rutherblood

Just what would the models be trained on? Machine learning requires you to have a corpus of mappings between peices of texts in two languages, each of which have been established to be close in meaning -> thereby requiring there to be no decipherment problem withstanding beforehand.

There are a series of problems in decipherment of Minoan scripts from what I understand: 1. The Linear A & Cretan script are undeciphered in the sense that we do not know what phonetics the symbols stand for 2. The Minoan language hypothesized to be written in these scripts is undeciphered in terms of vocabulary (given we do not know the phonetics of the letter symbols) & by extension its semantics. At best a kind of crude syntax can proposed for it based on patterns of the word-symbols in texts of the hypothesized language written in those scripts.

Something or the other is obsure about this task. But to be honest I'd have never come across something as ridiculous and what is purported to be true here. My ability to write useless stuff is unprecedented and unmatched. This is how I operate. This is how the dice rolls and how it always lands on an eight or a double-six. That's life for you.

Something or the other does stick and prosper. Intentions are rarely misunderstood or misguided. At best there is weird discrepancy between what is thought and what is revealed. What I'm saying is strange and may even be out of context I know but this shouldn't be taken as evidence of non-chalance.

Your argument is ridiculous for two simple reasons:

1. Do understand it is the same group of 5-14 who go on to transition to becoming 15-24 & so after having their life experiences all of which contribute to suicide 2. Low rates among 5-14 might precisely be because they are currently sheltered from the shitstorm that is the world & wider implications of losing that innocence. Mass adoption of social media by that age group might directly accelerate that & atleast may cause a rise in suicide rates. Even a single life lost to such bullshit is devastating.

Please stop advocating for bs like social media that is really never required in our lives much less kids' lives.

This exact problem plagues India. The public education system is essentially irrelevant here. Teachers hardly make money, even in private schools are hence incentivised towards joining the after-school private coaching industry training highschool kids for hyperc-competitive college entrance exams which is where the real money lies given parents are blindly willing to spend fortunes for even a small chance their kids might do better. Everyone knows regular high-school hours are quickly becoming irrelevant in a country obsessed with entrance exam coaching. Even many schools are getting in on the action with "intergrated post-school coaching". Education has truly become a gigantic business in your country the day even Amazon wants to get in on the action & does.

Is she having gastrointestinal problems too? Like digestion issues attimes, weird random pains in the abdomen, around the liver or stomach? I've been facing these since the last 2 months.

Sometimes I wonder how much our sense of smell is connected to the gut microbiome.

Can relate. Been 3 months since I recovered. Sense of smell has recovered definitely but since the past 2-3 weeks I've noticed it's still not fully there. A rare house plant blooming in the night which for everyone at home triggers a strong sweet fragrance which can be sensed even on the second floor, for me it was like a lingering placebo. Additionally, there is this weird stench that permeates everything I eat. I can't explain it, just a kind of smell I've never come across but now have to every other hour because it colors pretty much any earlier-pleasant-smelling thing

Honest question: is everyone a bitch of the CCP these days?

What a weird ass trivial title on the NY article, and what a misleading one on the HN

Over the years I've increasingly come to hate products and gurus who look to artificially rope in more usage & "spending" through such fundas.

Where I grew up (south Gujarat, IN) every year someday in September, families prepare multiple plates of good food and place them out on terraces for the crows to eat. They believe the crows eating this food to be recently deceased ancestors/family. The number of plates placed usually correspond to the number of deaths the family's witnessed in living memory.

Wherever Indians go, they take caste with them.

that handwriting is surprisingly legible

> Technology doesn't mean that plants are outright destroyed.

> A risky move compared to keeping nature alive, but I doubt that anybody in power will maintain a rain forest over using the area for more efficient means of energy and resource creation.

> Maintaining nature only makes sense if we are interested in knowledge as the primary driver. But the primary driver is power.

I understand the sense in which you are saying all this, and I agree, this might be how things go about provided humanity even survives this century provided we reach this hypothetical synthetic economic optimal. lots of ifs. and risky as hell, very very risky. but yeah probably how things would go by, the best one can be is sad.

tbh if you ask me I really doubt human enduced climate change can ever be mitigated through collective human effort. we'd rather chose annihilation over it.

> consiousness will be transferred to machines

yet another Kurzweilian fallacy based on pure speculation when we hardly know anything about the nature of consciousness or how the brain works.

I think you might be overestimating. What is state of art biological engineering based upon? Current life processes, at best such technologies are "hacks" built on top of life on earth -- standing on the shoulder of giants. As far as I have heard we haven't yet managed to build or even know the entirety of the biological stack.

> Unneeded efforts is where all the technology began.

let's say i grant this, but will you employ the said tech unless it is useful for you to do so?

the question here is about the purpose of going all synthetic.

1. sure, if say man can devise a way to manufacture a multitude of food "synthetically", that us just one purpose served i.e. food. you can keep replacing these various purposes that plants provide to human life. Let's say at one point all non-human species become extinct by human means or otherwise. after this we discover a purpose through their lack (even without this said discovery, it can be likely that we might not even know what we have lost, that could be or even then might have been useful to us, humans). now isn't that a tragedy? basically even if the "synthetic" means of some purposes to which other species benefit us were to be made economical somehow, that does not justify wiping them out even looking only through the lens of HUMAN benefit.

2. what is "synthetic" and how can synthetic means of achieving these purposes be made economical? first to have such an economy we would have to replicate the chemical efficiencies of photosynthesis etc. basically, copying life. second, we would need the self-replicating capacity too since this goes a long way towards economy, right? again, copying life. we might as well discover something the scale of a cell with self-replicating molecular architecture might be the way to go about it. we could as well end up making something which looks a lot like life actually and take a hell of time to achieve it, even provided we end up copying a whole lot of it (because it would be massively difficult, even this being a huge understatement, without a reference point i.e. existing life). now if all life on earth except humans if wiped out hypothetically through some means, this effort would be justified even if prone to instant failure because of our imminent deaths. but otherwise i don't see a point.

I'm not discouraging gaining knowledge about life and how it works, only that the argument of wiping it out to be replaced by everything synthetic, even someday doesn't make sense. do understand there is no such thing humans someday having all the knowledge. that day will never arrive.

the critical question is: is it economical?

let's take the example of replacing all plants with something humans made. Let's take one function (among innumerable others we might know or not know of) performed by plants critical to life: photosynthesis to trap energy to organic material & fill the air with oxygen. could we make something cheap enough to do this? the plants currently do this for free for us. they're also self-replicating mostly. could we build something like that? wouldn't we end up making something similar to what plants were and how they worked albeit with all this unneeded effort? let's say we can even do this, wouldn't you end up making something so similar to plants that it could actually be a plant?

You can ask the same question for all the other functions that plants perform. most of these functions we might not even know of and only realize once it's missed.

in short, it's not economical for us to do. it might not even be possible for us to do fully given all that complexity that millions of years in evolution captures.

life on earth can be seen as a huge huge body of knowledge. dont people mourn of loss of ancient libraries or cultures for this very reason? many of the things entrapped in such a culture or body of knowledge are tacit, unknown, maybe even unknowable, it definitely cannot be exactly replicated once it's lost

What a strange coincidence. currently reading bateson's book with that title.

there's a really funny thing that happens with websites on phones. i try clicking something sometime after the page loads and just when i click it, bam! something new loads up on the page, all these elements shift up or down and what I just clicked on isn't at its place anymore and i end up clicking on something completely different. All this happens in split of a second just between the moments when I look and decide to click on something and before my finger actually does the tap. This is so so common across the mobile web. Such a stupid little thing but also highly annoying. Even if we could collectively solve this one little thing, i would consider our UI sensibility to have improved over the years.

Unlike most of the comments here, i'd say i am at the very least sympathetic to the views in this article. But even I have to say, this is a badly written paper. A whole lot of talking, various anecdotes and quotes but nothing to show for. This is just finger-wagging...never is any light thrown upon this mysterious "being embodied in the world" and somehow out of the blue a discussion on causality's importance in cognition comes about and fizzles out without having said anything of substance

I haven't yet managed to fit inside a toothpaste tube. But you believe in the impossibility of this right? There is no absolute belief or disbelief. It is all a continuous gradation. Some things we can bring ourselves to belief in if there is sufficient cause. Not arguing for or against the original point but just your argument and condescension.

let's say he believes that. even then his belief would be as understandable & justifiable as yours. Wagging a finger and saying history of science suggest this and that is just that, belief. Just because something happened before you think it'll happen again and again. I do sympathize with your pov and even agree with it, but let's not beat around the bush as you say and let's just call this what our povs are: faith in science yet to come. Ours is no more righteous than the other.

EDIT: some grammar

from what I understand being "embodied" doesn't necessarily imply movement, but I am afraid even I do not understand it fully to say a computer isn't and an animal is.

My point is not whether all physical laws are computable, I have no doubt they are insofar as these laws are expressed mathematically. My point is rather that this search for laws might never finish and a complete ruleset never come about.

Like I said all current theories are based on current state of observations. Who is to say we don't observe something in the future for which these laws need to be revised? Who is to say this doesn't keep happening indefinitely? If such a "bottoming out" cannot even be conceived of, saying that the physical world, even a part of it, is exactly computable AS IT IS (all aspects of it) is utmost arrogance.

What do we know about the brain? how does it generate cognition? why does the color 'red' look like the way it does to you; does it look like the same to me? Unless the nature of such cognition and such a being which embodies this cognition is known one cannot say it is reducible or "emergent" from the CURRENT set or even any FUTURE set of physical laws we know or will know about.

The map is not the territory however minute in detail it becomes. Sure this map can become the territory itself by becoming it but then we cease to call it a "map". Say you want to understand how pendulums work, you make a pendulum, play with it. No one's going to call this actual pendulum a "simulation".

"That is, the physical world, including human cognition, can be realized by a Turing machine."

How did you get to the conclusion that all physical world is computable? Rather a huge jump i would say. Sure some things are, but "all of it" would rather be a BIG assumption. Physical theories of the world are limited to our current state of observations and knowledge of the world, they AREN'T the actual world. Who is to say this continuous search, observation and refinement of theories will ever end and we'll have a FINAL theory of everything that we can then plug into a computer and simulate?

Sure you can now say "I don't require a theory of everything, I just need a "sufficient" amount of theory to simulate the part of the world from which I can have my intelligence & cognition emerge". Sure you can say that but that would again hinge on the assumption that such cognition is reducable to these "sufficient" laws.

Likewise saying that the whole physical world can be realized by a Turung machine is a bit rich when we don't even know if such a complete reduction of the physical world is possible and when such reduction to physical laws is surely not yet complete.

EDIT: grammar

Why do we think computers can achieve intelligence? Where did this idea ever first come from? it sounds almost childish if one traces the history and wild misconception it must have emerged from. The idea maybe dates to Turing? maybe even Leibnitz? What was the idea based on? On seeing that some machines can "behave" i.e. do things a human does? And they started thinking if ultimately that machine might be able to do everything a human does? That a human is nothing but a " complicated machine" in the sense that we can formulate complex but finite rules for its behavior? maybe even simple rules which when applied on appropriate substrates would lead to "emergence" of such behaviors? That is a BIG assumption to make really. Intelligence and cognition here are treated as lists of rules which can be applied to any substrate. An electronic computer is just one substrate. i should also be able to do this on a sufficiently giant mechanical computer.

Even physics seem to have this rule-obssessed assumption. Can we really simulate the universe AS IT IS? Sure we can some parts of it. But is there a theory of everything really? After such a theory we would need to know nothing. physics would be pretty much done with. This theory would explain all observations in the past, present and future of anything we make in the universe.

Even in our search for the smallest particles can such a "bottoming out" ever take place?

EDIT: grammar

Whatever the criticisms of this paper may be, I get where it and Dreyfus is getting at. Even Hofstader had a lot to say about this but the guy was ignored to hell after his first book itself, I guess he has lost faith in the entire enterprise.

One problem with computer scientists and AI researchers is the level of arrogance that they display about their state of knowledge.

It would have had been good for us to rather engage with the larger body of philosophical work (which has a long tradition of thinking about how the mind works, how meaning and cognition emerge, how such embodied cognition interacts with the world) and then conduct empirical research trying to verify a philosophical paradigm rather than just going at it blindly by sometimes assuming mind can be reduced to logical systems and sometimes trying to simulate a reductionist and incomplete model of neural networks.

Not an expert on the Vedas thus not sure if any value judgement is made regarding the varnas in it or not but I am definitely SURE it nowhere says that all "varnas" are equal and that mobility between varnas is possible or based on one's "merit". the varna division just by articulation implies a hierarchy. Who wouldn't see the priestly class, the keepers of knowledge, as superior than the sewage workers? Saying that the Vedas say that caste is not based on lineage is utmost tomfoolery. Show me any instance in history where this mobility has been possible; is or was there some kind of "merit committee" in India who decides which caste you belong to, that i have heard nothing of? Which brahmin or other upper caste parent would willingly let their child be judged for which caste they should belong to by merit, be this at any point in history or present? By saying this all you are doing is revising history and saving the face of scripture you deem "holy" and "flawless". At the very least Vedas are definitely not the latter.

that's actually true, but in most cases, while they might be reluctantly willing to accept a partner from a "higher caste" they'd be downright aggressively dismissive of the other. And this holds for families all along the long chain of the caste hierarchy. Hypocrisy is a way of life.