9 ms·

My point is that when people say computers and software can have intentions they're stating an unfounded and often confused belief about what computers are capa

My point is that when people say computers and software can have intentions they're stating an unfounded and often confused belief about what computers are capable of as domains for arithmetic operations. Furthermore, the Curry-Howard correspondence establishes an equivalence between proofs in formal systems and computer programs. So I don't consider what the social media gurus are saying about algorithms and AI to be truthful/verifiable/valid because to argue that computers can think and have intentions is equivalent to providing a proof/program which shows that thinking and intentionality can be expressed as a statement in some formal/symbolic/logical system and then implemented on a digital computer. None of the people who claimed that LLMs were a hop and skip away from achieving human level intelligence ever made any formal statements in a logically verifiable syntax. They simply handwaved and made vague gestures about emergence which were essentially magical beliefs about computers and software. What you have outlined about minds and patterns seems like what Leibniz and Spinoza wrote about but I don't really know much about their writing so I don't really think what you're saying is controversial. Many people would agree that there must be irreducible properties of reality that human minds are not capable of understanding in full generality.

skissane 2y ago
> My point is that when people say computers and software can have intentions they're stating an unfounded and often confused belief about what computers are capable of as domains for arithmetic operations. Furthermore, the Curry-Howard correspondence establishes an equivalence between proofs in formal systems and computer programs I'd question whether that correspondence applies to actual computers though, since actual computers aren't deterministic – random number generators are a thing, including non-pseudorandom ones. As I mentioned, we can even hook a computer up to a quantum source of randomness, although few bother, since there is little practical benefit, although if you hold certain beliefs about QM, you'd say it would make the computer's indeterminism more genuine and less merely apparent Furthermore, real world computer programs – even when they don't use any non-pseudorandom source of randomness, very often interact with external reality (humans and the physical environment), which are themselves non-deterministic (at least apparently so, whether or not ultimately so) – in a continuous feedback loop of mutual influence. Mathematical principles such as the Curry-Howard correspondence are only true with respect to actual real-world programs if we consider them under certain limiting assumptions–assume deterministic processing of well-defined pre-arranged input, e.g. a compiler processing a given file of source code. Their validity for the many real-world programs which violate those limiting assumptions is much more questionable.
- soloist11 2y ago
  Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism. Even if you include syntax for randomness it still corresponds to a proof because there are categorical semantics for stochastic systems, e.g. https://www.epatters.org/wiki/stats-ml/categorical-probability-theory https://www.epatters.org/wiki/stats-ml/categorical-probabili....
  - skissane 2y ago
    > Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism. Real world computer software doesn't have a formal syntax. Formal syntax is a model which exists in human minds, and is used by humans to model certain aspects of reality. Real world computer software is a bunch of electrical signals (or stored charges or magnetic domains or whatever) in an electronic system. The electrical signals/charges/etc don't have a "formal syntax". Rather, formal syntax is a tool human minds use to analyse them. By the same argument, atoms have a "formal syntax", since we analyse them with theories of physics (the Standard Model/etc), which is expressed in mathematical notation, for which a formal syntax can be provided. If your argument succeeds in proving that computer programs can't have intentionality, an essentially similar line of argument can be used to prove that human brains can't have intentionality either.
    - soloist11 2y ago
      > If your argument succeeds in proving that computer programs can't have intentionality, an essentially similar line of argument can be used to prove that human brains can't have intentionality either. I don't see why that's true. There is no formal theory for biology, the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling it with formal language but that's not true for computers. The formal theory of computation is why it is possible to have a sequence of operations for making the parts of a computer. It wouldn't be possible to build computers if that was not the case because there would be no way to build a chip fabrication plant without a formal theory. This is not the case for brains and biology in general. There is an irreducible complexity to life and the biosphere.

skissane 2y ago

> My point is that when people say computers and software can have intentions they're stating an unfounded and often confused belief about what computers are capable of as domains for arithmetic operations. Furthermore, the Curry-Howard correspondence establishes an equivalence between proofs in formal systems and computer programs I'd question whether that correspondence applies to actual computers though, since actual computers aren't deterministic – random number generators are a thing, including non-pseudorandom ones. As I mentioned, we can even hook a computer up to a quantum source of randomness, although few bother, since there is little practical benefit, although if you hold certain beliefs about QM, you'd say it would make the computer's indeterminism more genuine and less merely apparent Furthermore, real world computer programs – even when they don't use any non-pseudorandom source of randomness, very often interact with external reality (humans and the physical environment), which are themselves non-deterministic (at least apparently so, whether or not ultimately so) – in a continuous feedback loop of mutual influence. Mathematical principles such as the Curry-Howard correspondence are only true with respect to actual real-world programs if we consider them under certain limiting assumptions–assume deterministic processing of well-defined pre-arranged input, e.g. a compiler processing a given file of source code. Their validity for the many real-world programs which violate those limiting assumptions is much more questionable.

soloist11 2y ago
Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism. Even if you include syntax for randomness it still corresponds to a proof because there are categorical semantics for stochastic systems, e.g. https://www.epatters.org/wiki/stats-ml/categorical-probability-theory https://www.epatters.org/wiki/stats-ml/categorical-probabili....
- skissane 2y ago
  > Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism. Real world computer software doesn't have a formal syntax. Formal syntax is a model which exists in human minds, and is used by humans to model certain aspects of reality. Real world computer software is a bunch of electrical signals (or stored charges or magnetic domains or whatever) in an electronic system. The electrical signals/charges/etc don't have a "formal syntax". Rather, formal syntax is a tool human minds use to analyse them. By the same argument, atoms have a "formal syntax", since we analyse them with theories of physics (the Standard Model/etc), which is expressed in mathematical notation, for which a formal syntax can be provided. If your argument succeeds in proving that computer programs can't have intentionality, an essentially similar line of argument can be used to prove that human brains can't have intentionality either.
  - soloist11 2y ago
    > If your argument succeeds in proving that computer programs can't have intentionality, an essentially similar line of argument can be used to prove that human brains can't have intentionality either. I don't see why that's true. There is no formal theory for biology, the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling it with formal language but that's not true for computers. The formal theory of computation is why it is possible to have a sequence of operations for making the parts of a computer. It wouldn't be possible to build computers if that was not the case because there would be no way to build a chip fabrication plant without a formal theory. This is not the case for brains and biology in general. There is an irreducible complexity to life and the biosphere.