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 have definitely broken chairs upon sitting in them, which someone else could have sat in just fine. So it's unclear why something particular to me would change the chair-ness of an object.

Similarly, I've sat in some very uncomfortable chairs. In fact, I'd say the average chair is not a particularly comfortable one.

>>woodru+3w
For a micro-moment before giving in it was a chair, then it broke. Now its no longer a chair. Its a broken chair.

>>byeart+kx
That's not one, but two particularities that aren't latent to the chair itself: me (the sitter), and time.

Do you really have a personal ontology that requires you to ask the tense and person acting on a thing to know what that thing is? I suspect you don't; most people don't, because it would imply that the chair wouldn't be a chair if nobody sat on it.

>>woodru+Pz
A stump isn't a chair until someone decides to sit on it, at that point it becomes chair _to_ that person. Chair is only capable of acting as "chair" object if constraints are met in regards to sitter.

>>byeart+Kj2
This is very complicated, because it now implies:

1. I can intend to sit on a chair but fail, in which case it isn't a chair (and I didn't intend to sit on it?)

2. I can intend to have my dog sit on my chair, but my dog isn't a person and so my chair isn't a chair.

This is-use distinction you're making is fine; most people have an intuition that things "act" as a thing in relation to how they're used. But to take it a step forwards and claim that a thing isn't its nature until a person sublimates their intent towards it is very unintuitive!

(In my mind, the answer is a lot simpler: a stump isn't a chair, but it's in the family network of things that are sittable, just like chairs and horses. Or to borrow Wittgenstein, a stump bears a family resemblance to a chair.)