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I remember an AI professor I had once asked the class to define "the number 3". The answer he chose, which stuck with me (if I recall the nuance correctly), is
by bmh_ca 10y ago
I remember an AI professor I had once asked the class to define "the number 3".
The answer he chose, which stuck with me (if I recall the nuance correctly), is that the number three is: The set of all things in the universe of which there three, three is that which they have in common.
Where it became interesting for me is observing our children growing up, especially learning colours and shapes. They exhibited a pattern of learning based upon observations of common patterns in communication by vocalization.
For example, children decided things were "red" based upon that trait being in-common with other things we called red. Circles based upon other things we call circles.
It's really quite a fascinating phenomenon to observe in children, and I expect there is a key atomicity of association from which more complex patterns - up to consciousness - can be created. Too fine grained and the patterns will be noise; too large and certain higher order structures will never form - a "Goldilocks" zone for the complex system of interpreting reality by observational exposure and initially arbitrary relation.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoThe prof's definition begs the question. Humans can be observed recognising patterns, but that doesn't say anything useful about the process of recognition. It seems we have experiences first, and generalise from them later in terms of our experience. So we have common experiences of threeness, circleness, and redness, and from them we generalise what "three", "circle", and "red" means. But what defines an experience of threeness? Is it really atomic, or is it made of further component parts/relationships? Is it learned, or innate? How does the labelling process influence the experience/generalisation process? (I'm not sure if it's an anthropological myth, but supposedly there are primitive tribes where counting goes "One, two, many..." What's their experience of threeness?) The exact mechanics of this pattern recognition remain mysterious. It turns out that when we build NNs to recognise patterns, the process is still mysterious. Which seems mysterious in itself. It's remarkable that we have these tools and they seem to work to an extent, but really no one understands why.
- alimw 10y ago> The prof's definition begs the question. It was good enough for Russell so I doubt that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-theoretic_definition_of_natural_numbers#Definition_by_Frege_and_Russell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-theoretic_definition_of_na...
- bmh_ca 10y ago️ <-- Unicode heart
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nl 10y agoThere is some evidence (in eg Tversky & Kahneman) that human judgement is mostly about the difference between sets, not the similarities. We seem to learn to generalise, and then compare differences.