Search Ideas

This suggests that programs can be “run differently” to result in a different computation. This is false because it violates Substrate Independence: the instantiation of a program is unaffected by its physical implementation. If a “context” changes what the program is computing, then that’s a different program. Suggesting that a person running the apple programs “makes them” conscious therefore is not sound. The programs are either conscious or not. If they were, by (A1), they would be people.

(7) We can be conscious of the apple imagery for the entire 5 seconds.

(6) Repeated running of the same fixed program is automatic, requires no creativity, and cannot constitute experience.

(5) Repeated running of the same fixed program, not being a person, does not make it a person.

(4) The programs rendering the apple are not people, so cannot themselves constitute experience.

(3) The programs rendering the apple imagery must be looping until stopped, since they could not have advance knowledge of when the stimulus stops.

(2) The rendering is caused by the running of some number of programs.

(1) During the entire 5 seconds, your mind renders the image of the apple.

Criticized per #4718: AIs are not "narrowly creative"; there is only creativity in the binary, universal sense, per Deutsch.

This highlights the core mystery of AGI/creativity: if it is the creation of something which cannot be deduced from existing rules (yet is still helpful, hard-to-vary, knowledge-bearing, etc.), how can it be programmed? In a sense it cannot, as Deutsch writes: "...what distinguishes human brains from all other physical systems is qualitatively different from all other functionalities, and cannot be specified in the way that all other attributes of computer programs can be. It cannot be programmed by any of the techniques that suffice for writing any other type of program." [https://aeon.co/essays/how-close-are-we-to-creating-artificial-intelligence]

If the human made Move 37 for the same reason as AlphaGo, it would not be creative. Such moves are creative when humans make them because they are not deducing them (they can't due to practical limitations). If something can be deduced, it is not creative. Creativity is the conjecture of a new structure which is not derivable/deducible/implicit via existing rules of inference. All AI-generated art is implicit in the training data and model design in the same sense, so is not being made via creativity.

Move 37 was not new knowledge. It was the winning choice in that situation before the AI ever existed, because it was deducible from the game's rules and the current board state. It was implicit knowledge, already contained in the system at that time. AlphaGo made it explicit, by finding it, like a search engine, but did not create it. If you calculate the trillionth digit of pi, you haven't created new knowledge, at least not in any sense we should mean. You have simply revealed a value that was already fixed by a definition.

The fact that Move 37 wasn't explicitly in the training data or the programmers is irrelevant to its status as knowledge. This is true for pi, and for all content created by AI at the time of this writing.

Move 37 was not explicitly present in the training data, nor designed by the programmers, and is extremely hard to vary (Deutsch's criterion for good explanations). Was the move present implicitly in the design of the system and/or the training data? Or inexplicitly? Do either of these mean the discovery of the move was non-creative?

By this standard, a random number generator has universal creativity as well, and is therefore a person. So there must be a standard for personhood other than: able to generate any possible explanation. Such as: can do that tractably.

Nature does have universal creativity; it can generate any possible knowledge. And all possible knowledge exists somewhere in reality.

This also admits of the distinction between AI and AGI (and "universal creativity") as being whether the system is capable of creating knowledge ex nihilo, as argued by Deutsch. Only universal creativity could create knowledge from nothing. Bounded creativity must start with something.

I keep returning to the notion of the space or domain in which simulated evolution so far operates in. It seems like we can say that current sim'd evolution can discover new knowledge via conjecture and criticism, but it is always bound by a domain predefined by fitness functions, automatic evaluators and so on, even if that domain itself contains many subdomains.

Then we can say that in nature, and in the minds of people, there is no externally defined space in which exploration is happening; the space is also evolving, also subject to criticism. I suspect this is part of how open-endedness comes about.

But the immediate question here was how to explain why AI is or is not "creative". Saying AIs are "narrowly creative" seems it could work, or saying they are creative within a fixed domain. The common intuition I think is that current AIs are "truly" creative, and I would say this is because the predefined domain (of LLMs, for instance) is gigantic, being sculpted by an internet-sized training corpus. But I suppose we should argue that "true creativity" means universal creativity.

I was curious if there are criticisms of the argument that current AI does legitimately create new knowledge.

Of course it's true that a system confined to a given abstraction will only evolve theories of that scale. But a person can operate at all computable levels of abstraction. The growth of knowledge by people (e.g. Relativity) would only have happened if people can vary their abstractions arbitrarily, because Relativity solves no problems at any one given level of abstraction, but across many. Observer Theory might be right for certain systems, but is wrong for people.

The aliasing that happens with the flipbook is a consequence of an imaging system. To suggest that theories/programs/explanations would be subject to aliasing in the same way suggests that they are derived from observation, which is Empiricism (false). They are created from mutation and criticism of existing knowledge, and this process can be performed by all universal computers. Any explanation/rendering/program runnable on one UC is runnable on all, so two observers can always converge to the same laws of physics.

Better example maybe: A whirlpool in water only exists to an observer that can create whirlpools in its VR. If the observer only has molecule-scale abstraction, it cannot coarse-grain, so there are no whirlpools for it, or explanations in terms of them. (Such a system also cannot be a person, because a person can create all possible explanations).

I'm wondering if what is true for the flip book is true for many phenomena, or all. Is the emergence of an autonomous feature always a function of ("relative to") what is observing/explaining/attempting to reproduce the system?

Is all emergence relative? I notice that when a flipbook or a zoetrope gives rise to the perceived motion of still images when they're rapidly changed, that is a result of aliasing on the part of the observer. Is this true in all cases of emergence, perceptual and otherwise..?

There's something to be said for a degree of complexity and novelty to a name. It lends air of thoughtfulness, and could spark curiosity in potential new users.

See also: "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell", the highly successful educational YT channel. I know people who are big fans, and yet can't pronounce the name correctly.

'Veritula' is not a difficult name as compared to other highly successful explanatory enterprises, like 'Veritasium.'