zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
I would argue that Lenat was at least directionally correct in understanding that sheer volume of data (in Cyc's case, rules and facts) was the key in eventually achieving useful intelligence. I have to confess that I once criticized the Cyc project for creating an ever-larger pile of sh*t and expecting a pony to emerge, but that's sort of what has happened with LLMs.

>>vannev+14
https://ai-2027.com/ postulates that a good enough LLM will rewrite itself using rules and facts... sci-fi, but so is chatting with a matrix multiplication.

>>baq+3j
I doubt it. The human mind is a probabilistic computer, at every level. There’s no set definition for what a chair is. It’s fuzzy. Some things are obviously in the category, and some are at the periphery of it. (Eg is a stool a chair? Is a log next to a campfire a chair? How about a tree stump in the woods? Etc). This kind of fuzzy reasoning is the rule, not the exception when it comes to human intuition.

There’s no way to use “rules and facts” to express concepts like “chair” or “grass”, or “face” or “justice” or really anything. Any project trying to use deterministic symbolic logic to represent the world fundamentally misunderstands cognition.

>>joseph+cm
> There’s no set definition for what a chair is.

Sure there is: a chair is anything upon which I can comfortably sit without breaking it.

>>yellow+Ev
I find this very amusing. In philosophy of science some 20+ years ago I had a wonderful prof who went through 3(?) periods of thought. He laid out this argument, followed by the arguments seen below in this thread in various ways, in a systematic way where he convinced you that one way of thinking was correct, you took the midterm, then the next day he would lead with "everything you know is wrong, here's why.". It was beautiful.

He noted that this evolution of thought continued on until people generally argued that concepts/definitions that let you do meaningful things (your definition of meaningful, doesn't really matter what it is), are the way to go. The punchline at the very end, which happened to be the last thing I regurgitated on my last undergraduate exam, was him saying something along the lines of "Science, it beats hanging out in malls."

All this to say that if we read a little philosophy of science, that was done a long time ago (way before the class I took), things would make more sense.