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Comment by superloika

10 hours ago

There is no intelligence. If anything, this just shows that natural language and mathematics are both fields which are structured in a logically computable way. And if you have a machine that can compute symbolic logic, you can process both natural language and mathematics.

A second corollary is that rational consciousness and thought is less likely to be contained in language than previously thought, because if language is so simple that a machine can process it, it can't contain consciousness.

If natural language was structured in a logically computable way, we'd have had interesting chatbots by the late 80s, basically as soon as a dictionary fit in local RAM, and for the same reason we got compilers.

Da hole raisin y nat-lang be v. hard is dat i kan rite lik dis an it be cool 4 native engrish speekrs 2 unerstand. LLMs are of course fine with this sentence in exactly the way that Zork's engine couldn't be.

  • The underlying structure of language, which is grammar, is obviously logical. That the symbols used to represent this grammar can be sometimes fuzzy or ambiguous, is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure.

    • It's not "obviously logical", it's a pattern which we mimic to avoid mockery.

      example For, semi-randomise I word order can this like, Yoda worse than, and be understood.

      > is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure.

      We had to invent Transformers to be able to do that with reliability anything close to being worth caring about. Transformers have to learn from examples, not be pre-programmed.

That's just defining intelligence or consciousness as whatever we specifically can't put in a machine. It's not a very useful definition. (And it's one that completely breaks down to nothing if we do manage to fully put these things into machines or somehow prove it's possible.)