Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thoughts on thinking

dcurt.is

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 459 posts

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#191

Post by alganet »

fennecbutt wrote: post #181
abathologist wrote: post #159

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they…

99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.

I'm not so sure about it.

Maybe it's like that because there aren't many novel opportunities for varied experiences nowadays.

The pointy ear sounds trivial in our experience, but it is radically different than ordinary everyday thought when observed as a piece of a whole imagined new world.

Of course, pointy ears now are not a novelty anymore. But that's beyond the point. By the time they were conceived, human experience was already homogenized.

The idea space for what an object is has been depleted by exploration. People already tried everything. It's kinda the same thing as saying that is impossible to come up with a new platonic solid (also an idea space that has been exhausted).

Any novel thought is bound to be nameless at first, and it becomes novel by trying to use derivation to define an unknown observation, not as a basis for it.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#192

Post by mr_toad »

fennecbutt wrote: post #181
abathologist wrote: post #159

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they…

99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.

> Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human.

Now that’s reductionist to the point of being diminutive.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#193

Post by abakker »

MoonGhost wrote: post #143
taylorallred wrote: post #4

Among the many ways that AI causes me existential angst, you've reminded me of another one. That is, the fact that AI pushes you towards the most average thoughts. It makes sense, given the technology. This scares me because creative thought happens at the very edge. When you get stuck on a problem, like you mentioned, you're on the cusp of something novel that will at the very least grow you as a person. The temptat…

> AI pushes you towards That's interesting point. But here is the thing: you are supposed to drive. Not AI god. Look at it as at an assistant whom you can interrupt, instruct, correct, ask to redo. While focusing on 'what' you can delegate it some 'how' problems.

I for one, thing directing subordinates to do something I could be doing kinda … sucks? Like, I get that’s how you have to work with LLMs, but it isn’t a fun thing to do for me.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#194

Post by mr_toad »

don_neufeld wrote: post #3

Completely agree. From all of my observations, the impact of LLMs on human thought quality appears largely corrosive. I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them. In some class they only allow students to turn in work that was done in class, under the direct observation of the teacher. There has also been a significant increase in “on paper” work vs work done on computer. Lest you wonder “what does this gu…

> I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them.

Schools will ban anything they think of as sinister.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#195

Post by DavidPiper »

fennecbutt wrote: post #181
abathologist wrote: post #159

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they…

99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.

That is a nonsense definition of creativity. The parent also wasn't suggesting - as far as I can read - that creativity is defined solely in the realm of the "truly novel" (or "isn't based on anything you've ever seen before").

All creativity is a conversation between our own ideas and what already exists.

Consider the unused soundtrack to James Cameron's Avatar [0][1], where ethnomusicologists set out to create a kind of music that had never been heard before.

They succeeded. But it was ultimately scrapped for the film because - by virtue of it being so different to any music anyone has ever heard before - it was not remotely accessible to audiences and the movie suffered as a result.

To argue that work is not creative because it is still based on "music" is absurd.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8

[1] https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/pie...

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#196

Post by musicale »

fennecbutt wrote: post #181
abathologist wrote: post #159

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they…

99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.

> Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen.

I would add a couple of things to that. First, humans (like other animals) have instincts and feelings; even newborns can exhibit varying personality traits as well as fears and desires. It's certainly useful to fear things like spiders, snakes, or abandonment without prior experience.

Second, an important part of experience is inner life - how you personally perceive, feel, and experience things. This may be very different from person to person.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#197

Post by musicale »

steamrolled wrote: post #39
jebarker wrote: post #17

> nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. No LLM can ever express your unique human experience (or even speak from experience), so on that axis of competition you win by default. Regurgitating facts and the mean opinion on topics is no replacement for the thoughts of a unique human. The idea that you're competing with AI on some absolute scale of the quality of your thought…

More generally, prior to LLMs, you were competing with 8 billion people alive (plus all of our notable dead). Any novel you could write probably had some precedent. Any personal story you could tell probably happened to someone else too. Any skill you wanted to develop, there probably was another person more capable of doing the same. It was never a useful metric to begin with. If your life goal is to be #1 on the pl…

> Who is the #1 Java programmer in the world?

James Gosling, of course[1]. Next question...

> The #1 topologist?

I'm not a mathematician, but... maybe Akshay Venkatesh, who won the Fields Medal in 2018?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005008

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#198

Post by dcurtis »

iamwil wrote: post #109

OP said something similar about writing blog posts when he found himself doing twitter a lot, back in 2013. So whatever he did to cope with tweeting, he can do the same with LLMs, since it seems like he's been writing a lot of blog posts since. > I’ve been thinking about this damn essay for about a year, but I haven’t written it because Twitter is so much easier than writing, and I have been enormously tempted to jus…

History rhymes. It’s funny that my problem back then was jamming fully formed thoughts into tweets, and now my problem is developing seeds of ideas into fully formed thoughts.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#199

Post by drdaeman »

ebiester wrote: post #44
curl-up wrote: post #31

> The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will. So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity. My mixer can mix dough better than I can, but…

Let's frame it more generously: The reward is based on being able to contribute something novel to the world - not because nobody else can but because it's another contribution to the world's knowledge.

If that's the source of author's existential crisis, they may possibly find it interesting to meditate on the idea that there's no thinker behind the thought, and the impermanence of "self".

Even if they don't buy all the way into the whole hard incompatiblism thing, the idea is that they may find some value in the process.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#200

Post by drdeca »

fennecbutt wrote: post #187
drdeca wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one merely presses a button (the same button, not choosing what button to push based on context), I don’t see what it is that one has contributed? One of those tippy bird toys can press a button.

I can draw a circle on a piece of paper and that's a serious contribution? Where is the line drawn? Is me sneezing a contribution to the world of art, since art is all about interpretation™®© and some smarmy critic will do a piece on how my sneeze is a visceral physical performative art illustrating the downfall of the modern world where technology binds us and we spend too much time inside surrounded by screens and…

It sounds to me like you are maybe agreeing with me but thought that I was expressing the opposite of what I did, and so are phrasing it as if it were disagreement?

Or maybe you are just agreeing, and did understand that my point was that I don’t think pressing a button is a contribution.

If you are disagreeing with my comment, can you explain how this is disagreeing?

Post reply on HN