2 ms·

We can argue that ML neural net does not know what a cat is.

• TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  We can also argue that a cat doesn't know what a cat is. Humans believe they know what the human definition of cat is, but that doesn't mean there's a definitive ideal definition of cat that humans have privileged access to. Some cats - like Schrodinger's Cat, and this cat - aren't cats at all. They're rhetorical devices about cats. Which is convenient, because they don't need food or a litter box. (Although they can be messy in other ways.) The point being that even a supposedly simple concept like "cat" is much more than the sum of some nominal properties and actions which are easy to enumerate. ("Has four legs, purrs.") Both the ML and human "definition" of cat - which is more like an open list of weighted cat-related experiences - is much closer to defining what a cat is than the intersection of all the properties that supposedly define a cat completely. In other words Plato was absolutely wrong. There are no Platonic ideal forms. (Even if there were - where would they live?) There are only probability density fields in qualia space. And when there's enough qualia density in one location you can start to suspect that you're interacting with a cat/chair/philosopher/ML researcher/whatever, and then draw on your behavioural model of each object to predict what will happen as you continue to interact with it.