The point was to test for human bias in the data. The initial complaint was that scientists were cherry picking the data to make it look worse than it was. By looking at the spread, it showed they were minorly cherry picking to understate the problem. A fact that is now more and more obvious as it plays out.
I personally suspect it's autism related. Social effort gets downgraded whether I want it to be or not. It doesn't seem to track with my own fight or flight reflexes. We might have different variants.
I know our brains deal with faces separately. That's why we see them everywhere e.g. face in the moon. It then makes sense that face memory is done separately.
It's weird. It's almost like someone took a video of an event, but replaced the face and body with a generic placeholder, and a pointer to more information. That extra info promptly gets dropped, leaving the pointer hanging.
I once found myself completely unable to describe someone, less than 5 minutes after talking to them, knowing I might need to describe them. The fact they had a nose piercing, and neon blue hair just got dumped from memory.
I feel you on that!
I'm not face blind, I can recognise particular faces fine. What seems to be screwed for me is face memory. Without a face to anchor to, names are then an absolute bitch.
I've yet to find even an actual name for the phenomenon, let alone a fix.
About a decade ago a group did a study on it.
They first created a simplified model. That model was still a fairly good match with the fully featured models. They then varied the parameters around reasonable possible values. If scientists were using most likely assumptions, you would expect a 50/50 split of better/worse predictions.
In practice it was 93% worse. Scientists were (unconsciously) using a lot of best case figures, not expected case.
When I read about that, and the complete lack of follow-up coverage, I knew we were fucked.
That is pretty much my view on things. I don't like it, but it's what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It's a useful lie.
Discworld's Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.
It's a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a "real" thing.
It's a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don't exist in the image itself.
In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it's akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.
I'm not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don't need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I've read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly's brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
There's fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly's, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly's brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don't think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There's no obvious reason we can't scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
I'm from the UK. When I was out in Dubai, I worked through a 40-45°C midday without slowing down much, with plenty of water.
In the UK, the humidity and buildings mean I start slowing down around 25°C, 35°C has me basically a lost cause, in less I push myself hard. 40+ is hellish.
Northern Europe isn't built for heat. It's built to trap heat.
One of the goals is to minimise them. Most of those left are blindingly obvious, but unprovable. They are technically there, but just part of the base assumptions of the models.
E.g. we couldn't do science if an all powerful being was deliberately messing with our results. We also can't prove the universe isn't a computer program, only rendering what a "conscious" entity is looking at, while back calculating the required history on the fly.
The challenge is, can you figure out where it is.
All hail the lemming of Lemmy!
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It wasn't deliberate. It was more likely scientists being overly cautious about overstating their case. The end results pushed the normal agreed values closer to best case predictions rather than middle.
This was back when the main models needed weeks of super computer time, so only a few were run, and everyone else analysed the shared results.