HACKER Q&A
📣 keepamovin

Is AGI 'computable' on transistor substrates? Is consciousness?


Are transistors enough to simulate a general intelligence? Maybe, but I have some doubts (and I kind of hope they're insufficient ~ a nice hard tech barrier to stop us before we get there, or at least slow us down, for a while).

Are they enough for consciousness? I doubt that. I don't think consciousness is 'computable' on transistors. I think we need something else. But maybe I'm totally wrong...maybe it's never "computed" on the substrated, but rather just attracted to the substrate (panpsychia / universal consciousness field), in which case it's probably possible. In that case, then the question becomes are transistors 'an expressive enough' substrate for a consciousness that we (=humans) would want to build? :)

  👤 mikewarot Accepted Answer ✓
I believe that MemGPT makes AGI possible this year, if it hasn't already happened.

Thanks to the structure inherent in writing, Word2Vec maps words into a coherent latent space.

Thanks to positional encoding, self attention mechanisms are enabled. Giving rise to next word prediction at superhuman levels in Transformer LLMs.

Thanks to synthetic data, you can train an LLM to follow directions.

Thanks to being able to train LLM s, you can generate synthetic examples of them successfully using a memory prosthesis.

They can be trained on those examples, and suddenly you have MemGPT which can be a packer[1].

It remains to be seen if a mapper can also be emulated by an LLM. I'm not sure how you could generate a ton of examples of finding an inconsistency between internal chunks of knowledge for it to train against.

[1] https://reciprocality.org/Reciprocality/r0/index.html#:~:tex....

👤 illuminant
Consciousness and intelligence are not explicitly related. Consciousness co-opts intelligence as a survival strategy.

Transistors are like switch boards and index cards. Rearranging these can produce intelligence superior to human capacity. Intelligence as inference may be statistically devised, and deduction may be combinatorially brute forced (over enough tries/long enough time line).

The relationship of information and intelligence are like memetics to consciousness. Consciousness is attracted to possibilities of outcomes and novelty.

I think consciousness is the material potential of the universe (as bound in our electro-chemical neurons) evolving through life technology to perceive and interact with itself (the rest of the universe.) In this way quantum computers may be closer to consciousness than classical transistors will ever be (which is more like rearranging a vast deck of cards.)

👤 plevexier
It's so funny, we're talking of AGI or consciousness like if we knew what they were but we don't. At best, we have some intuitions. And so this idea that we could reproduce something that we don't fully understand is pretty funny.

We're like the old sorcerers who wanted to turn lead into gold without having any clue about the periodic table of elements. And them too thought they were close...