It's a supernatural being in a thought experiment — Patterner

So it doesn't sound like you're disagreeing with me then, when I say "it can't exist in the universe it's predicting". If it's predicting a universe of atoms, it can't just exist in that universe as a thing made of atoms and also be able to perfectly predict the future faster than it happens - it has to be "super natural" - super meaning ABOVE, meaning above the nature of the universe it's supposed to predict. I agree, it has to be SUPER to the nature of the universe it can predict.

did we not just say in a physicalist determinist universe? If this demon is in this universe, then yeah.

If neither of my guesses was correct, what is the reason you think that, even in principle, the demon cannot exist inside of the same universe it's capable of predicting, even if that universe is 100% physicalist and 100% deterministic? — Patterner

Let's imagine a super simplified case. Forget quantum mechanics, imagine the world is classical, space and time are Cartesian, the world is composed of atoms which are more or less like tiny little billiard balls bouncing around.

Why, in such a simplified world, could an LD not possibly be able to predict the future with perfect accuracy?

Well, our LD is made of atoms, is he not? Some fraction of his atoms are for his brain, the rest are for his body. Even just to calculate his own future, only 1 second into the future, he would have to know the precise location and velocity of every atom inside his own body and brain, and know the location and velocity of every atom that's going to interact with his body in the next second.

He doesn't have enough atoms in his brain to store all that information, never mind do calculations on it.

And then you've got the computing speed problem - you can't compute the universe faster than the universe can compute itself, from within the universe . I mean there are some scenarios maybe where you could jump ahead because you know this particular thing is flying in a straight line and won't interact with anything, but mostly you don't have a bunch of simplified things like that, you have thousands of things bouncing into thousands of other things all the time. Not a lot of space for computational shortcuts available.

So a leplace demon is impossible to exist inside the universe - you could have one outside the universe looking in, but not inside

I have no idea what the first thing is that you're disagreeing with

It should be noted, and maybe already has, that even in principle the demon cannot exist inside of the same universe it's capable of predicting, even if that universe is 100% physicalist and 100% deterministic.

It is just one way of thinking about the universe. It may be useful, but is it true? What is the evidence one way or the other? — Ludwig V

"Closed" just means "everything that matters for calculating the future of this system is here." So what's the evidence that, regardless of whether the physical universe is closed itself, there's SOME closed system that contains the uinverse? Well, I don't have scientific evidence, but consider this intuition: there is a set of things that are the answer to the question, "what are all the things, physical or otherwise, that go into deciding future states?"

Future states are, in fact, realized, so something must realize them, so there must be a set of things relevant to the process of realizing the future. That set of things is "the closed system", whether that's exclusively physical or also contains other "realms".

The alternative is the claim "there is no set of things that go into deciding the futre states".

he says it right after quoting me. If it's not for me, who is he directing the question "what is your evidence" towards?

"IF the universe is a closed system.." we can make all sorts of deductions and predictions. But is it? What's your evidence? — Ludwig V

That's... now what I said. That's not even a response to what I said.

meant to say strictly, and don't call me auto correct

Ty, fixed

it doesn't strictly have to, though.

Suppose something is casual on our physical world, but outside the physical world - perhaps a mind or spirit realm, wherein mental and spiritual events occur. And suppose there's bidirectional causality between the physical realm and this mind realm.

One need not think of specifically the physical realm as a closed system, one can instead imagine (physical realm plus mind realm) as a combined closed system. And an LD that's fully aware of what's going on in all the relevant realms of the combined closed systems is still conceivable.

There are many people who are unable to be clear even if they reflect on what they say. — Tom Storm

I guess there's a few general categories, right?

The people who actually try to be rigourously clear and are good at it (these people are usually willing to reword or work through anything unclear upon request)

The people who try to be clear and are bad at it.

The people who don't even try.

When people in the last two groups get pissy that their posts are being understood in ways they didn't intend... whew , frustrating times.

But how's this - I doubt most people deliberately aim for their points to be misunderstood. — Tom Storm

True, BUT in a philosophical setting it's fully possible that it's simultaneously true that most people don't put any significant effort into trying to be understood either. So even if they don't want to be misunderstood, they're not writing their posts with a mind to the question, "is there some way that what I'm saying now is going to not be understood the way I mean it?" They just write away and hope for the best.

It seems remarkably common.

I doubt anyone deliberately aims for their points to be misunderstood. — Tom Storm

Some people absolutely play games where they TRY to be as opaque as possible, and bait misunderstandings from people which they can pounce on - it gives them permission to attack and insult, they think.

In fact I recently spoke to someone who, in one thread, got upset people were trying to interpret her vague questions, "why are you trying to read my mind?", and then in the same goddamn thread, wrote half a paragraph and then tied it off with "yada yada yada you get what I mean".

So, she gets to belittle me for trying to interpret her vagueries, and then continues to produce more vagueries... I think the belittling is the point

If all is deterministic, then numbers and information, and consciousness and intent, are irrelevant. It can all be reduced to particle physics, just as thermodynamics can. I suppose it would know why brain states also feel like mental states to us. But if "feel like" is all there is, but they have no casual power, and are, themselves, determined by the physical events, then it doesn't matter. — Patterner

This is why pluralism and process philosophy are so important - you don't have to take this "nothing matters, nothing is real" view, EVEN IF you accept that everything is fundamentally caused by the lowest-level physical rules.

Just because all of the components of a clock are governed by physics doesn't mean "the cogs don't cause the clock to work" - no, to the contrary, the fact that the cogs are made of fundamental particles doing what fundamental particles do is what MAKES the cogs work, and in tandem what makes the clock as a whole work.

It's not one or the other, it's one because of the other.

The casualty of your mind can be similar. It's not "my mind is acausal because it's just physical stuff in my brain obeying the laws of physics", it's "my mind IS CASUAL and works how it works, and interacts with the things it interacts with, precisely because it's made of physical things following the laws of physics".

Your view kind of makes it seem like anything that's not fundamental isn't real - I understand that intuition, but I think that's why concepts like emergence are so important to understand. The fundamental is real, and the emergent things that emerge from the fundamental are also real.

What, in your opinion, are some reasonable inferences one can draw from these examples?

You are the one who is correcting me and highlighting my grammatical mistakes, mate… — javi2541997

Really? So it wasn't you who started the conversation about my use of "except"? I think it was.

On the other hand…

I pour milk for everyone in my house except for me. Who pours milk for me?
— flannel jesus

The premise is badly written. — javi2541997

You started the semantic conversation, and now you're crying victim.

Let's leave it there. Sure. You're the victim, let's all shed a tear for javi.

knowing that I am not a native speaker. — javi2541997

I didn't know that, and it's not meant to be an insult, but it is clear from all your language confusions in this thread. You're trying to correct me in ways you don't understand. If English really isn't your native language, then it would make sense for you to be a little more humble about your interpretations of these words, rather than latching on to some other persons confusions on stack exchange.

I never debated a paradox here, there isn't one.

The first means “plus”. So, is there a barber in Seville apart from the one who shaves the people and himself? It is cumulative. There could be the possibility that others could shave the barber. But who If he is the only one in Seville?
The second means “minus”. Is there a barber except for the one who shaves others and himself? It is excluding. There cannot be a paradox because we already take for granted that the barber is the only one in Seville. — javi2541997

I'm not getting the impression from these words that you're entirely comfortable in English.

I see your personal linguistic confusions, is that what you want me to see?

when I Google "define apart from" I get:

Merriam: Other than, Besides, except for

You're stretching really far for all this my man.

You haven't explained what is a paradox yet! :blush: — javi2541997

A paradox certainly ISN'T a simple story, ended with a simple question that has a simple answer.

I pour milk for everyone in my house except for me. Who pours milk for me?

someone from outside Seville, or someone who isn't a barber, or maybe there are more barbers in Seville but they aren't all called "the barber of Seville", and that title is reserved for him. All quite apparent solutions

Or maybe nobody shaves him, maybe he has a really long beard - or he doesn't grow a beard, because he's a trans man before the age of hrt

yeah I don't think you're making any interesting connections just yet

You don't have any clue about this linguistic paradox. — javi2541997

This isn't a paradox. The sentence of the op is clearly, plainly, easily possible. Nothing remotely challenging about imagining a man shaving all men in his village except himself.

the barber shaves all other than himself, Joe shaves the barber, but Who doesn't shave anybody. Russell gets shaved by the barber.

I'm not really sure how that connects to the theist stories Vera was talking about. I doubt very many of them feature cars.

No, Who doesn't shave anybody.

Joe

There seems to be a bit of a wave of this material about - an attempt at rebuilding a discourse on meaning from the wreckage of humanism/scientism/materialism towards transcendental matters. Is Vervaeke a Platonist? — Tom Storm

There was already some discussion on this previously, but I don't think anybody said this explicitly:

Regarding the mind, and the things the mind does, and why and how it does them, he's 100% a "it's all in the brain" type of guy. He's said as much explicitly at least once or twice in a podcast I listened to.

I think there's a lot of misconceptions about matierliasm - it's not the boogyman many of you seem to think it is, as Janus points out.

But isn't there something "behind" the stories that a person cannot wimp out on even if she tried? — Astrophel

Like what?

But eventually it has to get to a position that it hasn't seen in its training data, and then what? — noAxioms

And then it continues to make (usually) legal moves which are approximately as good as its general skill level predicts they should be.

https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2024/01/03/chess-world-models.html

I also checked if it was playing unique games not found in its training dataset. There are often allegations that LLMs just memorize such a wide swath of the internet that they appear to generalize. Because I had access to the training dataset, I could easily examine this question. In a random sample of 100 games, every game was unique and not found in the training dataset by the 10th turn (20 total moves). This should be unsurprising considering that there are more possible games of chess than atoms in the universe.

I have to read this next, it's the follow up article

https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2024/03/20/chess-gpt-interventions.html#:~:text=Chess%2DGPT%20is%20orders%20of,board%20state%20and%20player%20skill.

Also in passing I learned about linear probes, which I gather are simpler neural nets that can analyze the internals of other neural nets. So they are working on the "black box" problem, trying to understand the inner workings of neural nets. That's good to know. — fishfry

Yeah same, this was really intriguing to me too

And thanks so much for pointing me at that example. It's a revelation. — fishfry

Of course, I'm glad you think so. I've actually believed for quite some time that LLMs have internal models of stuff, but the strong evidence for that belief wasn't as available to me before - that's why that article is so big to me.

I'm really pleased that other people see how big of a deal that is too - you could have just read a few paragraphs and called me an idiot instead , that was what I assumed would happen. That's what normally happens in these circumstances. I applaud you for going further than that.

By doing nothing more than auto-completing these games as text strings, — fishfry

For full clarity, and I'm probably being unnecessarily pedantic here, it's not necessarily fair to say that's all they did. That's all their goal was, that's all they were asked to - BUT what all of this should tell you, in my opinion, is that when a neural net is asked to achieve a task, there's no telling HOW it's actually going to achieve that task.

In order to achieve the task of auto completing the chess text strings, it seemingly did something extra - it built an internal model of a board game which it (apparently) reverse engineered from the strings. (I actually think that's more interesting than its relatively high chess rating, the fact that it can reverse engineer the rules of chess seeing nothing but chess notation).

So we have to distinguish, I think, between the goals it was given, and how it accomplished those goals.

Apologies if I'm just repeating the obvious.

okay so I guess I'm confused why, after all that, you still said

No internal model of any aspect of the actual game

Would you consider yourself a compatibilist?

So it's still possible that the "future" you changed to was the future that it was guranteed to be all along, yeah?

but you haven't proven that it was possible for you to do other than what you've done, right?

To conclude, I have proven I can change the future indirectly by interrupting the flow of the present — Barkon

Have you? Change the future from what?

This one developed a higher level of understanding than it was programmed for, if you look at it that way. — fishfry

I do. In fact I think that's really what neural nets are kind of for and have always (or at least frequently) done. They are programmed to exceed their programming in emergent ways.

No internal model of any aspect of the actual game. — fishfry

I feel like you might have missed some important paragraphs in the article. Did you notice the heat map pictures? Did you read all the paragraphs around that? A huge part of the article is very much exploring the evidence that gpt really does model the game.