Are you numeric? Biological computationalism disagrees with substrate independence.
> Biological computationalism disagrees with substrate independence. Don't leave me hanging, post citations! I welcome fringe theories when confident statements are followed by the conclusive evidence they imply. If that isn't possible, send chocolate. But, yes, I can count. And I am comfortable with natural forms, all the way to asymptotic limits. However, I don't put up with uncomputable/undefinable reals. Are you…
Um, functional computationalism is scifi, not physics in re consciousness. It assigns the same level of reality to written numeric patterns of a dog as to a real dog. And your self for that matter. How can you prove numbers exist physically?
And what about the discoveries that are worsening lives like military appplications and people who'll use the tech to discover better weapons?
Technological advances have been militarily applied since wars were a thing. Many times it's the military application that drove the advancement; like GPS was originally for military navigation and targeting, computers advanced quickly for codebreaking, the internet itself began as ARPANET (defense networking project), jet engines for faster fighter planes, etc. And look at where those advancements stand today in our…
Of course it does because the joy of math is discovering something yourself. At some point you just want to stare at a blank sheet of paper, start with a premise and go on a journey. Are you a mathematician or scientist? I am and just typing "tell me the proof of this result" sounds immensely boring to me. Have you ever played a video game with an "invincibility cheat"? Boring. But you do get to the end and "solve th…
Don't conflate the joy of doing math with the benefits of knowing new mathematics.
A large part of enjoyment is having a community who cares about what you're doing. So people will find it harder to enjoy it. Plus, some jobs actually are fun. Are you saying we should eradicate that fun because you hate your job? Some human being you are.
You should stop asking people for money for any other reason except that you provide value in return. Your enjoyment is your own business.
True, what I'm saying is that if we can create jobs that also provide enjoyment, we shouldn't be so quick to destroy them for the sake of greater efficiency because that provides social benefits beyond immediate financial ones. Of course, from your previous responses, you probably have more than enough money not to care about that and that's a typical response from the better off in society: screw you, I got mine.
Almost all mathematicians I know admit to feeling spiritual about discovery in the mathematical world. Engineers are taught the rigorous thing but it goes way beyond that. In fact, I bet a lot of people find some satisfaction in their work that goes beyond the practical. Artists, etc. That's what AI threatens because it destroys strong communities of people who value such work.
In what way is it destroying communities? Is AI preventing anyone from doing their own work to discover/rederive whatever it is they're interested in? Or is it just showing them, and eventually everyone else, the truth that nothing humans do is special and many are finding that hard to handle?
Again, people don't just do things in isolation for enjoyment. What humans do is special, and the end result is not the only thing that matters. You don't understand that because you're an aberration.
Welcome to the world of Chess a couple of decades ago...but look at chess now: more popular than ever. I hope that this doesn't mean that you need write proofs while streaming Twitch. ;)
MacDonalds is popular - does that make it a good thing?
Its not popular to work for. By popular, I mean people play it, at both the amateur and professional levels.
Don't conflate the joy of doing math with the benefits of knowing new mathematics.
The two cannot be separated.
Sure they can, as with each successive generation one learns the past works and then works to build on them. This genie just makes the past works be instantly created. In other words, I'm sure some mathematicians like to derive everything entirely from scratch but that's not most of them.
> First off, the phrase in the article is "I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments.", and you continue that by agreeing to something nobody said and that isn't true. Ahem. From TFA: "There is something about mathematical discovery (progress, advancement, creation) which is vital to the spiritual, experiential quality of doing mathematics. The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathem…
I stand corrected, and frankly, since that misunderstanding made me a bit "mad" on behalf that person, I think I would have written my response very very differently if I hadn't made that mistake. I want to apologise for that. Math is still based on axioms, AFAIK, but since I the author also seems to disagree and I'm the non-mathematician here I don't think I should press on that point, either.
Math is based on axioms because you need some a priori axioms to do logical deduction, but the axiom selection is also historically fluid. Mathematicians suggest new axioms or move away from old axioms based on their understanding of which results are intuitive or not, and also which are most useful, and most mathematicians that work close to the axioms have some view on how “correct” or not various axioms are. As evidence of this, I’d point to how many mathematicians find the axiom of choice problematic due to results that seem clearly “wrong”, but nevertheless accept it because they need it to prove other things that seem obviously “right”. So the axioms are not the base truth, there is some platonic ideal of mathematics beneath that.
I’m also a human expressing genuine emotion. Why is one more valid than the other?
Your emotion isn’t invalid, it’s merely bad, assholeish, brings shame upon you. But it is “valid” in the sense that the reader of your comment can see that you are, at least, sincere in your gloating at another person’s despair.
It's not the despair, it's the turnabout. Reading proofs containing the language that I mentioned seemed to suggest that the ideas were trivial to the author in a way that implied their superior intelligence. Now AI has come along and has, by way of counterexamples, shown theorems to be incorrect in devastating (maybe "trivial") ways. The shoe is on the other foot.
Technological advances have been militarily applied since wars were a thing. Many times it's the military application that drove the advancement; like GPS was originally for military navigation and targeting, computers advanced quickly for codebreaking, the internet itself began as ARPANET (defense networking project), jet engines for faster fighter planes, etc. And look at where those advancements stand today in our…
Not in a better place IMO.
I'd say the jury is out on that. Most advancements aren't needed per se, but the majority of us take their existence for granted and life goes on. Penicillin though, that's one thing that having available absolutely put us in a better place, and it was also war that triggered a massive push in solving medicinal mass production, because infected wounds was a massive problem.