Dennis Hackethal’s Blog
My blog about philosophy, coding, and anything else that interests me.
Tweets
An archive of my tweets and retweets through . They may be formatted slightly differently than on Twitter. API access has since gotten prohibitively expensive – I don't know whether or when I'll be able to update this archive.
But in case I will, you can subscribe via RSS – without a Twitter account. Rationale
RT @PessimistsArc:
Oh no Tristan honey... #TheSocialDilemma https://t.co/MHeyuOYywp
Very interesting case of (presumably fatal) buggy animal programming. twitter.com/biolocousb/sta…
RT @Bunny_Godfather:
Someone put Blade Runner 2049 music to drone footage of San Francisco on 9/09/20 credit to Terry Tsai (YouTube) #BayA…
It should be no forced taxation. They’re stealing from you.
RT @DouglasKMurray:
‘What we all know.’ This is the UN on ‘social justice’ theory. Some people still pretend such theory has only corrupted…
Neo-Darwinism is about the non-random differential reproduction of replicators (i.e., genes in biological evolution), not about competition between individual organisms.
@MagnetThatcher @DavidDeutschOxf
But for a general-purpose application, it may be difficult, because there is no special-purpose brain region for pink elephants floating in space (or summoning one's Tesla).
@MagnetThatcher @DavidDeutschOxf
For the case of driving, that may be okay, since, judging by the article, the corresponding nerve signals go through brain regions dedicated to movement.
@MagnetThatcher @DavidDeutschOxf
Then there's the issue that different people can have denotationally equal but structurally different ideas, and because of their different structure, they'd result in different neuronal patterns despite being qualitatively the same thoughts.
@MagnetThatcher @DavidDeutschOxf
Yes, but maybe the same neuronal patterns correspond not only to specific thoughts of that chair, but also to thoughts of pink elephants floating in space. And anything “in between.”
@MagnetThatcher @DavidDeutschOxf
Very interesting article. I wonder if different (unrelated or even contradictory thoughts) can sometimes result in the same neuronal patterns (I'm guessing those are what you mean by "thought pattern"). I guess there are infinitely many of those for every thought.
Disgusting. Big problem that the government there even has the power to enact and enforce these restrictions in the first place. twitter.com/VictoriaPolice…
@TahaElGabroun @DavidDeutschOxf
Yes, of course. No permission required to reference ideas!
RT @Mlaoliwolf:
“the mind contains an arena of self-replicating ideas.”
An interesting foray in Neo-Darwinism theory of the mind, inspired…
An evaluation of Neuralink's latest presentation with the help of some of Popper's and @DavidDeutschOxf's ideas. Errors mine.
In short: Neuralink could save time and make more money and progress using Popperian ideas! How? Listen in:
@p_dinheiro @andrewdoyle_com @WatchRatio
this one is either completely nuts or parody
Good. The political system is correcting errors.
RT @dvassallo:
Rehash: Forms of self-employment income 👇
🟢 info products: volatile, potential for extreme ROI.
🔴 product as a service: sl…
They deleted the tweet. Luckily, somebody archived it: archive.is/IImBY
How much did you need to spend on advertising for your products to really pick up?
@clairlemon @Quillette @jonkay
Those memes even spread into Germany and Austria. Makes no sense.
Bezos? Building companies. Making money. Delivering products people need. Making people around him rich. Staving off financial ruin after a divorce. Changing/expanding business models. Etc.
I'm guessing this is the profound evil that can be committed by good intentions.
@HeatherEHeying @HHMusicOfficial
How about letting him sleep?
A teacher’s union explicitly supports the (symbolic?) murder of the most successful man in history. twitter.com/CTULocal1/stat…
We see Howard getting back at Jimmy, Jimmy and Kim in his new office with the pillars, and Kim worrying about going to jail... season 6 foreshadowings? 😳
Comrade Newsom is like a totalitarian parent. “The better your grades, the more screen time you’ll get.”
Not to mention that businesses are just going to LOVE opening, closing, re-opening etc in rapid succession as the data change. twitter.com/GavinNewsom/st…
@MagnetThatcher @RichardDawkins
As for the last point, I guess the "amounts" of evolution compare roughly as follows:
"intra-ideas" >>>> memes >> genes
@MagnetThatcher @RichardDawkins
Here are some reasons:
- Vast majority of "intra-ideas" never become memes
- I don't think memes are essential to explaining how the mind works (only its biol. evolution)
- Vast majority of the evolution occurring on Earth is that of "intra-ideas," not memes or genes
@RJsnda @ks445599 @ella_hoeppner
I think spreading better epistemology and Popperian ideas is a good start.
@MagnetThatcher @RichardDawkins
It's a good idea, but I think I'd prefer not to use the term "meme" so there is no risk of confusion.
@tjaulow @RichardDawkins
They are not necessarily unconscious. Don't know what you mean by "commuting."
@ks445599 @RJsnda @ella_hoeppner
Yes, I'm saying that it's not obvious. Maybe it's true—maybe it's not—but either way, it's not obvious (because nothing is).
@RJsnda @ks445599 @ella_hoeppner
Ok. Popper wrote about the dangers of labeling something as "obvious." The truth is hard to come by. And once found—though we can never know we have found it—it can easily be lost again.
@RJsnda @ks445599 @ella_hoeppner
Are you familiar with Popper's work on manifest truth?
Has anyone explained how and why head trauma leads to depression, or have they merely pointed out correlations of proxies they labeled "depression"?
My overall intention is to draw attention to the fact that reductionism of the sort "it's ALL hardware/neurons/chemicals" are dehumanizing because they disregard creativity, and presumably they miss the vast majority of the causes of mental issues: software/bad ideas.
For some cases, that may be so. I don't deny that hardware issues can sometimes lead to mental issues—though I think even in those cases, the mental issues are ideas meant to interpret one's hardware problems.
@ella_hoeppner @moreisdifferent @bnielson01
Not to mention that induction is impossible.
It can help if that increased processing speed is accompanied by an increased error-correction rate for faster knowledge creation. Also, the mind may conjecture ideas with bad performance characteristics.
But yes, making a month's worth of progress in a day is possible!
But depression and anxiety are themselves states of mind.
Maybe if a hardware issue impedes one's problem-solving ability.
It's not trendy not to force "the right" ideas onto kids.
My conclusion for now: look to Musk for engineering insight, look elsewhere for philosophical insight (particularly Deutsch and Popper). This presentation is a good example of how much money and time Musk could save and how much more money he could make with better philosophy :)
Unfortunately, I doubt Musk is available to discuss any of this. I think the best thing that could happen is if by some chance he reads David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity" and takes the ideas in the book seriously.
Software is an emergent phenomenon that can be explained independently of the hardware. Perhaps it's not surprising that a neuroscience company has a hardware bias, but these are important errors that could be fixed by—you guessed it—philosophy.
The quote is also evidence that Musk is definitely a reductionist, because he throws together concepts like AI (which is software) and the limbic system and cortices (which are hardware), which doesn't make sense.
In the wannabe-AGI-slaveholder department Musk is heavily influenced by Bostrom.
Do you see how much pessimistic prophecy suddenly found its way into a meeting of otherwise optimistic celebration of engineering progress? Existential threats? Society-wide planning? Etc.
"And so I think it's going to be important from an existential-threat standpoint to achieve a good AI symbiosis, and that's what I think might be the most important thing that a device like this achieves."
"...and having that symbiosis be good such that the future of the world is controlled by the combined will of the people of Earth. That's obviously going to be the future that we want, presumably, if it's the sum of our collective will..."
"On a species-level basis I think it's going to be important for us to figure out how we coexist with advanced artificial intelligence [and] achieving some kind of AI symbiosis where you have an AI extension of yourself, like a tertiary layer above the limbic system and cortex.."
Okay the live stream is over so I can now rewind to the corresponding passage and quote him properly:
Musk's approaches to AGI "safety" and social "planning" are oddly totalitarian and pessimistic sounding. Knowledge of engineering won't help with that. He needs more knowledge of philosophy. Disconcerting given how much influence he has in terms of being able to spread ideas.
Third, summing the will of everyone with the link into the "will of society" doesn't work without introducing all kinds of inconsistencies and paradoxes. See Balinski's and Young's theorem as explained in BoI chapter 13. There can be no coherent "will of the people."
AGI "control problems" are, as I have explained elsewhere, cynical, slaveholder-like, mind-control games. Don't control AGIs, let them be. They're people like you and me.
First, an AI "extension" of oneself (if it is AGI) doesn't make sense. An AGI is a person. You can't be more of a person through some extension. You either have a second person sharing your brain for resources, or you don't. And you either are a person, or you're not.
There may be mistakes in this summary because he said it quickly and I couldn't write it all down in time. BUT if accurate, there are lots of problems with what he said.
Musk just claimed that the biggest thing the link could achieve is (paraphrasing) "symbiosis" with an AI extension of oneself in a tertiary layer of the limbic system and "controlled" AI, and summing together the will of every person into an emergent "will of society."
Yes, I've heard about that "low-level," hardware-based approach. I think it's deficient (let alone dehumanizing).
Maybe then neuronal patterns somehow help you refute your conjectured explanations. But the conjecture has to happen first.
In other words: you can't just "read off" the explanation for consciousness from neuronal patterns. You have to conjecture bold explanations.
Popper decades ahead once again. Paraphrasing from a conversation with Konrad Lorenz (fallibly, from memory): If neuronal patterns were shown to correspond directly to qualia, all you could claim is a tight parallelism, but that says nothing about the mental states themselves.
Employee claims that with the link they could now observe neuronal patterns that associate with mental phenomena (qualia?)
Judging by these statements it seems to me they are reductionist (maybe without explicitly realizing), which will put a pretty hard limit on how much they can understand about the mind.
Musk claims link can shed light on consciousness. Employee expands and claims the "hard problem will vanish very quickly."
Prophecy.
I'm not saying they shouldn't test on animals. I'm saying animal welfare is not an issue.
Employees now signaling how well they take care of the animals. 🙄 "We don't force things on them as much as possible."
The "as much as possible" doing a lot of work there. For, how could the pigs possibly consent to surgery?
Musk says link could serve to create backups of memories and let you upload and download them.
As I've hinted at, in addition to hiring a neuroscientist, I think they would benefit from hiring a Popperian neurophilosopher (i.e. epistemologist) if they really want to tackle big problems like qualia.
Musk just said that eventually they want to get to being able to type using your thoughts. For now they want to help quadriplegic people.
Calling the pigs happy reminds me of the stuff in BoI chapter 12 about mistaking a proxy for the underlying phenomenon.
A brain implant can't solve your problems — that requires creativity. Unless they run an AGI on that implant, which would mean you'd have another person physically inside your head. Don't think that's what they're going for.
See David Deutsch's conjecture that unhappiness is a result of being chronically baulked in one's attempts to solve problems.
Musk claims interfacing with hypothalamus could cure depression, anxiety. I find that highly doubtful. These phenomena are best explained on the level of ideas.
Happiness and other qualia are philosophical problems and properties (or perhaps pieces) of software, not hardware. Do they make that distinction? Are they reductionist? Have they thought about these questions?
Have Musk and the team given thought to the mind-body problem? Do they want to work on the mind in addition to the brain? How can they make predictions about the link's effect on human happiness without an investigation into what happiness is? Etc.
Musk says main purpose of the presentation is to recruit the best people. No prior experience on brains required. The wants to hire in the following domains. What's missing most notably from this list? PHILOSOPHY. https://t.co/XohBOpOww3
Link would connect to phone through an app. Range roughly 15 to 30 feet.
Musk claims link can predict movements of pig on treadmill fairly accurately.
Link in pig that has link is making beeping sounds for incoming neural signals.
At most you could say (for now) that the pig's hardware is functioning properly after link removal.
First pig does not have the link. Second pig used to but doesn't anymore. He claims that second pig is "healthy and happy."
Big epistemological mistake: making a prophecy about human happiness without explaining happiness or similarities and differences between pigs and humans.
I'm glad they tested on animals before testing on humans, which is both safe and ethical.
Musk is presenting demo with live pigs, some of which have the implant.
Musk claims brain does not bleed during procedure as wires are inserted.
Device installed in hole in skull and replaces that portion of the skull.
Device implantable in outpatient procedure in < 1hr without general anesthesia.
If I just understood him correctly, the device he's presenting could play music in your head.
Musk claims Neuralink can fix below problems. From what I can tell so far, Neuralink creates hardware solutions. Therefore, I find it doubtful that it could help with depression and anxiety. Memory seems to me a hybrid software/hardware problem. The rest are conceivable. https://t.co/QHHvqUfEY3