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You could say the same about humans; that we do not understand anything ourselves; that we’re mechanisms that do work. But it’s a moot point. What I’m saying i
by programmarchy 5y ago
You could say the same about humans; that we do not understand anything ourselves; that we’re mechanisms that do work. But it’s a moot point.
What I’m saying is that “reason” is an anthropocentric concept and is not a prerequisite for the production of knowledge, or even conducting science for that matter.
- Barrin92 5y agoReason isn't an anthropocentric concept at all. Knowledge isn't even produced. Knowledge is the subjective representation of facts, objects, skills and so forth. What's being produced by something like Alphafold is data, interpreting that data by means of reason and abstracting it into a model is what we call knowledge. The entire process is science. And the first point you make is very important. The fact that we have neural nets in our heads that we didn't and don't really understand hasn't changed anything about what science is. We reason about the world and we do science because having general models about the world we are in is more powerful than merely collecting or correlating data. And that will be the case for any kind of intelligence.