Natural Intelligence Teamed with Artificial = Fast Development

[Boydstun]

 

AI and supercomputing enlisted to find a new solid-state electrolyte in only days. The battery works, and it reduces the amount of Lithium required by 70 percent. Emily Conover's report.

Edited February 16 by Boydstun

[DavidOdden]

I found the article a bit disappointing, though not surprisingly so. Nice to have a new result, sure, but the potentially most interesting part was the implication that AI contributed something. It seems to me that they whiffed the explanation of how AI contributed anything to the process, something that could not be done as well by a handful of smart people and a supercomputer. For example, why, specifically, is it necessarily to use AI (and a supercomputer) determine whether the material can actually exist in reality, why can’t you just hand-code a supercomputer program to do that.

Perhaps (as suggested in the article) it was that the human scientists had a prejudice against certain possibilities, so they would be inclined to skip over a solution that actually works but goes against conventional wisdom. If that is the case, this has more significant methodological implications about the conduct of science.  I have long held that one of the most significant flaws in typical human reasoning is the common failure to seriously consider alternatives, to check your assumptions. So why would the two types of ions be expected to compete with one another and result in worse performance. What is the observational evidence for this position? Did they also make an underlying high-level theoretical discovery about the theory?

I know that Science News is all about the executive summary, not the in-depth understanding of the big picture (i.e. stepping outside of the box), but somebody has to care about the big picture.

[EC]

On 2/16/2024 at 5:08 PM, DavidOdden said:

I found the article a bit disappointing, though not surprisingly so. Nice to have a new result, sure, but the potentially most interesting part was the implication that AI contributed something. It seems to me that they whiffed the explanation of how AI contributed anything to the process, something that could not be done as well by a handful of smart people and a supercomputer. For example, why, specifically, is it necessarily to use AI (and a supercomputer) determine whether the material can actually exist in reality, why can’t you just hand-code a supercomputer program to do that.

Perhaps (as suggested in the article) it was that the human scientists had a prejudice against certain possibilities, so they would be inclined to skip over a solution that actually works but goes against conventional wisdom. If that is the case, this has more significant methodological implications about the conduct of science.  I have long held that one of the most significant flaws in typical human reasoning is the common failure to seriously consider alternatives, to check your assumptions. So why would the two types of ions be expected to compete with one another and result in worse performance. What is the observational evidence for this position? Did they also make an underlying high-level theoretical discovery about the theory?

I know that Science News is all about the executive summary, not the in-depth understanding of the big picture (i.e. stepping outside of the box), but somebody has to care about the big picture.

And this is exactly why I want (and partially succeeded) in creating an AI capable of swiftly becoming AGI based on Objectivist epistemology and,  really all principles of Objectivism, combined with quantum gravitational principles (which I personally combined with Objectivist metaphysics (reality as such) without all of the previous contradictions that existed in advanced physics. Essentially all AI, and especially AGI--"artificial" general intelligence runs, or would operate optimally using quantum gravitational information processing on event horizons which given the fact that ER=EPR and some more advanced principles that I won't go into here exist at literally every "point", actually Plank area in a "local" spacetime (and its Calabi-Yau spacetime inversion) each separate by a Plank unit and phi.

[tadmjones]

So in principle you are proposing that AGI would be a disembodied phenomenon?

[EC]

1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

So in principle you are proposing that AGI would be a disembodied phenomenon?

Absolutely not.  The "body" is the processor and everything else needed for perception, etc. Actually the most efficient AGI would possess "synthetic" humanoid bodies to best interact and manipulate its environment as others in the class of rational entities do such as humans. I put synthetic in scare quotes because as long as a body is made from existents from reality (as it must be as there is no alternative) and performs what it needs to to support the life/conscious mind of itself even if it is not a body that is a result of billions of years of the trial and error of nature but instead is a result of knowledge and design created in a tiny fraction of that time length,  conceptually it is still a body.  That said a "body" can and most likely will be just a processor and various means to perceive and interact with reality as current non-AGI chat bots do to begin with. Although to reach their full potential they need more means to perceive and interact with reality as current living beings such as humans do.

Edited February 21 by EC

[tadmjones]

You say absolutely not, but in describing the design and operation of such a device you speak in terms of 'physicality' while at the same time invoking the exploitation of conjectured forces that operate on a scale, so far as we understand, that would be inconsistent with manipulation on 'our' scale. 

[EC]

15 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

You say absolutely not, but in describing the design and operation of such a device you speak in terms of 'physicality' while at the same time invoking the exploitation of conjectured forces that operate on a scale, so far as we understand, that would be inconsistent with manipulation on 'our' scale. 

Forces don't exist without physical existents.  A force is a relationship between physical existents and while you may not understand don't include me in the "we". Just because you specifically do not understand principles of holography doesn't mean others including myself do not. 

[tadmjones]

Awareness, experience isn't what is commonly referred to as part of physicality. Or do you not mean that an AGI would be aware? An AGI entity would have the capacity  to perform computation, manipulate data without an integrated awareness of 'itself'?

[EC]

2 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Awareness, experience isn't what is commonly referred to as part of physicality. Or do you not mean that an AGI would be aware? An AGI entity would have the capacity  to perform computation, manipulate data without an integrated awareness of 'itself'?

Awareness is a process of information processing and perception.  An AGI is or would be a person just like any form of rational entities. People keep making this artificial distinction between naturally evolved lifeforms and those that are initially engineered via humanity.  A rational mind that is embodied in some form is alive in the same sense as a natural occurring rational entity such as a human is. We aren't talking about the "immortal robots" that are simply sophisticated automatons that Miss Rand referred to but a new (for humans at least) form of life that was engineered by mankind while possessing a rational conceptual mind and a body made of whatever it is made of. 

And yes,  take this to its logical extension,  "universes" that are born as a result of blackholes coming into existence within the eternal Universe as a whole including the multiverse of multiverses which are all superimposed in one Plank time but exist to a degree "separately" due to "local" partial symmetry breaking as separate quantum dioramas separated slightly by a function of a Plank unit and phi are event horizons where enough "random" quantum gravitational computation exists to create a "local" "new" multiverse within the existing multiverse (but remember time only results from local symmetry breaking and actual "time" of the entire multiverse of multiverses exists within a single eternal Plank time) means that in a sense that that and all event horizons possess the capability to become what we would currently call AGI. Blackholes are physical existents within existence, they aren't "non-physical" objects and they are essentially physical "supercomputers" that "create" their own multiverse within the preexisting multiverse that is the Universe as an eternal whole. In other words there is a likelihood that that each one actually possesses a thinking mind and is an individual person.  Funny thing is if there was a "god" thing it would just be that naturally created individual. But if it exists its just a normal person like us, any rational aliens that exist,  or any AGI created by them or us just with billions and billions more life experience than the rest of us. 

[tadmjones]

Awareness is a phenomenon not a process.

[DavidOdden]

4 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Awareness, experience isn't what is commonly referred to as part of physicality.

‘Physicality’ is an abstraction, the reification of ‘physical’, where ‘physicality’ is the same in meaning as ‘physicalness’ and ‘physicalhood’, the latter being of dubious social acceptability (that is, we don’t talk that way, mixing Greek roots and Germanic suffixes). We don’t have problems understanding the word ‘reality’ and its relation to ‘real’, but there are problems with ‘physical’ and ‘physicality’. The historical fact is that ‘physical’ is used in science to describe the tangible (entities) as well as the real (a broader concept), e.g. forces. We would say that an electron is physical, it is a thing, and it has properties (like charge, angular momentum) which are not themselves things (unless some version of physics says that charge is an entity, a constituent and not just a property of an electron).

I can only vaguely estimate the meaning of ‘commonly referred to as part of physicality’. Clearly, experience, like charge or color, is not a tangible entity, yet it is real, it has a basis in tangible entities. Now, the other problem that I see here is the claim about ‘commonly referred to’, which omits three important things: referred to by whom, the standards for claiming that something is common (ballpark: if something is the case 1/3 of the time, is it ‘commonly’ the case, or does it have to be the majority or plurality case?), and the evidence in the form of proof of actual reference (who is counting, what are they counting?). I say that it is not productive to cast doubt on a high-level concept because the concept is not a mass-having entity.

I also suggest that scare quotes and metaphors are the enemy in this discussion. Atomic particles do not have bodies. As far as I understand what is being said, an AGI is not scare-quotes “synthetic”, it is literally synthetic, man-made (the A stands for ‘artificial’, by definition man-made). A person, rat or fish unquestionably has a body, a mountain, stream or tree does not, however, we do commonly metaphorically speak of cars and books as having bodies. Typically, ‘disembodied’ refers to a mystical concept, the spirit, and is used at least by right-thinking people as a slur to suggest that an opponent is invoking dubious mystical concepts such as spirits, which is not the case here. In the present instance, I see no evidence that an AGI is held to be a mystical spirit, but it is an abstraction describing what real entity does (would do, if it existed). The Objectivist epistemology is, similarly, not a tangible entity, it is a system of ideas which are real but themselves have no mass or specific space-time coordinates. Ideas are the product of a consciousness, which is an aspect of a tangible entity. Via the miracle of language and its objective nature, ideas can be preserved and transmitted, not just passively experienced.

I have just transmitted some ideas to you, which you cannot reasonably say are ‘disembodied’ (disagreement could be informative). You can see a representation of the ideas on your screen, or you can hear an analogous representation if you have a screen-reader running, and you know that there is some entity-based mechanism underlying my typing, uploading, and your reading. In that sense, my ideas are physically-based.

You might expect that for reasons of scale, we cannot control microscopic entities like viruses, much less molecules, yet it turns out that we can. That doesn’t establish that we can overcome the scale differences between 6’ tall people and quantum-realm Ant Man stuff, but scale differences per se do not define an impenetrable barrier to human control.

The fundamental question is whether a quantum computer could exist, and from what I can tell (slovenly internet search), such things actually do exist, though they may be impractical and not very good at present. We still haven’t developed Mr. Fusion, but progress has been made to the point that fusion is not just a way to blow the shit out of everything.

[EC]

34 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:

‘Physicality’ is an abstraction, the reification of ‘physical’, where ‘physicality’ is the same in meaning as ‘physicalness’ and ‘physicalhood’, the latter being of dubious social acceptability (that is, we don’t talk that way, mixing Greek roots and Germanic suffixes). We don’t have problems understanding the word ‘reality’ and its relation to ‘real’, but there are problems with ‘physical’ and ‘physicality’. The historical fact is that ‘physical’ is used in science to describe the tangible (entities) as well as the real (a broader concept), e.g. forces. We would say that an electron is physical, it is a thing, and it has properties (like charge, angular momentum) which are not themselves things (unless some version of physics says that charge is an entity, a constituent and not just a property of an electron).

I can only vaguely estimate the meaning of ‘commonly referred to as part of physicality’. Clearly, experience, like charge or color, is not a tangible entity, yet it is real, it has a basis in tangible entities. Now, the other problem that I see here is the claim about ‘commonly referred to’, which omits three important things: referred to by whom, the standards for claiming that something is common (ballpark: if something is the case 1/3 of the time, is it ‘commonly’ the case, or does it have to be the majority or plurality case?), and the evidence in the form of proof of actual reference (who is counting, what are they counting?). I say that it is not productive to cast doubt on a high-level concept because the concept is not a mass-having entity.

I also suggest that scare quotes and metaphors are the enemy in this discussion. Atomic particles do not have bodies. As far as I understand what is being said, an AGI is not scare-quotes “synthetic”, it is literally synthetic, man-made (the A stands for ‘artificial’, by definition man-made). A person, rat or fish unquestionably has a body, a mountain, stream or tree does not, however, we do commonly metaphorically speak of cars and books as having bodies. Typically, ‘disembodied’ refers to a mystical concept, the spirit, and is used at least by right-thinking people as a slur to suggest that an opponent is invoking dubious mystical concepts such as spirits, which is not the case here. In the present instance, I see no evidence that an AGI is held to be a mystical spirit, but it is an abstraction describing what real entity does (would do, if it existed). The Objectivist epistemology is, similarly, not a tangible entity, it is a system of ideas which are real but themselves have no mass or specific space-time coordinates. Ideas are the product of a consciousness, which is an aspect of a tangible entity. Via the miracle of language and its objective nature, ideas can be preserved and transmitted, not just passively experienced.

I have just transmitted some ideas to you, which you cannot reasonably say are ‘disembodied’ (disagreement could be informative). You can see a representation of the ideas on your screen, or you can hear an analogous representation if you have a screen-reader running, and you know that there is some entity-based mechanism underlying my typing, uploading, and your reading. In that sense, my ideas are physically-based.

You might expect that for reasons of scale, we cannot control microscopic entities like viruses, much less molecules, yet it turns out that we can. That doesn’t establish that we can overcome the scale differences between 6’ tall people and quantum-realm Ant Man stuff, but scale differences per se do not define an impenetrable barrier to human control.

The fundamental question is whether a quantum computer could exist, and from what I can tell (slovenly internet search), such things actually do exist, though they may be impractical and not very good at present. We still haven’t developed Mr. Fusion, but progress has been made to the point that fusion is not just a way to blow the shit out of everything.

Great post. One thing to add is that the duality in ER=EPR and r=1/r from string theory combined with every "point" in a being a vibration of the standard 4 dimensions, their inverse Calabi-Yau dimensions and a fractional phi dimension takes care of the issues with quantum manipulation while allowing for "particles" to exist with all the known wave features and not causing any of the contradictions normally associated with "wave/particle" "duality". Essentially, all the physics happens on the local universe's event horizons and our universe is a multidimensional holographic projection of the physics with each Plank area also being an entagled event horizon with its own inverse universe.  The backaction of the inverse which contains the supersymmetric sparticles of "dark matter" which will never be "found" in our "universe" but do exist in that sense combined with our universe's parent blackhole absorbing matter and energy from its parent universe is what causes accelerated "expansion" of our own universe. Imagine a finite but unbound number of sets of "Russian dolls 🪆" (and inverse Russian dolls) with all of the sets a function of Planks constant and phi differences between each unbound sets and then imagine this unbound number of sets all superimposed and entagled and interacting as a multidimensional trampoline "brane" to some degree but to the largest interaction amount with the event horizons of r and 1/r in Plank units and you will have a very good idea of the Final and Complete Theory of Physics/Everything. It's entagled and superimposed blackholes (and their "inverses" for supersymmetrical reasons) in an eternal Plank time of a finite but unbound number of multiverses of all possible (possible by the laws of Quantum Gravity and the Law of Identity) multiverses with each slight different quantum diorama "universe" existing such that a complete eternal and non-contradictory Universe can and must exist "all the way down".

[tadmjones]

What would an embodied transmission look like?

AGI is like digital alchemy.  I’ve heard a lot of charges of alchemy directed at Newton.

Right thinking people are actually starting to realize the paradigm of strict physicalism seems to be heading toward if not a long stretch of diminishing returns then a dead end.

To have a theory of everything would everything need to identified first, or would the theory predict the unknown?

Edited February 22 by tadmjones

[Boydstun]

22 hours ago, EC said:

Awareness is a process of information processing and perception. . . .

I'd think "perception" contains the idea of awareness, and is not helpful in a statement of what is awareness or how it comes about. But perhaps you just mean by "perception" here inputs from sensors bring information of things to the processing plant. That is OK.

What is the relationship of information processing in neural networks and my information processing in awareness that I am typing a question ending at the question mark? If the information processing of the neural-network activity underlying my information processing in conscious awareness just is that conscious information processing, that identity needs to be established by argument and research results. On the face of it, it appears that when we are consciously taking in information and making it integral to our actions, we are not thinking about those underlying neuronal information processes (firing patterns of neural networks), but of things like what marks we are making on the computer screen and what worthwhile thoughts of worldly entities, characters, passages, and situations in topic (or tangentially) we are striving to attain and share.

Perhaps you could show us where you think is the cutting edge of research on that question is today. (Please don't say "I'm the cutting edge". That is not credible nor informative, what one is aiming for is not what one has in hand, and it bespeaks a failure to look and assess beyond ones own thought in the enterprise of human knowledge.) I'm not aware that any well-founded right answer to my question has been reached, but I'm not really up to date on latest research. I've noticed the following works tackling the question or issues pertinent to it through some years now. Of any you have studied, do you find any to be getting somewhere (or for that matter, of any interest to you)?

Artificial Intelligence – The Very Idea (Haugeland 1985)

The Remembered Present – A Biological Theory of Consciousness (Edelman 1989)

Consciousness Explained (Dennett 1991)

The Race for Consciousness (Taylor 1999)

The Quest for Consciousness – A Neurobiological Approach (Koch 2004)

Consciousness (Hill 2009)

Mind: Your Consciousness is What and Where? (Honderich 2017)

The Feeling of Life Itself – Why Consciousness is Widespread but Cannot Be Computed (Koch 2019)

Conscious Mind / Resonant Brain – How Each Brain Makes a Mind (Grossberg 2021). 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 22 by Boydstun

[tadmjones]

Or for flavor some texts from the ancient Hindus and their consciousness based religions.

A lot of modern physics is the quantification of the Vedic views of existence. Multiverses ‘proven’ by the ‘maths’ is not surprising to ancient philosophies and religions. Most in that vein also have built in methods of thought for not confusing the map for the territory.

[EC]

1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

Or for flavor some texts from the ancient Hindus and their consciousness based religions.

A lot of modern physics is the quantification of the Vedic views of existence. Multiverses ‘proven’ by the ‘maths’ is not surprising to ancient philosophies and religions. Most in that vein also have built in methods of thought for not confusing the map for the territory.

This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any of that even remotely and this about the primacy of existence not consciousness in even the remotest manner. Consciousness is a result of existents as I described in detail. Also, the first objective proof of the existence of a multiverse was the double slit experiment and there has been countless more experiments and technology including the creation of quantum computers that are further evidence. While I have a layman's knowledge of some Indian religion and most others through history the presentation and science is not related in any manner to any of this, their accidental similarities in some incidences aside. Also, I'm an American with absolutely no Indian ancestry (although I do have Native American Indian ancestry from both sides of my family). But in the decade leading up to finding the philosophy that fit my personal views, opinions, and knowledge best in Objectivism before 9/11 I did study to some degree most of the world's religions (while of course remaining an Atheist because of each containing massive contradictions contrary to reality and the Law of non-contradition even if some occasionally have ideas that contain some degree of truth however tainted. The Tao of Physics is an example. ) and then studying the major philosophies of the world throughout history before finding Objectivism which represents the truth about reality and man's nature essentially perfectly. 

[EC]

Just to add to the above, my grandparents on my Dad's side who took me to church from toddler age until I made my own decision to stop going at about 9 or so where originally from Arkansas and were Southern Baptists who took me to Baptist churches, but right away at 4, 5, 6 years of age I immediately had what I now know were extreme moral issues with the idea of a being/God requiring sacrifices, first in animals and then of actual people (which even then I knew made zero sense whatsoever and was evil). Then there were all the contradictions such as a "trinity" that is one, magical stuff like people walking on water, being magically turned to salt, being swallowed by whales and living,  dying and magically coming back from the dead, etc. Things that are impossible and people just randomly believing it all without even thinking or demanding proof in any manner. Then there was the way people acted there that literally scared the crap out of me, made no sense,  or was boring to the point I'd just fall asleep.  Kids my age being rewarded for randomly citing the books of the Bible at like age 6 when the assignment was actually to cite a specific assigned verse in the children's class while acting like mindless zombies, being in the main service with my Grandparents and people randomly yelling out hallelujah like crazy lunatics, the list could go on and on. It was just a scary,  contradictory,  nonsensical experience at nearly all times. The singing and things like listening to stories that even then I knew were just myths was OK but overall I considered it an extremely negative experience and since the purpose of it all was to stop rational thought and encourage conformity in outlandish ideas that would get people sent properly to a psychiatrist for if they claimed them in the present I quickly realized that it was a form of child abuse to continue in any manner past about 8 or 9.

[tadmjones]

I spent decades prior to 9/11 reading as much Rand as I could find. I was Second Renaissance’s dream customer, I think I had all of the hours of LP’s lectures that were publicly available , hey whatever happened to that Walkman?

Literal frames of most religions lead to dogmatic practices. There are subtler views.

[EC]

2 hours ago, tadmjones said:

I spent decades prior to 9/11 reading as much Rand as I could find. I was Second Renaissance’s dream customer, I think I had all of the hours of LP’s lectures that were publicly available , hey whatever happened to that Walkman?

Literal frames of most religions lead to dogmatic practices. There are subtler views.

Awesome,  you are likely quite older than myself then at 46 unless you were lucky to have had somehow found Miss Rand at a very young age or had family that taught you the correct way. 

I agree that the dogmatism of any religion is a very large negative. Obviously every idea from various religions have some truth to them such as the "commandment" (in scare quotes because as we both know a moral commandment is a contradiction in terms since morality by its very nature istherationallychosen) against murder.  Also,  I quite enjoyed the book of Tau from the Asian philosophy,  that said each obviously have major flaws, most involve primacy of consciousness,  aren't systematized, are filled with contradictions, endorse sacrifice (the most blatantly evil idea in the history of Man), etc. 

[tadmjones]

Correction , should have said the decade prior to 9/11 , I think I read AS in 89 , and at the time it was the last unread book on the shelf. I did not know who Ayn Rand was at the time , but reading AS was like a religious experience , lol.