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Some of literature’s most powerful inventions

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: Some of literature’s most powerful inventions

#11

Post by RupertEisenhart »

yesenadam wrote: post #4
RupertEisenhart wrote: post #2

Not to be glib, but this reminds me of days spent reading TV tropes. I think the author is stretching a little to say noone considered this since Aristotle. Not only is there a lot of overlap with meme theory, people have been doing literary criticism forever. Nice article though.

Absolutely, it's weird isn't it–talk about an elephant in the room! I'm not sure what would be weirder, if the author never heard of tvtropes.org, or they know of it but write as if it doesn't exist. The author seems to live in some parallel universe, very strange. I think you're too kind though–it makes the article entirely ridiculous. And then... I read this[0], which talks about the author's work. He's got degrees…

Thanks for this.

Bringing this down to the CPU is as absurd as all those 17th century opponents of materialism. "How can rude matter bring about all the ineffable qualia!" Hilarious.

Re: Some of literature’s most powerful inventions

#12

Post by benibela »

yesenadam wrote: post #4
RupertEisenhart wrote: post #2

Not to be glib, but this reminds me of days spent reading TV tropes. I think the author is stretching a little to say noone considered this since Aristotle. Not only is there a lot of overlap with meme theory, people have been doing literary criticism forever. Nice article though.

Absolutely, it's weird isn't it–talk about an elephant in the room! I'm not sure what would be weirder, if the author never heard of tvtropes.org, or they know of it but write as if it doesn't exist. The author seems to live in some parallel universe, very strange. I think you're too kind though–it makes the article entirely ridiculous. And then... I read this[0], which talks about the author's work. He's got degrees…

>The paper's called Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature: A Logical Proof and a Narrative..

That reminds me of a more serious approach of that proof.

Roger Penrose's books, The Emperor's New Mind and the two sequels

The Penrose–Lucas argument based on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. From the theorem we know any mathematical system has sentences that the system itself cannot prove. So computer algorithms, based on mathematical systems, cannot prove them either. (just like the Halting problem) But humans can prove them like Gödel did. Thus human intelligence is noncomputable and inherently superior to AIs.

That would also be true for novels, since novels can contain character talking about such proves.

But, Penrose takes it to the next step. The laws of physics are also a mathematical system and fully simulatable by a computer. But since the computer cannot simulate human intelligence as proved before, this proves that human intelligence is not described by physical laws.

That raises the question, if consciouness is not described by physical laws, ? Essentially it would appear as a random influence to physics (even though it is not actually random, just noncomputable). Now there is a completely random process in physics: quantum wave function collapse. Then he goes on, that consciouness comes from features embedded at the Planck scale in the spacetime geometry.

>4. Causal reasoning cannot be performed by machine-learning algorithms because those algorithms run on the CPU's Arithmetic Logic Unit, which is designed to run symbolic logic, and symbolic logic can only process correlation.

And I just wrote my PhD thesis about causal reasoning algorithms :/

Re: Some of literature’s most powerful inventions

#13

Post by webmaven »

benibela wrote: post #12
yesenadam wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, it's weird isn't it–talk about an elephant in the room! I'm not sure what would be weirder, if the author never heard of tvtropes.org, or they know of it but write as if it doesn't exist. The author seems to live in some parallel universe, very strange. I think you're too kind though–it makes the article entirely ridiculous. And then... I read this[0], which talks about the author's work. He's got degrees…

>The paper's called Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature: A Logical Proof and a Narrative.. That reminds me of a more serious approach of that proof. Roger Penrose's books, The Emperor's New Mind and the two sequels The Penrose–Lucas argument based on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. From the theorem we know any mathematical system has sentences that the system itself cannot prove. So computer algorithm…

> And I just wrote my PhD thesis about causal reasoning algorithms :/

Sounds interesting. Link?

Re: Some of literature’s most powerful inventions

#14

Post by tsimionescu »

benibela wrote: post #12
yesenadam wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, it's weird isn't it–talk about an elephant in the room! I'm not sure what would be weirder, if the author never heard of tvtropes.org, or they know of it but write as if it doesn't exist. The author seems to live in some parallel universe, very strange. I think you're too kind though–it makes the article entirely ridiculous. And then... I read this[0], which talks about the author's work. He's got degrees…

>The paper's called Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature: A Logical Proof and a Narrative.. That reminds me of a more serious approach of that proof. Roger Penrose's books, The Emperor's New Mind and the two sequels The Penrose–Lucas argument based on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. From the theorem we know any mathematical system has sentences that the system itself cannot prove. So computer algorithm…

> The Penrose–Lucas argument based on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. From the theorem we know any mathematical system has sentences that the system itself cannot prove. So computer algorithms, based on mathematical systems, cannot prove them either. (just like the Halting problem) But humans can prove them like Gödel did. Thus human intelligence is noncomputable and inherently superior to AIs.

Godel's incompleteness theorems apply to math itself, not to computation. Those observations are not provable but incomputable, they are not provable in the formal system at all. So, humans can't prove them anymore than computers could. The gods themselves couldn't prove them.

What I believe the argument could be is that humans still found them and have reasons to believe they are true (they have an informal proof), even if they can't be formally proven.

However, the Penrose-Lacau argument is quite infamous and is generally not believed in the scientific community. The most obvious way out of Godel's incompleteness theorems conflict with human mathematicians is to simply reject the notion that human mathematicians have proven these things in any sense. Godel's incompleteness theorems don't forbid incorrect but convincing proofs, and informal proofs that can't be formalized could well be just that.

Re: Some of literature’s most powerful inventions

#15

Post by benibela »

webmaven wrote: post #13
benibela wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The paper's called Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature: A Logical Proof and a Narrative.. That reminds me of a more serious approach of that proof. Roger Penrose's books, The Emperor's New Mind and the two sequels The Penrose–Lucas argument based on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. From the theorem we know any mathematical system has sentences that the system itself cannot prove. So computer algorithm…

> And I just wrote my PhD thesis about causal reasoning algorithms :/ Sounds interesting. Link?

Here: https://benibela.de/bin/others/phd-thesis.pdf
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