3 ms·

For a micro-moment before giving in it was a chair, then it broke. Now its no longer a chair. Its a broken chair.

cokernel_hacker 2y ago
What if it breaks in a way which renders it no longer a chair for you but not others? This seems to imply that what is or is not a chair is a subjective or conditional.
woodruffw 2y ago
That's not one, but two particularities that aren't latent to the chair itself: me (the sitter), and time. Do you really have a personal ontology that requires you to ask the tense and person acting on a thing to know what that thing is? I suspect you don't; most people don't, because it would imply that the chair wouldn't be a chair if nobody sat on it.
- byearthithatius 2y ago
  A stump isn't a chair until someone decides to sit on it, at that point it becomes chair _to_ that person. Chair is only capable of acting as "chair" object if constraints are met in regards to sitter.
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    This is very complicated, because it now implies: 1. I can intend to sit on a chair but fail, in which case it isn't a chair (and I didn't intend to sit on it?) 2. I can intend to have my dog sit on my chair, but my dog isn't a person and so my chair isn't a chair. This is-use distinction you're making is fine; most people have an intuition that things "act" as a thing in relation to how they're used. But to take it a step forwards and claim that a thing isn't its nature until a person sublimates their intent towards it is very unintuitive! (In my mind, the answer is a lot simpler: a stump isn't a chair, but it's in the family network of things that are sittable, just like chairs and horses. Or to borrow Wittgenstein, a stump bears a family resemblance to a chair.)
    - josephg 2y ago
      I'm the person who asked about the definition of a chair up thread. Just to make a very obvious point: Nobody thinks of the definition for a chair as a particularly controversial idea. But clearly: - We don't all agree on what a chair is (is a stump a chair or not?). - Nobody in this thread has been able to give a widely accepted definition of the word "chair" - It seems like we can't even agree on what criteria are admissible in the definition. (Eg, does it matter that I can sit on it? Does it matter that I can intend to sit on it? Does it matter that my dog can sit on it?) If even defining what the word "chair" means is beyond us, I hold little hope that we can ever manually explain the concept to a computer. Returning to my original point above, this is why I think expert systems style approaches are a dead end. Likewise, I think any AI system that uses formal or symbolic logic in its internal definitions will always be limited in its capacity. And yet, I suspect chatgpt will understand all of the nuance in this conversation just fine. Like everyone else, I'm surprised how "smart" transformer based neural nets have become. But if anything has a hope of achieving AGI, I'm not surprised that: - Its something that uses a fuzzy, non-symbolic logic internally. - The "internal language" for its own thoughts is an emergent result of the training process rather than being explicitly and manually programmed in. - That it translates its internal language of thought into words at the end of the thinking / inference process. Because - as this "chair" example shows - our internal definition for what a chair is is seems clear to us. But it doesn't necessarily mean we can translate that internal definition into a symbolic definition (ie with words). I'm not convinced that current transformer architectures will get us all the way to AGI / ASI. But I think that to have a hope of achieving human level AI, you'll always want to build a system which has those elements of thought. Cyc, as far as I can tell, does not. So of course, I'm not at all surprised its being dumped.
tshaddox 2y ago
A broken chair is by definition a chair. You just said it!

What if it breaks in a way which renders it no longer a chair for you but not others? This seems to imply that what is or is not a chair is a subjective or conditional.

woodruffw 2y ago

That's not one, but two particularities that aren't latent to the chair itself: me (the sitter), and time. Do you really have a personal ontology that requires you to ask the tense and person acting on a thing to know what that thing is? I suspect you don't; most people don't, because it would imply that the chair wouldn't be a chair if nobody sat on it.

byearthithatius 2y ago
A stump isn't a chair until someone decides to sit on it, at that point it becomes chair _to_ that person. Chair is only capable of acting as "chair" object if constraints are met in regards to sitter.
- woodruffw 2y ago
  This is very complicated, because it now implies: 1. I can intend to sit on a chair but fail, in which case it isn't a chair (and I didn't intend to sit on it?) 2. I can intend to have my dog sit on my chair, but my dog isn't a person and so my chair isn't a chair. This is-use distinction you're making is fine; most people have an intuition that things "act" as a thing in relation to how they're used. But to take it a step forwards and claim that a thing isn't its nature until a person sublimates their intent towards it is very unintuitive! (In my mind, the answer is a lot simpler: a stump isn't a chair, but it's in the family network of things that are sittable, just like chairs and horses. Or to borrow Wittgenstein, a stump bears a family resemblance to a chair.)
  - josephg 2y ago
    I'm the person who asked about the definition of a chair up thread. Just to make a very obvious point: Nobody thinks of the definition for a chair as a particularly controversial idea. But clearly: - We don't all agree on what a chair is (is a stump a chair or not?). - Nobody in this thread has been able to give a widely accepted definition of the word "chair" - It seems like we can't even agree on what criteria are admissible in the definition. (Eg, does it matter that I can sit on it? Does it matter that I can intend to sit on it? Does it matter that my dog can sit on it?) If even defining what the word "chair" means is beyond us, I hold little hope that we can ever manually explain the concept to a computer. Returning to my original point above, this is why I think expert systems style approaches are a dead end. Likewise, I think any AI system that uses formal or symbolic logic in its internal definitions will always be limited in its capacity. And yet, I suspect chatgpt will understand all of the nuance in this conversation just fine. Like everyone else, I'm surprised how "smart" transformer based neural nets have become. But if anything has a hope of achieving AGI, I'm not surprised that: - Its something that uses a fuzzy, non-symbolic logic internally. - The "internal language" for its own thoughts is an emergent result of the training process rather than being explicitly and manually programmed in. - That it translates its internal language of thought into words at the end of the thinking / inference process. Because - as this "chair" example shows - our internal definition for what a chair is is seems clear to us. But it doesn't necessarily mean we can translate that internal definition into a symbolic definition (ie with words). I'm not convinced that current transformer architectures will get us all the way to AGI / ASI. But I think that to have a hope of achieving human level AI, you'll always want to build a system which has those elements of thought. Cyc, as far as I can tell, does not. So of course, I'm not at all surprised its being dumped.

tshaddox 2y ago

A broken chair is by definition a chair. You just said it!