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Comment by tracerbulletx | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. This whole AI situation has really exposed how bad most people are at considering the ontological and semantic content of the words they use.

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A large number of adults I encounter are functionally illiterate, including business people in very high up positions. They are also almost 100% MATHEMATICALLY illiterate, not only unable to solve basic algebra and geometry problems, but completely unable to reason about statistical and probabilistic situations encountered in every day life. This is why gambling is so popular and why people are constantly fooled by politicians. It's bad enough to be without words in the modern world, but being without numbers makes you vulnerable to all manner of manipulations.

Gambling exists more because of people dopamine systems than math...though I get the overall drift. People are fooled by politicians because ?? Also not really math related I think.

Indeed, people confidently assert as established fact things like "brains are bound by the laws of physics" and therefore "there can't be anything special" about them, so "consciousness is an illusion" and "the mind is a computer", all with absolute conviction but with very little understanding of what physics and maths really do and do not say about the universe. It's a quasi-religious faith in a thing not fully comprehended. I hope in the long run some humility in the face of reality will eventually be (re)learned.

This. People do not understand the implications of the most basic facts of modern science. Gravitation is instantaneous action at a distance via an "occult" force (to quote Newton's contemporaries).

If your position is that brains are not actually bound by the laws of physics -- that they operate on some other plane of existence unbound by any scientifically tested principle -- then it is not only your ideological opposites who have quasi-religious faith in a thing not fully comprehended.

My "position" isn't remotely that. The problem with "brains are bound by the laws of physics" isn't that there's something special about brains. It's that physics doesn't consist of "laws" that things are "bound" by. It consists of theories that attempt to describe.

These theories are enormously successful, but they are also known to be variously incomplete, inconsistent, non-deterministic, philosophically problematic, open to multiple interpretations and only partially understood in their implications, with links between descriptions of things at different scales a particularly challenging and little understood topic. The more you learn about physics (and while I'm no physicist, I have a degree in the subject and have learned a great deal more since) the more you understand the limits of what we know.

Anybody who thinks there's no mystery to physics just doesn't know much about it. Anybody who confidently asserts as fact things like "the brain consists of protons, neutrons and electrons so it's impossible for it to do anything a computer can't do" is deducing things from their own ignorance.

Lot's of assumptions about humanity and how unique we are constantly get paraded in this conversation. Ironically, the people who tout those perspectives are the least likely to understand why we're really not all that "special" from a very factual and academic perspective.

You'd think it would unlock certain concepts for this class of people, but ironically, they seem unable to digest the information and update their context.

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