It is not that act of reflecting off a surface that induces an echo with energy, the echo is a transformation.

The same dissipation of energy occurs no matter what because of air friction

Reflection doesn’t induce energy, it dissipates it because it does not reflect perfectly.

You are precisely wrong here, echoes require open space to proliferate.

Go out to a field and try to produce an echo. They literally require walls to bounce off of.

Isn’t the reason you are invoking a contortion of scale to shift our focus to inside one of these smaller bubbles/cells motivated by a desire to induce a sense of some small degree of open space around us? In a sense, aren’t you arguably still invoking the idea that space is what allows echoes rather than density and enclosure?

You need some space yes, ideally the inside of your chamber needs to be mostly empty and insubstantive.

However, echo chambers can not be filled with too much space, because echoes don’t work at infinite scale. Sound dissipates and loses energy as it travels through air, so for an echo to occur and you to hear it, you need to be a relatively short distance away from a wall. To be truly echoey and hear multiple echoes of the same sound bouncing back and forth on the walls in front of and behind you, you need those walls even closer together, for not just the extra distance travelled, but also how much energy is lost during each reflection.

An echo chamber is inherently a closed space because open spaces don’t echo because there’s nothing to bounce off of.

Echo Chambers’s defining characteristics are walls that cut them off from the outside world, being large voids with little substance inside, and hearing what you say repeated back to you.

Plus, if you shrank down to the size where you could fit inside one of the bubbles of acoustic foam, it may very well be echoey in there.

Yes, this is incredibly non-controversial. Which cars do you replace them with? American ones?

Did you read what I wrote, or just have that response pre planned and fired it off in response to anything?

No, probably not, because I trust him far less, but that doesn’t mean I would be right for jumping down his throat about this, just that I was biased and upset and being reactionary.

In response to the confident claim that he made the wrong move in a game where the claimant knows less then half the relevant information.

Again, if you feel strongly that his is an L or a W, you’re probably a moron.

And I have the right to criticize the over confident and under informed.

Free will exists and you feel it every time you’re dieting, lol, or restricting yourself in any way for higher reasons. It escapes the realm of words because it’s fundamental to our existence, you can’t argue against it in good faith, it can simply be denied the same way you could deny the rising of the sun… And, again, I think you’re confused.

Lol, “free will exists because I think it exists” is not an argument.

Okay, could a calculator with all its parts be considered intelligent/more intelligent than us simply because it can make calculations faster and with more accuracy? A computer? It’s the same principle.

Computers have long been limited to not being more intelligent than very complicated calculators, because they had no good way of solving fuzzy pattern matching problems, like ingesting arbitrary data and automatically learning and pulling out patterns from it. This famous xkcd points that out: https://xkcd.com/1425/

The entire recent surge in AI is being driven because AI algorithms that model our neurons do exactly that.

We simply haven’t made anything that 1) understands the world around it in any way 2) has volition.

LLMs contain some understanding of the world, or they wouldn’t be able to do what they do, but yes I would agree. That doesn’t meant we won’t or can’t get there though. Right now many leading edge AI researchers are specifically trying to build world models as opposed to LLMs that do have an understanding of the world around them.

We have made a code eating, code spitting machine that works when we want it to, that’s all.

No, this is a reductive description of how even LLMs work. They are not just copying and pasting. They are truly combining and synthesizing information in new and transformative ways, in a similar way that humans do. Yes, we can regurgitate some of that book we read, but most of what we get from it is an impression / general knowledge that we then combine with other knowledge, just like an LLM.

Language is literally the basis for almost all of our knowledge, it’s wild to flatly deny that a multi billion collection of simulated neurons that are trained on language could not possibly have any intelligence or understanding of the world.

Are they or just simulating a model of a model?

So you’re saying there’s a magical other plane that the material objects on this world are just a model of and the objects in this plane don’t actually determine behaviour, the ones on that plane do?

What evidence do you have to support that? What evidence do you have that consciousness exists on that plane and isn’t just a result of the behaviour of neurons? Why does consciousness change when you get a brain injury and damage those neurons?

And it doesn’t have to be magical for it to be unreachable for us (read Roger Penrose)

Roger Penrose, the guy who wrote books desperately claiming that free will must exist and spent his time searching for any way it could before arriving at a widely discredited theory of quantum gravity being the basis for consciousness?

and what we have today is just inert code ready to work on command, not some e-mind just living in the cloud

So? If we could put human brains in suspended animation, and just boot them up on command to execute tasks for us, does that mean that they’re not intelligent?

Come on, man, this is not debatable.

It obviously and evidently is debatable since we are debating it, and saying “it’s not debatable” isn’t an argument, it’s a thought terminating phrase.

Feeling strongly about whether this is an L or a W is insane, on top of the inherent problem of being that black and white simplistic.

First of all, you are basing your knowledge off of random news articles you read. Assuming the PM is competent, they will be making decisions based on intelligence reports that both include everything you know, and a whole crapload of stuff you don’t.

He’s literally playing a game of Diplomacy, against a mad man backed by demons. Give him some space to cook.

Tehran has more than one suburb, and Tehran also isn’t the only city in Iran. If there are 400 bodies in one suburban morgue, and you extrapolate across the country, you’d hit 12,000 very fast.

Regardless of what structure these things may have, there’s no consciousness, just a machine that works on prompts and rules like everything else we’ve made. It cannot escape it, only we expand its data capacity and give it new commands. And a regurgitation/collage of music is still music, sure, and you could also sing and dance to melodies written and played by a billion monkeys, idk, sure, but never forget there’s no “it”.

Lol what are you basing that on? They’re simulating the neurons in your brain. If they replicate that structure and behaviour they’ll replicate your consciousness, or do you believe that brains operate on magic that doesn’t behave according to the physical laws of nature?

My man, you’re speaking sci fi, not what we currently have.

The biggest of current LLM models contains ~ the same number of parameters as we have neurons. It’s not a 1:1 mapping because parameters are closer to neuronal connections, but from a pure numbers standpoint we are operating at the scale where we can start creating true simulated intelligences, even if not human scale just yet.

This doesn’t mean current LLMs are that intelligent, just that it’s not sci-fi to think we could create a simulated intelligence now.

Furthermore, both philosophically and materially, the notion that consciousness cannot be computed is more than gaining traction.

Is it? Do you have any sources / do they have any explanation for why neurons can’t be simulated?

If humans ever make something with free will and volition, something that isn’t just doing things on command but has its own wants, sure. But we might never get there, and that’s a real possibility. Intelligence isn’t in solving equations but in imagining the math problems.

I mean, we’re talking about whether or not an AI could make music. If it creates a new song, with lyrics and music / a melody that never existed before, and people listen to it and sing it and dance to it and enjoy it, how would it not be music?

AI is not “making anything”, it’s regurgitating combinations of previous stuff on-command.

Even current day LLMs are doing more than just regurgitation, even if they fall far short of human intelligence.

And at a fundamental level, there’s no reason to think that simulated neurons running on computer chips can’t be as intelligent as us, if we can figure out the right way of wiring them so to speak.

There’s no inherent law of the universe that says that only biological humans can be intelligent and can thus create music.

That’s not a redefinition, lol, music is a human construct. Nature has lovely noises and birds chirp, and by itself, even if it constitutes notes and waves, it isn’t music.

A gorilla or ape can’t sing or make music? Could a neanderthal? Homo florientis? Homo erectus? What is it specifically about homo sapiens that give us the unique ability to make music and sing, that no other animal has?

Again, if you predefine music as being made by humans then you’re not engaging in a discussion or logical debate, you’re just arbitrarily setting goal posts to guarantee that you’re right.

People need to get over the idea that algorithms can’t be intelligent because they’re algorithms. Algorithms can model the behaviour of the neurons in your brain, meaning that they can model your brain and intelligence. We are obviously not there yet with LLMs, but just saying ‘numbers and math = not intelligent’ is quite frankly dumb and just shows that you don’t understand math, physics, biology, neuroscience, etc.

I mean there’s the video of 400 bodies in one morgue. It could be fake, but the reporting is not based on vibes. Kind of sounds like you can’t accept that a religious fundamentalist dictatorship could murder its own citizens for thinking independently, despite that pattern repeating throughout history ad nauseum.

A single video shows ~400 bodies piled up in one Tehran suburb.

What the honest fuck are your talking about 600ish sounds more believable? More believable based on what? Based on you dick riding the Ayatollah?

There is no human intentionality in AI-created music.

The entirety of your argument boils down to you arbitrarily deciding that music needs to derive from human intentionality.

That’s not an actual argument about whether or not AI is capable of creating music, that’s you redefining music to make sure the answer is no.

“Drawing the line” is a Thought Terminating Phrase, which is a concept worth reading and thinking about.

In the abstract / in your example, if you’re just “drawing the line” then no, that’s not a legitimate argument. It is literally just you saying “nope, I arbitrarily say this is different then this”.

However, if you can back up why one thing is different from the other, then it is valid to distinguish between them. Sometimes it can be worth dividing a system into chunks and drawing arbitrary lines rather not drawing any, but you should still be able to logically back up why it’s better to chunk things than not.

But in your example, it sounds like you don’t actually have a logical argument, just one based on you arbitrarily deciding that music can only be made by a human.