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Thank you very much for the elaboration! I think I follow better. Thinking doesn't have a rigorous and testable definition, so it isn't scientific. We all have

Thank you very much for the elaboration! I think I follow better. Thinking doesn't have a rigorous and testable definition, so it isn't scientific. We all have our own colloquial understand. Since it's not testable and the definition varies person to person, it's not useful when reasoning about AI or intelligence. Also I wanted to say I love how you write!

kelseyfrog 2y ago
Even if it had a rigorous and testable definition it would still be suspect by virtue of us having searched for evidence of it under the guise of science. To explain it by analogy, we had the concept of women and men for at least thousands of years. Socially construed by physical appearance and behavior. Then in 1905 Nettie Stevens discovered sex chromosomes. Her discovery "found" the existence of men in women in the epistemological universe of science. But then a curious thing happened, people began placing people in social categories based on sex chromosomes. It's an incestuous loop of logic that hoists itself into validity simply because folks forget how it occurred. If we went searching for a scientifically rigorous definition of "thinking" we would forget we made the same fatal leap of logic.
- BoxedEmpathy 2y ago
  Interesting way to look at it. I suppose I have trouble seeing it that way because I view words as pointers to meaning. The word itself holds no intrinsic value; it's the meaning humans attach to it and the context in which it's used that gives it significance. When we give "thinking" a scientifically testable definition we can reason around it in a more academic way. I've read psych papers that defined "thinking" as cognition, measured by action potentials. A participant was said to be "thinking more" when their EEG showed increased activity. It's important to understand that "thinking" here was only defined within the context of the paper. To use an analogy, many people say their computer is thinking when it's undergoing a heavy processor load. Strictly speaking this is not the case, their computer cannot think, but they aren't wrong or incorrect because in that context 'thinking' literally means 'processing'.
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kelseyfrog 2y ago

Even if it had a rigorous and testable definition it would still be suspect by virtue of us having searched for evidence of it under the guise of science. To explain it by analogy, we had the concept of women and men for at least thousands of years. Socially construed by physical appearance and behavior. Then in 1905 Nettie Stevens discovered sex chromosomes. Her discovery "found" the existence of men in women in the epistemological universe of science. But then a curious thing happened, people began placing people in social categories based on sex chromosomes. It's an incestuous loop of logic that hoists itself into validity simply because folks forget how it occurred. If we went searching for a scientifically rigorous definition of "thinking" we would forget we made the same fatal leap of logic.

BoxedEmpathy 2y ago
Interesting way to look at it. I suppose I have trouble seeing it that way because I view words as pointers to meaning. The word itself holds no intrinsic value; it's the meaning humans attach to it and the context in which it's used that gives it significance. When we give "thinking" a scientifically testable definition we can reason around it in a more academic way. I've read psych papers that defined "thinking" as cognition, measured by action potentials. A participant was said to be "thinking more" when their EEG showed increased activity. It's important to understand that "thinking" here was only defined within the context of the paper. To use an analogy, many people say their computer is thinking when it's undergoing a heavy processor load. Strictly speaking this is not the case, their computer cannot think, but they aren't wrong or incorrect because in that context 'thinking' literally means 'processing'.
- deleted 2y ago
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