6 ms·
It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of
by TeMPOraL 7mo ago
It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxonomies are arbitrary - they're created by people for some specific purpose, and judged by useful they are in serving that purpose.
You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.
- disqard 7mo agoIndeed, one of the epistemological lessons for me when confronting the power of LLMs is that a sort of "intellectual capability" can emerge in any system, from sheer scale/complexity alone. If you're interested, check out Rupert Sheldrake: https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Conscious.pdf https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Consc...
- j16sdiz 7mo agoIt's the same people complaining tomato is fruit, so it must not be a vegetable.
- robocat 7mo agoRelatedly I just noticed potato fruit (potato berries) the other day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_fruit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_fruit Part of the same Solanaceae/nightshade family also includes bell peppers and eggplants. To help confuse the Tomato plant and the Tomato vegetable further.