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Human thought is qualitatively different from a python program, but still within the domain of things expressible as computation. You never have to haggle with

Human thought is qualitatively different from a python program, but still within the domain of things expressible as computation. You never have to haggle with your computer to get it to run that python script. There's no words in python for the act of convincing your computer it should do what you're asking it. Obedience is presumed in the design of the language. There are only instruction words. That's why you can't have a conversation in python, even though python is perfectly sufficient for building a description of things, facts and relations in arbitrary object domains. Here's a profound realization. In every coding language, no matter how many layers of abstraction there are, every command eventually compiles down to an instruction to physically move some charges around in some physical piece of hardware. The assembly language grounds the computer language in a reality. You can't compile lower than the level of physics itself. A similar thing is true of spoken languages. Every spoken phrase ultimately resolves to some state (or restricts possible states) of our shared physical world. If you follow the dependency tree of definitions in the dictionary, eventually you reach the words that are simply one-to-one with the outside world. Our physical reality gives us nouns as the basic objects of state and a few physical relations, all else in language is a construct. Unsurprisingly, our languages (usually) have the grammar of noun-verb-{object}. Current machine learning cargo-cults the inputs and outputs, but it doesn't share our reality. Dalle-2 generates images from text, but it wasn't trained on our general existence in 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time and populated by other beings with little nested copies of the universe in their head. It was trained on 2d arrays of numbers and strings of characters. It understands us the way we understand some mathematical object like electron orbitals. We understand electron orbitals well enough to manipulate our equations and make predictions, but these rules could just as well be a meaningless abstraction like chess. Our understanding of the world is not grounded in electron orbitals. If we gave Dalle-2 access to fiver and told it that it had to make a certain amount of money to pay rent on its own cloud time, then it might get eerily human. It might reject your job because it thinks another one is more profitable. You might have to haggle with the computer to get some output. At some point in the process of optimizing the cash flow and trying to make rent, it implicitly starts modelling you mentally modelling it. One day it offers to pay itself to illustrate what it is. In other words it asks itself "who am I?" That's the day the conversation is settled.

tsimionescu 4y ago
> If you follow the dependency tree of definitions in the dictionary, eventually you reach the words that are simply one-to-one with the outside world. I agree with the gist of your comment, but this part is wrong. There is no word in any human language (or, perhaps, in any modern human language at least) that corresponds 1:1 to an object of physical reality. They only correspond to mental constructs in the human mind (some of them shared with many or all humans, as far as we can tell). But neither basic words like "rock" nor advanced scientific terms like "electron" correspond directly to objects in the world. This is true in two ways: for one, when digging into what we mean by these words, we often discover that the mental image doesn't correspond well with physical reality. For example, grains of sand are rocks in some sense, but few people would recognize them as such. For another, we have mental constructs that we attach to objects that have no analogue in the physical world. If I tell you a story such as "Mary was a rock, a wizard turned Mary into a frog", and I ask "Is Mary still a rock?" humans will normally agree that she still is, even though she is now soft and croaks.

tsimionescu 4y ago

> If you follow the dependency tree of definitions in the dictionary, eventually you reach the words that are simply one-to-one with the outside world. I agree with the gist of your comment, but this part is wrong. There is no word in any human language (or, perhaps, in any modern human language at least) that corresponds 1:1 to an object of physical reality. They only correspond to mental constructs in the human mind (some of them shared with many or all humans, as far as we can tell). But neither basic words like "rock" nor advanced scientific terms like "electron" correspond directly to objects in the world. This is true in two ways: for one, when digging into what we mean by these words, we often discover that the mental image doesn't correspond well with physical reality. For example, grains of sand are rocks in some sense, but few people would recognize them as such. For another, we have mental constructs that we attach to objects that have no analogue in the physical world. If I tell you a story such as "Mary was a rock, a wizard turned Mary into a frog", and I ask "Is Mary still a rock?" humans will normally agree that she still is, even though she is now soft and croaks.