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>Think of it this way: do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics? If so that's essentially a religious p
by cuttothechase 1y ago
>Think of it this way: do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics? If so that's essentially a religious position (or more literally, a belief in the supernatural). If not, then functions and approximations to functions are what the human experience boils down to.
It seems like, we can at best, claim that we have modeled the human thought process for reasoning/analytic/quantitative through Linear Algebra, as the best case. Why should we expect the model to be anything more than a model ?
I understand that there is tons of vested interest, many industries, careers and lives literally on the line causing heavy bias to get to AGI. But what I don't understand is what about linear algebra that makes it so special that it creates a fully functioning life or aspects of a life?
Should we make an argument saying that Schroedinger's cat experiment can potentially create zombies then the underlying Applied probabilistic solutions should be treated as super-human and build guardrails against it building zombie cats?
- ants_everywhere 1y ago> It seems like, we can at best, claim that we have modeled the human thought process for reasoning/analytic/quantitative through Linear Algebra....I don't understand is what about linear algebra that makes it so special that it creates a fully functioning life or aspects of a life? Not linear algebra. Artificial neural networks create arbitrarily non-linear functions. That's the point of non-linear activation functions and it's the subject of the universal approximation theorems I mentioned above.
- cuttothechase 1y agoANNs are just mathematical transformations, powered by linear algebra + non-linear functions. They simulate certain cognitive processes — but they are fundamentally math, not magic.
- delusional 1y agoI wouldn't say they "simulate cognitive processes". They do statistics. Advanced multivariadic statistics. An LLM thinks in the same way excel thinks when you ask it to fit a curve.
- ImHereToVote 1y agoWho invoked magic in this thread exactly?
- ants_everywhere 1y agoI think the point of mine that you're missing (or perhaps disagreeing with implicitly) is that *everything* is fundamentally math. Or, if you like, everything is fundamentally physics, and physics is fundamentally math. So classes of functions (ANNs) that can approximate our desired function to arbitrary precision are what we should be expecting to be working with.
- hackinthebochs 1y ago>Why should we expect the model to be anything more than a model ? To model a process with perfect accuracy requires recovering the dynamics of that process. The question we must ask is what happens in the space between bad statistical model and perfect accuracy? What happens when the model begins to converge towards accurate reproduction. How far does generalization in the model take us towards capturing the dynamics involved in thought?