7 ms·
People can not be reduced to lookup tables even in theory. No one even knows how a single cell does what it does let alone an entire organism like a person. I'
by clooper 3y ago
People can not be reduced to lookup tables even in theory. No one even knows how a single cell does what it does let alone an entire organism like a person.
I'm not making an abstract claim about neural networks because all numerical algorithms like neural networks can be reduced to a lookup table given a large enough hard drive. This is not practical because the space required would exceed the number of atoms in the known universe but the argument is sound. The same isn't true for people unless a person is idealized and abstracted into a sequence of numbers. I'm not saying no one is allowed to think of people as some sequence of numbers but this is clearly an abstraction of what it means to be a person and in the case of the neural network there is no abstraction, it really is a numerical function which can be expanded into a large table which represents its graph.
- Centigonal 3y agoMy "what if someone made a lookup table of everything I ever said in response to something else" hypothetical is pretty flimsy - I realized that right after writing it. The point I wanted to make is that concepts of sentience, consciousness, reasoning, intelligence, etc. are very philosophically loaded ideas. Responding to your comment, I don't think anyone credible is arguing that a human being is somehow the same as a neural network. I think the question at play here is "what constitutes reasoning?" - and more specifically "can a deterministic process reason?" This is not a new debate at all - an abacus can tell us truths about the world, but we don't consider the abacus intelligent. Is GPT-4 somehow different, or is it a very large abacus?
- clooper 3y agoAs a numerical function it can be implemented on an abacus so I don't think it's any different from a large enough abacus. It's practically not feasible but theoretically there is no idealization or abstraction happening when numerical calculations on a computer are transferred to an abacus.
- Legend2440 3y ago>People can not be reduced to lookup tables even in theory Sure you can. Simply enumerate all of the physical states that the atoms in your body could be in. Any finite-sized object has a finite number of possible states, and so can be represented by a finite lookup table. Your argument is so broad as to be meaningless.
- clooper 3y agoThen give some concrete numbers for the states of the atoms. My argument is not abstract, it is very concrete. Give me a neural network and I can generate the graph and prove the equivalence between the network and its graph representation as a table of tuples.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoYou said "even in theory" which is obviously wrong, since the (local) universe is finite and deterministic, hence it is itself a giant lookup table.
- somewhereoutth 3y agoSimply not true. Of course it is comforting for computer people to believe the world they live in is a giant computer, but that is not our real reality.
- aruss 3y agoWhere are you going to get all that time and space to build a lookup table? Are you sure you're able to measure all state at enough precision to make an accurate table?
- ben_w 3y agoDoesn't matter given the original statement spawning this subthread was: > People can not be reduced to lookup tables even in theory
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- naasking 3y ago> People can not be reduced to lookup tables even in theory. Yes they can, this is a direct corollary of the Bekenstein Bound.