Eric Holloway

Law of Universal Gravitation education funny concept. Isaac Newton under an apple tree

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
January 31, 2023

Categorized
Physics

Tagged
Atoms, brain, Democritus, Ghosts, gravity, Isaac Newton, machine, Materialism, Matter, mind, Mind Brain, Particles, Physics}

Blinded by a Defunct Theory

_{The "interaction problem" is everywhere we look in physics, but the dogma of materialism remains} _{Eric Holloway

January 31, 2023

5

Physics}

Materialism. 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 ›

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
January 16, 2023

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind

Tagged
ChatGPT, ChatGPT and humans in the loop, Featured, Microsoft, Microsoft and ChatGPT}

Found! ChatGPT’s Humans in the Loop!

_{I am the only writer I’ve been able to discover who is suggesting ChatGPT has humans in the loop. Here is a series of telling excerpts from our last conversation…} _{Eric Holloway

January 16, 2023

10

Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind}

The new ChatGPT chatbot has wowed the internet. While students revel in the autogenerated homework assignments, the truly marvelous property of ChatGPT is its very humanlike interactions. When you converse with ChatGPT you could swear there was a human on the other end, if you didn’t know better. For all intents and purposes, ChatGPT has achieved the holy grail of AI and passed the Turing test, on a global scale. Always quick to snatch a deal, Microsoft is currently in talks to spend a mere $10B to acquire half “the lightcone of all future value.” However, things are not always what they seem. Previously, I pointed out aspects of ChatGPT that implied humans were helping craft the chatbot’s responses. Now, Read More ›

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
January 10, 2023

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Programming

Tagged
Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Computers, Data Mining, Neural networks, Number sequence, Numbers (types)}

Is ChatGPT Solely a Neural Network? I Tested That…

_{Changing the random number test to a "computer easy, human hard" test requires simply that we ask ChatGPT to reverse the random number. It couldn't.} _{Eric Holloway

January 10, 2023

9

Artificial Intelligence, Programming}

ChatGPT is a direct descendent of GPT-3, and is a fancy form of a fancy machine learning algorithm called a neural network. For an overview of all of ChatGPT’s neural network complexity, here is a fun article. However, all that is beside the point. The important thing about a neural network: It can only generate what is in its training data. Therefore, ChatGPT can only produce what is in its training data. ChatGPT’s training data does not include the conversation you or I are having with ChatGPT. Therefore, if something novel occurs in the conversation, ChatGPT cannot reproduce it. That is, if ChatGPT is a neural network. Conversely, if ChatGPT reproduces novel text from the conversation, then ipso facto ChatGPT is not a Read More ›

Chatbot conversation. Person using online customer service with chat bot to get support. Artificial intelligence and CRM software automation technology. Virtual assistant on internet.

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
December 26, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Programming

Tagged
Artificial intelligence as sentient, ChatGPT, ChatGPT and humans in the loop, Connie Loizos, Featured, Humans in the loop, Kevin Roose, Sam Altman, Sentience}

Yes, ChatGPT Is Sentient — Because It’s Really Humans in the Loop

_{ChatGPT itself told me there could be humans crafting its input. My tests indicate that that’s likely true} _{Eric Holloway

December 26, 2022

12

Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Mind, Programming}

OpenAI, recently released a new AI program called ChatGPT. It left the internet gobsmacked, though some were skeptical, and concerned about its abilities. Particularly about ChatGPT writing students’ homework for them! [ChatGPT] also appears to be ominously good at answering the types of open-ended analytical questions that frequently appear on school assignments. (Many educators have predicted that ChatGPT, and tools like it, will spell the end of homework and take-home exams.) Kevin Roose, “The Brilliance and Weirdness of ChatGPT” at New York Times (December 5, 2022) The really amazing thing is ChatGPT’s humanlike responses. They gives an observer an unnerving suspicion that the AI is actually sentient. Maybe it is actually sentient. Wait, what? You heard me. The AI is Read More ›

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
November 22, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Censorship, Data Privacy, Philosophy of Mind, Social Media

Tagged
CAPTCHA, Eliza effect, Featured, Terminator test, Turing Test}

CAPTCHA: How Fooling Machines Is Different From Fooling Humans

_{Automated censorship is intended to protect against a tidal wave of spam but it could certainly have other uses…} _{Eric Holloway

November 22, 2022

3

Artificial Intelligence, Censorship, Data Privacy, Philosophy of Mind, Social Media}

Readers of Mind Matters News have likely heard of the iconic Turing test. Computer pioneer Alan Turing famously invented a test to determine whether a program could pass as a human. The gist is, if a program can fool human testers into believing it is a human, then the program is intelligent. Not everyone is convinced. Thing is, it doesn’t take much to fool us humans! Take Eliza , a program of only a few hundred lines, written in the 60s, which fooled many people into believing it was a real human therapist. But what if we flip the Turing test on its head? Instead of a test where a program tries to pass as human, we use a test Read More ›

AI-generated digital art of a wooden board

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Author
Eric Holloway
Date
October 23, 2022

Categorized
Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture, Creativity

Tagged
AI-generated art as engineers' art, AI-generated art trained on itself, Claude Shannon and Markov chain, Craiyon, Creatovity of AI tested, Dall-E, Featured, Markov chain and AI art, Midjourney, Mutual information and Markov text, Stable Diffusion tested, Three Little Pigs andAI-generated text}

AI Art Is Not “AI-Generated Art.” It is Engineer-Generated Art

_{The computers aren’t taking over the art world. The engineers are. Just the way engineers have taken over the music world with modern electronic music} _{Eric Holloway

October 23, 2022

11

Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Culture, Creativity}

Creativity is a mysterious thing. Our world economy is powered by creativity, yet despite the best efforts of our best engineers, creativity has not been captured by a machine. Until recently. With the new school of AI things have changed. We now have GPT-3 that can digress at length about any topic you give it. Even more remarkable, we have the likes of Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. These phenomenal AI algorithms have scaled the peak of human creativity. AI can now create art that has never been seen before: The new artistic AI has become so successful the image social networks have become flooded with their artwork. Some communities have even banned the AI art. But the AI art Read More ›

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 Read More ›

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 Read More ›

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 Read More ›

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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 Read More ›

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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 Read More ›

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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 Read More ›

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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. Read More ›

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 Read More ›

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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 Read More ›

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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 Read More ›

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 Read More ›

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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 Read More ›

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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 – Read More ›

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 Read More ›