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In 17th century, Leibniz dreamed of a machine that could calculate ideas (2019)
- readyplayernull 3y agoUnless a symbol is as fuzzy as the bray of a donkey of Buridan.
- MichaelMoser123 3y agoAlso Newtons method/gradient descent + calculus play a big role in backpropagation/ML (Leibnitz was one of the inventors of calculus).
- anthk 3y agoI was about to mention Ramon Llull, but it's there.
- sublinear 3y ago> Swift’s point was that language is not a formal system that represents human thought, but a messy and ambiguous form of expression. Yep even the greatest minds are susceptible to false dichotomy. We now have linguistics and computer science, yet some aspects of thought remain forever intractably messy.
- divbzero 3y agoThe Baroque Cycle contains a fun digression describing the combinatorial logic behind this machine.
- chrisbrandow 3y agoI loved that section and wasn’t sure how much livery Stephenson might have been taking. Not much, it seems.
- moffkalast 3y agoNewton has left the chat
- dwheeler 3y agoLeibniz dreamed that we would be able to completrly determine if some claim was true or not. We can't do that for all claims, but at least in mathematics, we can prove with absolute certainty that some axioms will lead you to other claims. So at least a little piece of his dream is a reality.
- dvt 3y agoLeibnitz followed very closely in the footsteps of the Neoplatonists and he was what you'd call a rationalist's rationalist. He would be later rebuked by Hume (the famous is-ought problem made moral—ought—problems fundamentally distinct from rational—is—problems) and Kant would put the nail in the coffin of the rationalist-empiricist debate in the next century (with his earth-shattering Critique of Pure Reason). And if that wasn't enough, as the logical positivists of the early 20th century were still clinging to some form of mathematical completeness, Gödel proved that the project dreamed up by Leibnitz (and more distantly by Plato) was a dead end, to Wittgenstein’s, Russell’s and many others' dismay. Some things (even true ones!) are simply unprovable. I love this story as it spans more than 2000 years, and even though the idea itself proved to be untenable, this search gave us the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the computer age, and beyond.
- smokel 3y agoHmm. Do I understand your comment correctly in that thoughts should be either rational or not? I think different kinds of thinking have their applications in different contexts. Gödels theorems are hardly ever relevant to most of mathematics and not in the least to computers (which are finite). I also doubt that industrialism has anything to do with Leibniz or Hume. That part of history is most likely fuelled by greed for money, not for philosophical thought.
- routerl 3y ago> Do I understand your comment correctly in that thoughts should be either rational or not? You didn't understand correctly. "Rationalist", in the OP, is a historical label which can retrospectively be applied to a specific set of thinkers, who defended specific beliefs, from the 16th to the 18th centuries. None of them were claiming they were the only people who thought "rationally"; rather, they were mostly claiming that only rational thought could reach truth, and empirical evidence need not factor into it. In modern parlance, the Rationalists believed that all knowledge would end up being deductive, like math. > Gödels theorems are hardly ever relevant to most of mathematics and not in the least to computers (which are finite). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem > I also doubt that industrialism has anything to do with Leibnitz or Hume. That part of history is most likely fuelled by greed for money, not for philosophical thought. In this time period, the intellectual circles that Leibniz and Hume frequented are exactly the circles that gave rise to modern economics, the ability to measure longitude at sea, the ability to calculate rates of change over time, using steam to power machines, etc. In other words, we're literally talking about all of the intellectual developments that directly led to the industrial revolution.
- johndhi 3y agoWhat do we dream of now? I've been reading 70s and 80s sci Fi and loving all of the ideas of the future they had. I don't see them today but I don't know what to read.
- gpderetta 3y agoI think cyberpunk was pretty spot on?
- WillAdams 3y agoMastering biological processes so that we can ensure that there is enough food for everyone (of a reasonable variety)[1] and that maybe the plants can do well and clean up our environment and make it nicer to live in?[2] Maybe to achieve long enough human lifespans that we can think of interstellar travel?[3] 1 - Hal Clements _Space Lash_, short story "Raindrop" 2 - L.E. Modesitt, Jr's The Forever Hero trilogy (as well as the "The Mechanic" from Space Lash) 3 - Poul Anderson's _The Boat of a Million Years_
- climb_stealth 3y ago
- cubefox 3y ago(2019) Note that this article precedes both ChatGPT and GPT-3. When it was written, Leibniz' idea of a machine reasoning by manipulating symbols was still science fiction. Now it is very much reality.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoAre the billions of parameters all symbols, or are you referencing math manipulation as symbol manipulation?
- cubefox 3y agoBoth the inputs and outputs are symbols: text.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThe machine is considering text the same way as RGB pixel values in the annealing process. Are these pixel values symbols? Maybe it’s all information and symbols are a small way to grasp at it but not the complete way.
- WillAdams 3y agoDoes ChatGPT actually manipulate symbols, or does it string together strings of characters based on what most frequently occurs next? I haven't seen anything that indicates actual working w/ symbols/logic/ideas.
- emmelaich 3y agoRelated: Dijkstra's "Under the spell of Leibniz's Dream" https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1298.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/E...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- K0balt 3y agoI wonder how his vector math was? Because it sounds like he had the conceptual underpinnings of the altar we’ve all been praying at lately. It’s really humbling how a fundamentally simple algorithm interpreting a ridiculously complex and vast data set is capable of a simulacrum of thought. That data set, of course, is the formalisation of human culture, taken from our works. It begs the question of whether our fundamental algorithm for parsing that data is really that much different. We cannot think without tokens, symbols. We can be, and we can feel, but we cannot think without them. So, where is the intelligence, really? Is it in our heads, or in the data? Is the data the computation, like an unfathomably vast choose-your-own-adventure book, or is the computation the data, like a one time pad decryption algorithm that creates a universe simulator from the chaotic arrangement of atoms in a beach full of sand? Is this really “artificial” intelligence, at all? Or just the steam engine of human intellect?
- routerl 3y ago> I wonder how his vector math was? He was born around the same time as the invention of analytical geometry (i.e. the idea that it is possible to do geometry using algebra), and "vector math" (or linear algebra) came several decades later. So, his vector math was non-existent.
- wrp 3y agoLeibniz was envisioning something like Douglas Lenat's Cyc project. In his grant proposal to the French court, his first intended stage was to reduce all of human knowledge to propositional form. He estimated it would take about 5 years given a small clerical staff and a good library.
- 082349872349872 3y agoI sometimes wonder if Turing picked factorial as the example in his 1949 "Checking a Large Routine"[0] purely at hazard, or possibly as an homage to Leibniz, who was fond of them[1]? [0] https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/publications-lectures-and-talks-amtb/amt-b-8 https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/publications-lectures-... [1] see "Dissertatio de arte combinatoria...", 1666 https://ia800906.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/14/items/ita-bnc-mag-00000844-001/ita-bnc-mag-00000844-001_jp2.zip&file=ita-bnc-mag-00000844-001_jp2/ita-bnc-mag-00000844-001_0075.jp2&id=ita-bnc-mag-00000844-001&scale=8&rotate=0 https://ia800906.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages....
- personlurking 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21448983 (2019, 25 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29210099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29210099 (2021, 50 comments)