Search Ideas

Actually this is not implied. One experience and an identical later one could be caused by the same program(s) being run again at a later time; if the program which is identical to the given experience is part of an "evolutionary personhood program", that still qualifies: If the second experience is identical, under the above solution that just means that the exact same evolutionary steps are taken in the second case. Maybe this would virtually never happen, but poses no problem of principle.

By the latter standard, neither nature nor random number generators are people, which is sensible; nor can nature create any given possible knowledge tractably -- this is true because the fact that all possible knowledge exists is only by way of the multiverse, which is a process that cannot be simulated in its entirety, even by a quantum computer.

This is a bad criterion because then random program generators are sometimes people.

It is mistaken to apply probabilistic thinking to human affairs, because they involve knowledge, and the growth of knowledge cannot be predicted.

In summer in the desert, will it "probably" be sunny in the afternoon?

PROBLEM: Why are we conscious of the apple rendering? Given (6), why is there an experience of it, if the programs comprising it are looping, and so are therefore predefined?

SOLUTION: The apple programs are not the same programs one execution to the next. They are being re-evolved every time they are run. This evolution is what the person is doing, and so must be what gives rise to the experience consisting of the apple rendering.

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.