Never though of it this way! But, yes—I think that's right. (Not sure if I'm going all in on your reduction to Hume, but obviously in the end it's all footnotes to Plato.) If only, um, Wittgenstein had talked about AI at all. It's not like he didn't have the opportunity!
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When I read the material on rule following (and then Kripke's book), it always seemed to me to be about the possibility of understanding human life—not the possibility of its mechanization.
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo @NegarestaniReza
It’s about human understanding, to be sure, but I take it to be showing that rule-following (AI) is insufficient to produce it (ie, understanding such as humans have, or AGI).
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Replying to @Plato4Now @NegarestaniReza
You could say it’s an argument against GOFAI, and in favor of machine learning
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo @NegarestaniReza
I’m almost with you. I’d say it gives an argument in favor of machine “learning,” while showing that such learning could not be understanding.
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PS the learning that they do these days is super underdetermined—there’s no teacher.
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo @NegarestaniReza
Right. I don’t think understanding requires a teacher. If it did, that would preclude (scientific) advancement. The problem with machine “learning” is not that there’s no teacher but that there’s no understanding.
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I think machine “learning” is like the way a virus “learns” to infect a host. When it succeeds, and accomplishes the task, it does so through a complex mechanism, but not by understanding.
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Replying to @Plato4Now @SimonDeDeo
Since Kant we have a semblance of comprehension as how even the faculty of understanding can be functionally decomposed. It is a qualitatively exceptional faculty precisely because it is composed of myriad multi-level functions which can be not that different from a virus/prion.
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Complex systems are the products of structural and statistical complexity, generative entrenchment and dynamic constraints.
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Replying to @NegarestaniReza @SimonDeDeo
I’m happy to accept that. I’m not sure what each of those terms mean, but you’ve written a book about it so I defer! What I can’t accept is that the understanding is a complex system. Any complexity would spoil its claim to knowledge.
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Replying to @Plato4Now @SimonDeDeo
I agree, the term complexity is free-floating. By that terms I only mean scale-, level-, context-sensitivity a al Remo Badii and James Ladyman but with some caveats.
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