holloway

July 24, 2022

4

Artificial Intelligence, Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind, Programming}

What is the human mind? AI pioneer Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) said in 1987 that essentially “Minds are what brains do.” That is, the mind is the result of electrical waves cycling through the brain, as neurons spike and synapses transmit signals. But is that true? Can we test this idea? We can indeed, using artificial neural networks. One of the most popular approaches to artificial intelligence is artificial neural networks. These networks, inspired by an early model of how neurons fire (the McCulloch–Pitts model), consist of nodes, where each node is similar to a neuron. A node receives signals and then sends them to its linked nodes based on an activation function. There are, of course, differences between neural networks…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
June 24, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Science, Work

Tagged
Blake Lemoine (Holloway's view), Chatbots (LaMDA), Crowdworkers and LaMDA, Featured, LaMDA (claims for sentience), LaMDA (claims for understanding), Sentience and AI}

Google’s Chatbot LaMDA Sounds Human Because — Read the Manual…

_{What would you expect LaMDA to sound like? Whales? ET? I propose a test: “Human until PROVEN otherwise”} _{Eric Holloway

June 24, 2022

9

Artificial Intelligence, Science, Work}

Recently Google employee Blake Lemoine caused a media storm over the LaMDA chatbot he was working on, that he claims is sentient (it feels things like a human being). A heavily edited transcript has been released that shows him and a collaborator having a very coherent conversation with LaMDA. Many have been quick to dismiss his claims about the chatbot’s sentience, accusing the Googler of falling prey to the Eliza effect: anthropomorphizing a probability distribution over words (thus believing that he is talking to a human). The accusation is that Lemoine generated a large number of dialogs, then edited down the exchange to create a coherent narrative. Google placed Lemoine on leave, technically for breaking the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
June 7, 2022

Categorized
Biology, Probability, Programming

Tagged
Bruce Salem, Darwinian evolution and exponential sums, Darwinian evolution and time allowed, Engineers and evolution doubt, Evolution and time allowed, Evolutionary algorithms and the Salem hypothesis, Featured, P double prime programming language, Salem Hypothesis}

The Salem Hypothesis: Why Engineers View the Universe as Designed

_{Not because we're terrorists or black-and-white thinkers, as claimed. A simple computer program shows the limits of creating information by chance} _{Eric Holloway

June 7, 2022

8

Biology, Probability, Programming}

In the fun-filled world of internet debate between creationists and evolutionists, we encounter the Salem Hypothesis: Creationists tend to be engineers. Many explanations have been offered for this phenomenon (apparently named after Talk Origins contributor Bruce Salem): engineers are closet terrorists creationists are trying to protect their fragile beliefs a desire to exert authority engineers like simple black and white answers There’s a reason internet forums are not known for flattering character analysis! Anyhow, the true reason for the Salem Hypothesis is summed up in this graph. Read on to find out why. Engineers are more likely to be creationists because they are familiar with what it takes to design complex things for specific tasks. Which is exactly what we…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
May 23, 2022

Categorized
Biology, Information Theory

Tagged
Blind Watchmaker (book), Blind Watchmaker thesis, Darwinian evolution (and information), Epigenetics, Epigenetics (and information), Featured, Mad Libs, Richard Dawkins, Weasel Libs (Holloway), Weasel program, Weasel quote from Shakespeare}

Dawkins’ Weasel Program vs the Information Life Acquires En Route

_{To demonstrate what is wrong with fully naturalist assumptions like those of Richard Dawkins’ Weasel program, I developed Weasel Libs, modeled on Mad Libs} _{Eric Holloway

May 23, 2022

6

Biology, Information Theory}

In his famous Weasel program zoologist and philosopher Richard Dawkins shows that the simple combination of random mutation and natural selection (Darwinian evolution) can produce the English sentence, “Methinks it is like a weasel”, in a short time period. The point of his program is to demonstrate that evolution can generate the complex, pre-specified DNA sequences we find in biology before the heat death of the universe. His argument sounds persuasive because both English sentences and DNA sequences are made up of symbols. Both can be randomly modified anywhere, and by cumulative selection, they can plausibly adapt to the environment in reasonably short order. Writers in English can learn to pen best-selling novels through trial and error and audience feedback.…

Chatbot / Social Bot mit Quellcode und Keyboard

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
April 25, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence

Tagged
Artificial Intelligence, GPT-3, GPT-J, Markov process, OpenAI, Singularity}

Why GPT-3 Can’t Understand Anything

_{Without long-term memory, human conversation becomes impossible} _{Eric Holloway

April 25, 2022

9

Artificial Intelligence}

There is a mathematical reason why machine learning systems like GPT-3 are incapable of understanding. The reason comes down to the fact that machine learning has no memory. It is just probabilistic associations. If there is only a 10% chance of going off topic, then after just seven exchanges there is a greater than 50% chance the machine learning model has gone off topic. The problem is that when prediction is just based on probabilities, the likelihood of making a misprediction increases exponentially. A long-term memory is needed in order to maintain long-term coherence. GPT-3 is essentially a sophisticated Markov process. What is important about the Markov process is that the next step in the process is only dependent on…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
April 23, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence

Tagged
Chatbots (Open AI), Featured, InstructGPT, OpenAI, Turing Test (and chatbots)}

AI Companies Are Massively Faking the Loophole in the Turing Test

_{I propose the Turing Test be further strengthened by presuming a chatbot is human until proven otherwise} _{Eric Holloway

April 23, 2022

18

Artificial Intelligence}

Computer pioneer Alan Turing was posed the question, how do we know if an AI has human like intelligence? He offered his famous Turing test: If human judges cannot differentiate the AI from a human, then it has human-like intelligence. His test has spawned a number of competitions in which participants try to fool judges into thinking that a chatbot is really a human. One of the best-known chatbots was Eugene Goostman, which fooled the judges into thinking it was a 13-year-old boy — mostly by indirection and other distraction techniques to avoid the sort of in-depth questioning that shows that a chatbot lacks understanding. However, there is a loophole in this test. Can you spot the loophole? What better…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
April 11, 2022

Categorized
Information Theory

Tagged
Featured, Information (as having mass), Landauer's Principle, Melvin Vopson}

Does Information Weigh Something After All? What If It Does?

_{At the rate we create information today, one physicist computes that in 350 years, the energy will outweigh the atoms of Earth} _{Eric Holloway

April 11, 2022

4

Information Theory}

In the 1960s, IBM researcher Rolf Landauer (1927–1999) observed that if the logical information in a computational system decreased, then the physical entropy in the system must increase (Landauer’s Principle). This conclusion follows from the principle that the entropy in a closed system can never decrease. A decrease in the logical information corresponds to a decrease in entropy. And factoring in the principle that the entropy cannot actually decrease, the physical system itself must increase in entropy when the information decreases. This increase in entropy will result in the emission of heat, and a reduction of energy in the system. Now Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth, has taken Landauer’s principle to the next logical step. He…

Positive girl resting on the couch with robot

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
April 4, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence

Tagged
Artificial Intelligence, GPT-3, OpenAI, Singularity}

Soylent AI is…people!

_{OpenAI advertises itself as AI-powered, but at the end of the day, the system is human-powered} _{Eric Holloway

April 4, 2022

30

Artificial Intelligence}

In the sci-fi movie, “Soylent Green,” the big reveal is that a food called soylent green is actually made from human beings, the catchphrase being “soylent green is people.” Likewise, as I discovered from a recent exchange with OpenAI’s GPT-3, “soylent AI is people.” GPT-3 is the product of AI company OpenAI. The company made headlines in 2019 with the claim that their AI model was too dangerous to publicly release. OpenAI is not a mere research company. While their publicly stated goal is fairly modest – “Aligning AI systems with human intent” – their CEO Sam Altman has bigger plans. He left his very successful role as president of Y Combinator, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capital…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
March 28, 2022

Categorized
Biology

Tagged
Evolution, Hamlet, Natural selection, Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Weasel program}

Dawkins’ Dubious Double Weasel and the Combinatorial Cataclysm

_{Dawkins has successfully reduced a combinatorial explosion to a manageable problem...or has he?} _{Eric Holloway

March 28, 2022

6

Biology}

In Richard Dawkins’ book, The Blind Watchmaker, he proposed a famous (and infamous) computer program to demonstrate the power of cumulative selection, known as the “Weasel program.” The program demonstrates that by varying a single letter at a time, it is possible to rapidly evolve a coherent English sentence from a string of gibberish. The way the program works is as follows: First, a sequence of characters is randomly assembled by drawing from the 26 English letters and the space. Then, one character is randomly reassigned. The resulting sequence is compared to the phrase from Hamlet, a quote uttered by Polonius: “methinks it is like a weasel.” For every character that matches, a point is scored. If the new sequence…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
March 12, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Blind Watchmaker thesis, Evolution of intelligence, Featured, Michael Levin, Modular cognition thesis, Rafael Yuste, Richard Dawkins, Search for a search (vs modular cognition), Word ladder game (and gradual evolution)}

Can Computers –- and People — Learn To Think From the Bottom Up?

_{That’s the big promise made in a recent article at Aeon} _{Eric Holloway

March 12, 2022

6

Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind}

Tufts University biologist Michael Levin and Columbia University neuroscientist Rafael Yuste have an ambitious project in hand: To explain how evolution “‘hacked’ its way to intelligence from the bottom up,” that is, from nothing. They base their thesis on computer science: This is intelligence in action: the ability to reach a particular goal or solve a problem by undertaking new steps in the face of changing circumstances. It’s evident not just in intelligent people and mammals and birds and cephalopods, but also cells and tissues, individual neurons and networks of neurons, viruses, ribosomes and RNA fragments, down to motor proteins and molecular networks. Across all these scales, living things solve problems and achieve goals by flexibly navigating different spaces –…

cropped shot of robot playing chess on wooden surface

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
February 28, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Natural Intelligence

Tagged
AlphaGo, AlphaZero, Artificial Intelligence, chess, DeepMind, Go (game), Google, Lee Sedol, Natural Intelligence}

Is AlphaZero Actually Superior to the Human Mind?

_{Comparing AI and the human mind is completely apples and oranges} _{Eric Holloway

February 28, 2022

3

Artificial Intelligence, Natural Intelligence}

The Google-backed AI company DeepMind made headlines in March 2016 when its AlphaGo game AI engine was able to defeat Lee Sedol, one of the top Go players in the world. DeepMind followed up this great achievement with the AlphaZero engine in 2017, which made the remarkable achievement of soundly beating AlphaGo in Go as well as one of the world’s best chess engines in chess. The interesting difference between AlphaGo and AlphaZero is that AlphaGo uses databases of top human games for learning, while AlphaZero only learns by playing against itself. Using the same AI engine to dominate two different games, while also discarding reliance on human games suggests that DeepMind has found an algorithm that is intrinsically superior…

AI, Machine learning, Hands of robot and human touching on big data network connection background, Science and artificial intelligence technology, innovation and futuristic.

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
February 20, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Artificial intelligence (implications of consciousness), Daniel Dennett (on conscious AI), Featured, GPT-2, Ilya Sutskever, Linguistic neural networks, Mathematics (consciousness), Uncanny Valley effect}

“Slightly” Conscious Computers Could Doom Atheism

_{That might sound surprising but let’s follow the logic of the “consciousness” claim through to its inevitable conclusion} _{Eric Holloway

February 20, 2022

4

Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind}

Recently, Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, proposed that artificial intelligence (AI) may currently be “slightly” conscious. His claim was probably in reference to the GPT-3 AI that can generate text from a prompt. I’ve played with a couple of the linguistic neural networks a bit, and you can try them out here. Some of the output is quirky, which could be mistaken for personality and make the algorithm appear conscious. The algorithm also generates emotional statements, that can generate empathy in a human user of the system. Just as kids make believe their dolls are alive when they develop an emotional bond with their toy, the algorithm text generates empathy in the human user. It can make us feel a…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
January 23, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
Conscious Mind (book), David Chalmers (on computer consciousness), Emperor's New Mind (book), Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem, Non-computable concepts, Roger Penrose, Roger Penrose (on computer consciousness)}

Chalmers and Penrose Clash Over “Conscious Computers”

_{Philosopher Chalmers thinks computers could be conscious but physicist Penrose says no} _{Eric Holloway

January 23, 2022

4

Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind}

Two authors I’ve been reading recently are Roger Penrose and David Chalmers. Penrose is a physics Nobel laureate who has stoked controversy by claiming in The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics (1989) that the mind can do things beyond the ability of computers. Chalmers is a philosopher of science who claims in The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1997) that consciousness cannot be reduced to physical processes. Both thinkers are well respected in their fields, even though they articulate positions that imply that the mind’s operation is beyond current science. At the same time, they believe that there is a way to see the mind as part of nature (that is,…

3d rendering of Human cell or Embryonic stem cell microscope background.

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
December 27, 2021

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Philosophy of Mind, Science

Tagged
Artificial intelligence (powered by human brain cells), Brain organoids (playing Pong), Consciousness (brain organoids), Cortical Labs, Featured, Free energy principle (FEP), Human embryonic stem cells, Human embryonic stem cells (and consciousness), Human-induced pluripotent stem cells, Organoids (brain organoids), Organoids powering appliances (ethics), Pong (video game)}

Are the Brain Cells in a Dish That Learned Pong Conscious?

_{Human-derived organoids learned faster than AI and always outperformed mouse-derived organoids in terms of volley length, raising troubling questions} _{Eric Holloway

December 27, 2021

5

Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Philosophy of Mind, Science}

Recently, science media were abuzz with a remarkable story about minibrains (mouse and human brain cells in a dish) learning to play the video game Pong: Scientists have successfully taught a collection of human brain cells in a petri dish how to play the video game “Pong” — kind of. Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created “mini-brains“ consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports. The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity. “We think it’s fair to call them cyborg brains,” Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs and research lead of the project, told New Scientist. Tony Tran,…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
December 1, 2021

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Biology

Tagged
Douglas Blackiston et al., Featured, Self-replication (frog stem cell claims), Self-replication (information problem), Von Neumann Universal Constructor, Xenobots (frog stem cells)}

Is the Age of the Living, Self-Replicating Robot at Hand? No.

_{Stem cells naturally reproduce themselves. The researchers working with frog stem cells merely found, via algorithms, one configuration that works better} _{Eric Holloway

December 1, 2021

4

Artificial Intelligence, Biology}

Recently, the sci-fi dream of self-replicating robots has been in the news, thanks to the University of Vermont, Tufts University, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. A recent experiment with frog cells was hailed by news outlets as disparate as CNN (“World’s first living robots can now reproduce, scientists say”) and Daily Wire (“American Universities Create First ‘Self-Replicating Living Robots’”). And it was also debunked by Ars Technica: (“Interesting research, but no, we don’t have living, reproducing robots”). So what’s really happening? Self-replication is a very tricky problem of information. To truly self-replicate, an organism must completely copy the information necessary for function. Seems simple enough but it introduces a conundrum. For the organism to copy…

Billiard balls colorful background, 3D rendering

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
November 19, 2021

Categorized
Philosophy, Science

Tagged
Atoms (views of atoms), Epicureanism, Epicurus, Featured, Lucretius, Materialism, On the Nature of Things (poem), Physicalism, Physics (and Epicureanism)}

Can the “Physical World” Be Wholly Physical? Physical at All?

_{Nothing ever physically touches anything else in the physical world, yet the effects of objects on each other are a constant occurrence} _{Eric Holloway

November 19, 2021

3

Philosophy, Science}

Sounds like the answer should be “Of course!” But the question may not be as simple as it appears. Let’s wind the clock back to the first century BC, when a Roman poet and philosopher named Lucretius wrote the poem On the Nature of Things.” In this poem, Lucretius outlines a philosophy known as Epicureanism in order to demonstrate the world can be explained without reference to a deity. In the Epicurean philosophy, only three things exist: atoms, the void, and the universe. Consequently, everything we see in the physical world can be reduced to atoms bumping into each other. You may notice that Epicurean philosophy sounds similar to modern day physics. This is not an accident. Through the influence…

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
October 12, 2021

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Relationships

Tagged
Featured, GPT-3 (and human language learning), GPT-3 (scale question), Language learning, Reborn dolls}

Is GPT-3 the “Reborn Doll” of Artificial Intelligence?

_{Unlike the reality doll collectors, GPT-3 engineers truly believe that scaling up the model size will suddenly cause GPT-3 to think and talk like a real human} _{Eric Holloway

October 12, 2021

5

Artificial Intelligence, Relationships}

There is a worldwide community that collects “reborn dolls.” These dolls look almost like real babies. Look again, closely, at the featured photo above… They help some collectors cope with the loss of a child. For others, it fulfills their sense of self image. And yet others just see them as a quirky hobby. Regardless of how much the baby dolls mimic the appearance of real dolls, the dolls will forever remain copies because the external appearances are not generated by biological processes. For the collectors, this is a feature, not a bug. They enjoy the appearance of a baby without the real life difficulties of raising a real person. As one collector comments, her doll “doesn’t turn into a…