> The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same goal. It's how behavior over time doesn't undermine its purpose. Fragmented, incoherent behavior does not serve self-preservation.
Why would movement towards a goal be incoherent if it happened "in the dark"? Our brains perform many critical functions "in the dark" (and do so coherently) which do not rise to the level of consciousness.
Presumably the question you're asking is why does a unified self representation require consciousness. (Split brain cases are easy examples of how a break in unification results in incoherent behavior.) The brain nominally performs functions as cascading behavior of atoms whose structural relationships correspond to various functions. But there is no unification at the unconscious/atomistic level therefore a new representational regime is required that can ground the higher level unification.
A successful organism exhibits a high level of competence at reacting appropriately to environmental/sensory states. The "light's being on" is how the brain represents being situated in a world and the significant features therein. Representations within this gestalt are inherently meaningful. For example, phenomenal pain brings with it competence at protecting bodily integrity. The memory of pain becomes part of the explanatory narrative for the monitoring function that tracks progress towards goals ensuring coherent behavior (imagine being fearful of a stove but not knowing why). The contents of consciousness is the semantic engine that induces competent behavior over time on otherwise naive entities.
> For example, phenomenal pain brings with it competence at protecting bodily integrity. The memory of pain becomes part of the explanatory narrative for the monitoring function that tracks progress towards goals ensuring coherent behavior (imagine being fearful of a stove but not knowing why).
But this isn't true! It has been repeatedly shown that patients without inner brain function react to stimuli (such as being pinched or pricked with a needle) by recoiling from the pain, as do babies with no experience of pain. So qualia and consciousness seem like they have nothing to do with ensuring coherent behavior. To put this another way, your experiences and interactions with the world could be sufficient to associate the stove with danger, but how does that explain why the experience of touching the stove has qualia, as opposed to simply the pain-reaction of a patient without inner brain function or a baby?
Another counterargument is that our brains carry out lots of "coherent" functions "in the dark". Consider, for example, thermoregulation; most of the time, there is no conscious experience associated with it, but yet it is happening constantly and coherently.
Let's simplify it further: to use a famous example, do you believe that a thermostat is conscious? After all, a theremostat is able to coherently regulate its temperature over time in response to changes in its environment.
>But this isn't true! It has been repeatedly shown that patients without inner brain function react to stimuli (such as being pinched or pricked with a needle) by recoiling from the pain, as do babies with no experience of pain.
Yes, reflexive avoidance behavior doesn't require conscious experience. But as the environment of the organism gets more complex, reflexive avoidance behavior isn't sufficient for competence. For an agent in a complex environment, competent damage avoidance requires engaging with negative valence as a cognitive entity to be planned around and weighed against other interests. This requires unification and consciousness.
>Another counterargument is that our brains carry out lots of "coherent" functions "in the dark". Consider, for example, thermoregulation
This isn't an example of coherent behavior in the sense being used here. The issue is one of voluntary behavior being coherently executed as to achieve some goal without undermining itself.
> But as the environment of the organism gets more complex, reflexive avoidance behavior isn't sufficient for competence. For an agent in a complex environment, competent damage avoidance requires engaging with negative valence as a cognitive entity to be planned around and weighed against other interests. This requires unification and consciousness.
But why does engaging with negative valence, planning, and weighing actions against other interests require subjective experience? That sounds simply like a mathematical function (perhaps using our own past experiences as inputs). Reinforcement Learning is a great counterexample here: AI systems weigh negative valence and execute long-term plans without any qualia.
If thermoregulation is too "reflexive" for you, consider that there are many examples in which humans are able to perform very complex tasks in the absence of qualia. Consider, for instance, the phenomena of highway hypnosis, blindsight or sleepwalking - humans can do incredibly complicated things without qualia.
> This isn't an example of coherent behavior in the sense being used here. The issue is one of voluntary behavior being coherently executed as to achieve some goal without undermining itself.
This argument is circular. The original claim is that behaving coherently in a a complex environment requires consciousness. By shifting the goalposts to say that only voluntary behaviors qualify, you are begging the question. The entire notion of "voluntary" implies conscious intent, so your argument has become "consciously willed behaviors require consciousness".
>But why does engaging with negative valence, planning, and weighing actions against other interests require subjective experience?
I have a few different answers here. None are rock solid. Lets take it as a given that planning requires a unified representation of all inputs to the planning apparatus. Now, going with the example from earlier: an organism touches a hot stove and recoils. We can imagine this behavior without any accompanying qualia. But to plan subsequent behavior around the hot stove, the damaging hotness must be represented in the unified representation in a way that intrinsically carries the semantics of negative valence. Phenomenal pain just is "semantics of negative valence featured in a unified representation". My claim is that this is a conceptual identity; you can't have one without the other. This gives the planning apparatus competence at engaging with signals of bodily damage.
Without intrinsic semantics/phenomenality all you have is a signal with no intrinsic meaning and some context to select behavior downstream of the signal. But planning in dynamic environments requires much more flexible signaling than this kind of static context can provide.
>AI systems weigh negative valence and execute long-term plans without any qualia.
AI systems are highly fragmented representations. It's why you can get them to contradict themselves in the same session, or even one sentence after another. They are not an exemplar of coherent behavior. There's also no negative valence in LLMs. At most they have a representation of good/bad and this spectrum influences the valence/quality/alignment in their behavior. But valence as such is external to the LLM.
>consider that there are many examples in which humans are able to perform very complex tasks in the absence of qualia. Consider, for instance, the phenomena of highway hypnosis, blindsight or sleepwalking - humans can do incredibly complicated things without qualia.
Complexity is relative. The complexity of tasks sans qualia are always starkly deficient compared to comparable tasks with qualia. A wide look at cognitive science demonstrates the inherent value of qualia to highly complex tasks or tasks executed over long timescales.
>This argument is circular. The original claim is that behaving coherently in a a complex environment requires consciousness. By shifting the goalposts...
The goalposts aren't shifted, I'm clarifying the target of the term behavior as there was clearly a disagreement in meaning.
>to say that only voluntary behaviors qualify, you are begging the question. The entire notion of "voluntary" implies conscious intent, so your argument has become "consciously willed behaviors require consciousness".
This misunderstands the debate. The philosophical issue of consciousness is how to explain consciousness given the in principle completeness of physical descriptions and their categorical distinction from phenomenal descriptions. In this context, voluntary behavior is just higher order/complex behavior, it is not taken as downstream of consciousness in principle. There is a parallel conversation in psychology/cognitive science where consciousness is largely understood as wakefulness, attention, reportability, intentionality, etc. In this context "consciousness" (in this restricted sense) is a pre-requisite of voluntary behavior. But that's neither here nor there with regards to the philosophical debate.
Isn't Maturana's theory that consciousness has to do with language, and the use of language to make distinctions about ourselves and others? To me, this seems clearly insufficient to explain consciousness - qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc.
> qualia totally precede language; one could experience qualia without language, etc.
While I do believe this as well, I don't think there is any way to prove this with current knowledge. You can introspect and separate your experience of a color from your language, but this type of introspection can also be misleading. And that's about all you can do - we don't know of any way to objectively test if another organism experiences qualia, and any historical/evolutionary evidence is also lost.
The relation is not qualia at the base and language on top, even if qualia is more primitive, because language directs action and action leads back to qualia, so they form a recursive loop which cannot be analyzed component by component anymore.
Qualia represents the compressed past experiences acting as a screen on which we represent new experiences, language is compressed past experiences from others and from past generations. Both work to reduce costs of cognition and action. (imho)
Sure. We can't prove that other organisms experience qualia; we can only look at the effects of qualia (e.g. behaviors that are likely to be the product of emotions) and assume that an organism is therefore conscious. The real point, though, is that suggesting language gives rise to consciousness lacks any explanatory power as to why language should be accompanied by consciousness.
Most proponents of the existence of qualia regard them as fundamental to what they call the hard problem of consciousness. People like Chalmers and Searle assume that all of the externally observable behaviors of people could be (at least in principle) explained without the need for qualia; that is, they believe it's possible for p-zombies to exist; this then gives rise to this question of consciousness - if all physical behaviors can be explained without qualia, and yet everyone of us has qualia, how and why does this happen?
I thought the point above was in a similar vein - that qualia and language are theoretically separable phenomena, so that we can imagine a being might have qualia without language, or language without qualia, and so these need to be explained separately. I was trying to point out that we have no proof for the existence of beings that possess these two qualities separately, so that I don't think the theoretical distinction is necessarily true. Just like any volume of gas has a temperature and a pressure, the existence of separate concepts doesn't mean they are physically separable.
What a wild take. The straightforward takeaway from the end of ZIRP and the resulting increase in focus would be that you need to say no to more things, not fewer? You have to really contort yourself to argue that actually ZIRP gave rise to an entire class of make-work which then gave rise to a class of folks to keep said make-work under control.
The relevant era wasn't even a good example of (near) zero interest rates. At least when control for inflation. And there are other eras that also had low or even negative real interest rates.
I don't think we should undersell that transformers and semantic search are really powerful information retrieval tools, and they are extremely potent for solving search problems. That being said, I think I agree with you that RAG is fundamentally just search, and the hype (like any hype) elides the fact that you still have to solve all of the normal, difficult search problems.
I'd argue the author missed a trick here by using a fancy embedding model without any re-ranking. One of the benefits of a re-ranker (or even a series of re-rankers!) is that you can embed your documents using a really small and cheap model (this also often means smaller embeddings).
For technical domains, stuffing the context full of related-and-irrelevant or possibly-conflicting information will lead to poor results. The examples of long-context retrieval like finding a fact in a book really aren't representative of the types of context you'd be working with in a RAG scenario. In a lot of cases the problem is information organization, not retrieval, e.g. "What is the most authoritative type of source for this information?" or "How do these 100 documents about X relate to each other?"
There is no reason to believe that the foods humans have historically eaten are safer/healthier than "industrially processed/extracted/refined" food simply because we have historically eaten them. Evolution does not select for avoiding the health problems facing modern-day humans such as cancer or heart disease.
Uhh I don't think that financial incentives are a valid reason to believe something is healthier or safer than an alternative. Unless I have missed some sarcasm.
I mean there is a financial incentive to use byproducts of industrial processes that would otherwise be wasted, as food ingredients, and as there is no requirement to rigorously show that new ingredients are safe to consume in the US, this happens all the time and makes up a big portion of the average modern US diet.
But the list of allegedly questionable foods above are all foods we already eat, just with some things removed (e.g., avocado oil is just avocado with the flesh removed; pea protein is peas with the carbs removed). It is not obvious to me how you would conclude these are unhealthy.
"In three cases, bottles labeled as “pure” or “extra virgin” avocado oil contained near 100 percent soybean oil"
You don't necessarily know what you are getting when you buy a processed ingredient, and there are huge financial incentives to not sell a top quality product when you can substitute other things or use cheaper processes to make it.
Some portion of avocado oil sold today is refined with hexane, heated during the refining process, and likely heavily oxidized before consumption. (This is evidenced by the above paper, oxidized = rancid, and it's not a binary either/or there is a spectrum of how oxidized/rancid a fat can be.)
I'm not saying they're healthier simply because we've historically eaten them.
But there are many reasons to believe natural/traditional foods may be safer and healthier than new industrial foods. To name a few:
1) There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
2) Many highly processed foods have within decades of their introduction to our diet been found to be really bad for us. Refined sugars, refined oils, refined flours, artificial sweeteners, many of the weird additives, many synthetic compounds like methylcellulose (someone close to me is extremely sensitive to this one), on and on.
3) These new ingredients, new kinds of refining and processing, and even synthetic food compounds, do not have to undergo any rigorous testing to be shown to be safe before being added to food. Even if they do some studies for some of them, how would you really know it's not causing serious long term problems for say 1% of people? Or even 10%? The size and duration of a study you'd need to find them to be safe would be expensive and they generally don't do it, since they're not required to.
4) These new ingredients often introduce novel molecules to the body that the body may not be adapted to. I hope I don't need to explain how many novel molecules that were invented and widely used in recent decades have proved to be highly toxic.
5) We have a huge increase in severe chronic disease in recent decades. I won't claim here that this is primarily because of the changes to our diet from industrially processed foods, but diet is a top contender given that it's one of the biggest things that has changed in the human lifestyle, along with all the other novel substances our bodies come in contact with now.
6) We know of tons of people who were healthy to age 80, 90, 100, eating primarily/entirely natural foods. We don't yet have any examples of this with people eating a large portion of modern industrial foods that didn't exist 80 years ago. This is not proof that they're dangerous, I'm just saying we don't know and have reason to be cautious.
I agree it's probably healthier to eat wild meat or homegrown meat grown on healthy pasture than it is to eat feedlot meat grown on whatever they feed them there. There are lots of differences between them.
Not particularly because it has more fat though. While it's true that wild deer for example especially in warmer climates can have very little fat, there are plenty of animals that were traditionally eaten all over the world that have much higher proportions of fat. Fish, geese and ducks and many kinds of birds, whales and seals and lots of aquatic mammals, bears, etc.
I'm not trying to argue in favor of industrial beef at all I'm just trying to say that natural animal fat isn't necessarily unhealthy. (I really want to know actually if it is, because I do eat a lot of it, and have for much of my life. As far as I can tell I'm very healthy but I'm always open to learning. I have not yet found any compelling evidence for natural animal fat being bad.)
> There's reason to believe our bodies may be more adapted to eating natural or traditional foods, having eaten them for hundreds of thousands of years rather than one or two generations.
This is an argument that no white people should be eating pineapples, mangos, bananas, kiwifruit, etc. Hell, probably not even apples.
Different kinds of fruits from around the world may well have more in common with each other than categorically new synthetic compounds which are found in processed food.
Pretty much all people ate real foods - plants, animals, and fungus, and ferments of these, all over the world. There are categorical chemical differences between this stuff and much modern food.
Yes; you can phone it in post-tenure. But just because it is possible doesn't mean (in my experience) it is common; and I don't think it's helpful (as TFA claims) to equate this possibility with "a total scam." To get tenure anywhere doesn't just require a huge amount of work as an Assistant Professor; it also requires a huge amount of work as a PhD student and potentially multiple rounds of post-doc'ing or other non-tenure-line work. In my experience, tenured professors have spent nearly two decades distorting their work-life balance beyond all recognition to the point that grinding insanely hard in pursuit of publications just feels normal.
Worth noting that the filtering implementation is quite restrictive if you want to avoid post-filtering: filters must be expressible as discrete smallints (ruling out continuous variables like timestamps or high cardinality filters like ids); filters must always be denormalized onto the table you're indexing (no filtering on attributes of parent documents, for example); and filters must be declared at index creation time (lots of time spent on expensive index builds if you want to add filters). Personally I would consider these caveats pretty big deal-breakers if the intent is scale and you do a lot of filtering.
> Most of the time you don't need a different Python version from the system one.
Except for literally anytime you’re collaborating with anyone, ever? I can’t even begin to imagine working on a project where folks just use whatever python version their OS happens to ship with. Do you also just ship the latest version of whatever container because most of the time nothing has changed?
If you're writing Python tools to support OS operations in prod, you need to target the system Python. It's wildly impractical to deploy venvs for more than one or two apps, especially if they're relatively small. Developing in a local venv can help with that targeting, but there's no substitute for doing that directly on the OS you're deploying to.
This is why you DON'T write system tools in Python in the first place. Use a real language that compiles to a native self contained binary that doesn't need dependency installing. Or you use a container. This has been a solved problem for decades. Python users have been trying to drag the entire computing world backwards this whole time because their insistence on using a toy language invented to be the JavaScript of the server, as an actual production grade bare metal system language
Why would movement towards a goal be incoherent if it happened "in the dark"? Our brains perform many critical functions "in the dark" (and do so coherently) which do not rise to the level of consciousness.
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