Viewing profile — AIPedant

This is where you are confused - in fact just plain wrong: A symbol is a discrete sign that has some sort of symbol table (explicit or not) describing the mapping of the sign to th…

No, analog computers truly are symbolic. The simplest analog computer - the abacus - is obviously symbolic, and thus is also true for WW2 gun fire control computers, ball-and-shaft…

Articles like this indicate we should lock down the definition of "computation" that meaningfully distinguishes computing machines from other physical phenomena - a computation is …

I understand the broader point but it is not actually constitutionally problematic for the executive branch to assert that a suspect committed a crime - of course they believe that…

If you look at my comment history you will see that I don't think LLMs are nearly as intelligent as rats or pigeons. Rats and pigeons have an intuitive understanding of quantity an…

"Making predictions about the world" is a reductive and childish way to describe intelligence in humans. Did David Lynch make Mulholland Drive because he predicted it would be a go…

Putin and Xi fantasizing about immortality via 3D-printed organs quite starkly illustrated that many adults do not understand the difference between science and science fiction.

Keep in mind that we also have no clue how general anesthesia works! It's not just psychiatry, many medications targeting the nervous system (e.g. muscle relaxants) have unknown me…

It didn't come completely out of nowhere, Euler and Bernoulli had looked at trigonometric series for studying the elastic motion of a deformed beam or rod. In that case, physical i…

On the simplest end of that spectrum, Taylor series are useful because many real-world dynamics can be approximated as a "primarily linear behavior" + "nonlinear effects." (And cas…

Caves of Qud is quite good, though a bit less traditional in being a big open world vs a dungeon. There a few quirks and bugs but the game is very fun and creative, and it has exce…

The point is that knowing where your hand is in space relative to the rest of your body is a distinct sense which is directly three-dimensional. This information is not inferred, i…

No, the sensors measure a continuum of force or displacement along a line or rotational axis, 1D is correct.

Inner ear is a great example! I mentioned in another comment that if you want to be reductive the sensors in the inner ear - the hairs themselves - are one dimensional, but the ove…

It is simply wrong to describe touch and proprioception receptors as 2D. a) In a technical sense the actual receptors are 1D, not 2D. Perhaps some of them are two dimensional, but …

Human perception is not 2D, touch and proprioception[1] are three-dimensional senses. And of course it really makes more sense to say human perception is 3+1-dimensional since we p…

That's not what "coherent computational representation" means in this context. It means being able to reliably apply the rules of Othello / chess / etc to the current state of the …

I don't think "so isolated he turned to a chatbot for validation" describes this, or why people get unhealthily attached to chatbots. 1) The man became severely mentally ill in mid…

You can say it’s exactly 1 plus or minus some small epsilon and use the completeness of the reals to argue that we can always build a finer ruler and push the epsilon down further.…

The real point is that it takes infinite energy to get infinite precision. Let me add that we have no clue how to do a measurement that doesn't involve a photon somewhere, which me…

I am confused why you think the exactness of integers and rationals is unphysical. "This egg carton has 12 eggs" is a (boring) physical statement. "You can make 1/3rd of a carton o…

I have no idea what point you're trying to make. I am aware the selection process is different. If you understand the argument now but you're just splitting hairs about whether it'…