Wtf/wtg science

Eh, it’s probably fine at sarcasm. If you think of words and phrases as vectors, then sarcasm and hyperbole are just inversions and extensions.

It may not really understand what words really mean, but it can put them together just fine.

I would argue one key difference between flight and “intelligence”, or maybe more accurately “rationality” is that rationality has long been held as the key distinguishing feature of people, and also of God (whether Christian or Hellenistic.)

Therefore, there is an enormous amount of philosophical and cultural “baggage” that goes along with the word “intelligence.” Talking about “artificial intelligence” makes it very difficult to separate that from what human beings do.

This is why I much prefer terms like “machine learning” or “automatic pattern recognition.” However, those terms don’t “sell” as well, I think for precisely the reason that they do not carry all those other connotations.

You mention reaching “heaven”. A lot of people think we are, basically, building God in a computer, or maybe Satan. I believe this thinking is not really justified.

Intelligence isn’t “what humans do”. It is “what brains do”. It just happens that humans have slightly bigger and faster brains than other animals. Human civilization is what happened when animal brains crossed some threshold.

While it’s plain that a neural network is not literally a brain, it’s unclear to me whether it might be passing a similar threshold.

I don’t think you can really separate the human brain from the body it occupies.

Did it happen when brains passed a threshold? Or when the entire collection of human organisms reached some threshold in a particular environment?

I think there is a real cultural bias we have to consider thinking outside of the environment in which the thinking is meant to apply. I think this goes back to a philosophical position that prioritizes abstract, universal reason about eternal truths over practical reason about one’s environment.

I have sort of the opposite takeaway.

Our big brains were “meant” to identify which mushrooms are poison, but they hit some magic threshold that resulted in concertos, calculus, philosophy, architecture, poetry, art, rocketry, etc.

It was all basically a weird accident that came from having enough computational power to converse.

Spraking of, GPT-4 also takes image inputs.

A more interesting situation.

:laughing:

I think that is true.

But I think you are going too far by establishing a kind of dualism. It is easy to accidentally imply: once we pass that threshold, there is a whole other kind of abstract thinking we find that not only supplements, but also supersedes and replaces a thinking that applies to our environment. And since it’s separate, we can develop it, on its own, artificially, without going through the “lower level” kind of “animal thinking” we can also do.

For example, we can write a computer program to analytically/deductively prove certain theorems based on given axioms. But the historical practice of mathematics is much more than this. At the least it is also about deciding what mathematical proofs might be important. And it seems to me this depends on the mathematicians as complete people, living in a society and environment. So it isn’t clear to me even something like math can really be fully separated from this “lower reasoning.”

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I feel like I need to make some joke about mathematicians living in their mom’s basements, proving ridiculously abstract meaningless theorems when they could be working as engineers on problems that real people care about.

Anyway, AIs seem able to determine what’s important. They otherwise wouldn’t be able to communicate effectively, summarize information, write poetry, make art, or music.

…simply deciding not to eat any of them. “Hey, I’ve got a lot more brain to use now that I’m not wasting it on mushrooms…”

Which magic mushrooms to eat.

Arnold Rimmer (alive) : - the outcome of which was a proposal by the aforementioned Lister to the aforementioned Rimmer to cook him breakfast.

Captain Frank Hollister : Okay, I’m getting the picture.

Arnold Rimmer (alive) : Breakfast comprised of two eggs, three rashers of bacon, a grilled tomato, two sausages, a small portion of fried potatoes… and a large quantity of mushrooms. Having consumed this repast, second technician Rimmer, Arnold J. experienced what can only be described as a voyage to trip-out city.

i don’t know, maybe the mushrooms are what did it.

maybe our whole sense of self starts with a distant ancestor’s mushroom trip.

Not exactly “science” but I couldn’t think of a better thread for this

Has the proof not been published yet?

Is it any easier a proof than circumscribing a square (length a+b) around another square (length c), such that four triangles are created with sides a, b, and hypotenuse c, then rearranging the triangles in the “a+b” square so that two squares with sides a and sides b are formed?

Not seeing proving Pyth by starting with the Law of Sines is possible without some trig. I am of limited thought, though. They’re friggin’ trig functions, after all.

While I haven’t been doing this kind of math in a long time, the explanation in the article claims that using sin^2 + cos^2 = 1 is a result of pythagorean theorem, but they managed to do it with the law of sines, which is not a result of the theorem. I can’t opine on the truthiness or lack thereof.

I don’t think the law of sines requires the Pythagorean theorem. Just the definition of sine and an altitude drawn from a vertex of the triangle.

I can’t opine on where they go from there

I was able to find the abstract for their presentation but have not seen the proof. I have seen multiple articles. This article has contained the most detail about the actual math. And as others have said, I am not qualified to opine on pretty much any of it. I was hoping y’all could explain it to me. I assumed (many) someone(s) will dig deeper at some point on this math nerd forum.

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