4 ms·

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

by Symmetry 11mo ago

handfuloflight 11mo ago
What an oversimplification. Thinking computers can create more swimming submarines, but the inverse is not possible. Swimming is a closed solution; thinking is a meta-solution.
- npinsker 11mo ago
  That’s a great answer to GP’s question!
  - DavidPiper 11mo ago
    It's also nonsense. (Swimming and thinking are both human capabilities, not solutions to problems.) But of course here we are back in the endless semantic debate about what "thinking" is, exactly to the GP's (and Edsger Dijkstra's) point.
    - handfuloflight 11mo ago
      Swimming and thinking being 'human capabilities' doesn't preclude them from also being solutions to evolutionary problems: aquatic locomotion and adaptive problem solving, respectively. And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing.
      - DavidPiper 11mo ago
        > And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing. I know, that's the point I'm making.
- yongjik 11mo ago
  Then the interesting question is whether computers can create more (better?) submarines, not whether they are thinking.
- gwd 11mo ago
  I think you missed the point of that quote. Birds fly, and airplanes fly; fish swim but submarines don't. It's an accident of language that we define "swim" in a way that excludes what submarines do. They move about under their own power under the water, so it's not very interesting to ask whether they "swim" or not. Most people I've talked to who insist that LLMs aren't "thinking" turn out to have a similar perspective: "thinking" means you have to have semantics, semantics require meaning, meaning requires consciousness, consciousness is a property that only certain biological brains have. Some go further and claim that reason, which (in their definition) is something only human brains have, is also required for semantics. If that's how we define the word "think", then of course computers cannot be thinking, because you've defined the word "think" in a way that excludes them. And, like Dijkstra, I find that discussion uninteresting. If you want to define "think" that way, fine, but then using that definition to insist LLMs can't do a thing because it can't "think" is like insisting that a submarine can't cross the ocean because it can't "swim".
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - goatlover 11mo ago
    Reading the quote in context seems to indicate Dijkstra meant something else. His article is a complaint about overselling computers as doing or augmenting the thinking for humans. It's funny how the quote was lifted out of an article and became famous on it's own. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867...
  - handfuloflight 11mo ago
    Then you're missing the point of my rebuttal. You say submarines don't swim [like fish] despite both moving through water, the only distinction is mechanism. Can AI recursively create new capabilities like thinking does, or just execute tasks like submarines do? That's the question.
    - gwd 11mo ago
      > Can AI recursively create new capabilities like thinking does, or just execute tasks like submarines do? That's the question. Given my experience with LLMs, I think that they could, but that they're handicapped by certain things at the moment. Haven't you ever met someone who was extremely knowledgable and perceptive at certain tasks, but just couldn't keep on target for 5 minutes? If you can act as a buffer around them, to mitigate their weak points, they can be a really valuable collaborator. And sometimes people like that, if given the right external structure (and sometimes medication), turn out to be really capable in their own right. Unfortunately it's really difficult to give you a sense of this, without either going into way too much detail, or speaking in generalities. The simpler the example, the less impressive it is. But here's a simple example anyway. I'm developing a language-learning webapp. There's a menu that allows you to switch between one of the several languages you're working on, which originally just had the language name; "Mandarin", "Japanese", "Ancient Greek". I thought an easy thing to make it nicer would be to have the flag associated with the language -- PRC flag for Mandarin, Japanese flag for Japanese, etc. What do do for Ancient Greek? Well, let me see it looks and then maybe I can figure something out. So I asked Claude what I wanted. As expected, it put the PRC and Japanese flags for the first two languages. I expected it to just put a modern Greek flag, or a question mark, or some other gibberish. But it put an emoji of a building with classical Greek columns (), which is absolutely perfect. My language learning system is unusual; so without context, Claud assumes I'm making something like what already exists -- Duolingo or Anki or something. So I invested some time creating a document that lays out in detail. Now when I include that file as a context, Claude seems to genuinely understand what I'm trying to accomplish in a way it didn't before; and often comes up with creative new use cases. For example, at some point I was having it try to summarize some marketing copy for the website; in a section on educational institutions, it added a bullet point for how it could be used that I'd never thought of. The fact that they can't learn things on-line, that they have context rot, that there's still a high amount of variance in their output -- all of these, it seems to me, undermine their ability to do things, similar to the way some people's ADHD undermines their ability to excel. But it seems to me the spark of thinking and of creativity is there. EDIT: Apparently HN doesn't like the emojis. Here's a link to the classical building emoji: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F3DB https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F3DB
esafak 11mo ago
I think it is, though, because it challenges our belief that only biological entities can think, and thinking is a core part of our identity, unlike swimming.
- energy123 11mo ago
  The point is that both are debates about definitions of words so it's extremely boring.
  - throwawayq3423 11mo ago
    except for the implications of one word over another are world-changing
  - pegasus 11mo ago
    They can be made boring by reducing them to an arbitrary choice of definition of the word "thinking", but the question is really about weather inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking, and so would deserve to be applied the same label. Which is not at all a boring question. It's equivalent to asking weather current architectures are enough to reach AGI.
    - roadside_picnic 11mo ago
      > inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking There is currently zero evidence to suggest that human thinking violates any of the basics principles of the theory of computation nor extend the existing limits of computability. > Which is not at all a boring question. It is because you aren't introducing any evidence to theoretically challenge what we've already know about computation for almost 100 years now.
      - pegasus 11mo ago
        > There is currently zero evidence... Way smarter people than both of us disagree: among them being Roger Penrose, who wrote two books on this very subject. See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804258 "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
viccis 11mo ago
He was famously (and, I'm realizing more and more, correctly) averse to anthropomorphizing computing concepts.
pegasus 11mo ago
I disagree. The question is really about weather inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking, and so would deserve to be applied the same label. Which is not at all a boring question. It's equivalent to asking weather current architectures are enough to reach AGI (I myself doubt this).
oergiR 11mo ago
There is more to this quote than you might think. Grammatically, in English the verb "swim" requires an "animate subject", i.e. a living being, like a human or an animal. So the question of whether a submarine can swim is about grammar. In Russian (IIRC), submarines can swim just fine, because the verb does not have this animacy requirement. Crucially, the question is not about whether or how a submarine propels itself. Likewise, in English at least, the verb "think" requires an animate object. the question whether a machine can think is about whether you consider it to be alive. Again, whether or how the machine generates its output is not material to the question.
- brianpan 11mo ago
  I don't think the distinction is animate/inanimate. Submarines sail because they are nautical vessels. Wind-up bathtub swimmers swim, because they look like they are swimming. Neither are animate objects. In a browser, if you click a button and it takes a while to load, your phone is thinking.

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

handfuloflight 11mo ago

What an oversimplification. Thinking computers can create more swimming submarines, but the inverse is not possible. Swimming is a closed solution; thinking is a meta-solution.

npinsker 11mo ago
That’s a great answer to GP’s question!
- DavidPiper 11mo ago
  It's also nonsense. (Swimming and thinking are both human capabilities, not solutions to problems.) But of course here we are back in the endless semantic debate about what "thinking" is, exactly to the GP's (and Edsger Dijkstra's) point.
  - handfuloflight 11mo ago
    Swimming and thinking being 'human capabilities' doesn't preclude them from also being solutions to evolutionary problems: aquatic locomotion and adaptive problem solving, respectively. And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing.
    - DavidPiper 11mo ago
      > And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing. I know, that's the point I'm making.
yongjik 11mo ago
Then the interesting question is whether computers can create more (better?) submarines, not whether they are thinking.
gwd 11mo ago
I think you missed the point of that quote. Birds fly, and airplanes fly; fish swim but submarines don't. It's an accident of language that we define "swim" in a way that excludes what submarines do. They move about under their own power under the water, so it's not very interesting to ask whether they "swim" or not. Most people I've talked to who insist that LLMs aren't "thinking" turn out to have a similar perspective: "thinking" means you have to have semantics, semantics require meaning, meaning requires consciousness, consciousness is a property that only certain biological brains have. Some go further and claim that reason, which (in their definition) is something only human brains have, is also required for semantics. If that's how we define the word "think", then of course computers cannot be thinking, because you've defined the word "think" in a way that excludes them. And, like Dijkstra, I find that discussion uninteresting. If you want to define "think" that way, fine, but then using that definition to insist LLMs can't do a thing because it can't "think" is like insisting that a submarine can't cross the ocean because it can't "swim".
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- goatlover 11mo ago
  Reading the quote in context seems to indicate Dijkstra meant something else. His article is a complaint about overselling computers as doing or augmenting the thinking for humans. It's funny how the quote was lifted out of an article and became famous on it's own. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867...
- handfuloflight 11mo ago
  Then you're missing the point of my rebuttal. You say submarines don't swim [like fish] despite both moving through water, the only distinction is mechanism. Can AI recursively create new capabilities like thinking does, or just execute tasks like submarines do? That's the question.
  - gwd 11mo ago
    > Can AI recursively create new capabilities like thinking does, or just execute tasks like submarines do? That's the question. Given my experience with LLMs, I think that they could, but that they're handicapped by certain things at the moment. Haven't you ever met someone who was extremely knowledgable and perceptive at certain tasks, but just couldn't keep on target for 5 minutes? If you can act as a buffer around them, to mitigate their weak points, they can be a really valuable collaborator. And sometimes people like that, if given the right external structure (and sometimes medication), turn out to be really capable in their own right. Unfortunately it's really difficult to give you a sense of this, without either going into way too much detail, or speaking in generalities. The simpler the example, the less impressive it is. But here's a simple example anyway. I'm developing a language-learning webapp. There's a menu that allows you to switch between one of the several languages you're working on, which originally just had the language name; "Mandarin", "Japanese", "Ancient Greek". I thought an easy thing to make it nicer would be to have the flag associated with the language -- PRC flag for Mandarin, Japanese flag for Japanese, etc. What do do for Ancient Greek? Well, let me see it looks and then maybe I can figure something out. So I asked Claude what I wanted. As expected, it put the PRC and Japanese flags for the first two languages. I expected it to just put a modern Greek flag, or a question mark, or some other gibberish. But it put an emoji of a building with classical Greek columns (), which is absolutely perfect. My language learning system is unusual; so without context, Claud assumes I'm making something like what already exists -- Duolingo or Anki or something. So I invested some time creating a document that lays out in detail. Now when I include that file as a context, Claude seems to genuinely understand what I'm trying to accomplish in a way it didn't before; and often comes up with creative new use cases. For example, at some point I was having it try to summarize some marketing copy for the website; in a section on educational institutions, it added a bullet point for how it could be used that I'd never thought of. The fact that they can't learn things on-line, that they have context rot, that there's still a high amount of variance in their output -- all of these, it seems to me, undermine their ability to do things, similar to the way some people's ADHD undermines their ability to excel. But it seems to me the spark of thinking and of creativity is there. EDIT: Apparently HN doesn't like the emojis. Here's a link to the classical building emoji: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F3DB https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F3DB

esafak 11mo ago

I think it is, though, because it challenges our belief that only biological entities can think, and thinking is a core part of our identity, unlike swimming.

energy123 11mo ago
The point is that both are debates about definitions of words so it's extremely boring.
- throwawayq3423 11mo ago
  except for the implications of one word over another are world-changing
- pegasus 11mo ago
  They can be made boring by reducing them to an arbitrary choice of definition of the word "thinking", but the question is really about weather inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking, and so would deserve to be applied the same label. Which is not at all a boring question. It's equivalent to asking weather current architectures are enough to reach AGI.
  - roadside_picnic 11mo ago
    > inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking There is currently zero evidence to suggest that human thinking violates any of the basics principles of the theory of computation nor extend the existing limits of computability. > Which is not at all a boring question. It is because you aren't introducing any evidence to theoretically challenge what we've already know about computation for almost 100 years now.
    - pegasus 11mo ago
      > There is currently zero evidence... Way smarter people than both of us disagree: among them being Roger Penrose, who wrote two books on this very subject. See also my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45804258 "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

viccis 11mo ago

He was famously (and, I'm realizing more and more, correctly) averse to anthropomorphizing computing concepts.

pegasus 11mo ago

I disagree. The question is really about weather inference is in principle as powerful as human thinking, and so would deserve to be applied the same label. Which is not at all a boring question. It's equivalent to asking weather current architectures are enough to reach AGI (I myself doubt this).

oergiR 11mo ago

There is more to this quote than you might think. Grammatically, in English the verb "swim" requires an "animate subject", i.e. a living being, like a human or an animal. So the question of whether a submarine can swim is about grammar. In Russian (IIRC), submarines can swim just fine, because the verb does not have this animacy requirement. Crucially, the question is not about whether or how a submarine propels itself. Likewise, in English at least, the verb "think" requires an animate object. the question whether a machine can think is about whether you consider it to be alive. Again, whether or how the machine generates its output is not material to the question.

brianpan 11mo ago
I don't think the distinction is animate/inanimate. Submarines sail because they are nautical vessels. Wind-up bathtub swimmers swim, because they look like they are swimming. Neither are animate objects. In a browser, if you click a button and it takes a while to load, your phone is thinking.