Comment by defrost
3 months ago
How does this relate to the article?
Addressing the substance of your comment (as per your profile):
* Humans did not invent arithmetic, they discovered it - one billion years past, prior to human existance, 1 + 2 still resulted in 3 however notated.
It is better to say humans formalized it :) All birds and mammals are capable of arithmetic in the sense of quantitative reasoning. E.g. a rat quickly learning that if they're shown two plates, one with two rocks and one with three rocks, if they pick the plate with five rocks they get a treat. That is to say rats understand addition intuitively, even if they can't write large numbers like humans can.
Too many AI people are completely uninterested in how rats are able to figure stuff like that out. It is not like they are being prompted, they are being manipulated.
That has nothing to do w/ what I wrote. If people stop making computers then the "alien" minds Karpathy & friends keep harping about simply disappear & people end up doing arithmetic manually by hand (which presumably no longer makes it "alien"). AI discourse is incoherent b/c people like Karpathy have a confused ontology & metaphysics & others take whatever they say as gospel.
You've fleshed out your comment considerably since my comment, which directly addressed the little that had been written at that time.
I didn't notice your comment when I was editing but I don't see how your comment addresses the unedited version either. If you believe in platonic ideals then that still does not make mathematics & arithmetic any more alien than assuming inventive contingency.