Well, it is happening now. We take down scammers and terrorists I guess. Who wanted to destroy half of the society!!! Really disgusting.
What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
61–70 of 99 posts
Re: What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
#62Not often mentioned because joyless hard work, but standardization is in my eyes quite the archievement. All those synergies, systems suddenly becoming frictionless recimbineable and thus iterations faster is a pretty great achievement.
Re: What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
#63Advaita (non duality) is the highest intellectual achievement of the human civilization. The list itself mentioned is interesting but it focuses on content of consciousness and not consciousness itself. The contents keep changing. Consciousness doesn't. In other words humans appearing in consciousness discovering consciousness is more interesting than what appears on consciousness like laws of motion. This is not to…
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Re: What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
#64Advaita (non duality) is the highest intellectual achievement of the human civilization. The list itself mentioned is interesting but it focuses on content of consciousness and not consciousness itself. The contents keep changing. Consciousness doesn't. In other words humans appearing in consciousness discovering consciousness is more interesting than what appears on consciousness like laws of motion. This is not to…
Are you sure? After trying to read into it a bit, I'm getting the feeling that this theory does not solve many practical problems and leaves more questions than answers, e.g.: does my AI (or my GPU) have a consciousness, should it have rights, etc.?
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Re: What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
#65One should also mention the creation of "God(s)" in any religion (sub)context. We are probably the only mammalian creature who delegated all his existential angst to an abstracted entity responsible for anything that it didn't make sense at the time. I think it is THE intellectual pinnacle of a brain trying to survive and process information full of null pointers without halting its programming:/)
Re: What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
#66Asking ChatGPT, I have:
- The scientific method
- Calculus
- Einstein's Relativity
- Darwin's Evolution
And more generally:
- The zero
- Formal logic
- The written language
This is the kind of questions I think a LLM work well for, because people are going to have different opinions. I think that most of us will think about science, maths, etc... But what about, say, monotheism, Athenian democracy, banking and accounting, etc... I also see that Freud is in there, a controversial take as his ideas are considered pseudoscience today, but it certainly opened the way for modern psychology, so what do you make of that.
Using a LLM trained on what is most of human written knowledge and carefully aligned will hopefully give a reasonable consensus. It is not perfect of course, but I think it is better than personal guesses.
Note: your experience may differ, not all LLMs are the same and your prompt matter, but I get similar results: mostly scientific achievements, with the one I cited usually getting top spots. A bit of social (democracy, human rights) but spirituality in general seems to be absent.
Re: What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
#67Development of zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0
Is it though? All languages have the word 'nothing'. Better candidates: a) place-value numbering aka the positional numeral system, b) the Cartesian coordinate system. Forced to choose, I would pick (b).
The difference is that zero is explicitly a number, rather than a concept.
Making it a number allows it interact with the rest of mathematics in a consistent way, which I'd argue you can't do with "nothing".
To use your later example of "no apples":
Is no apples the same thing as no bananas? What about no meters? I honestly don't know, the question is a bad one. My gut says yes, nothing in each case is just nothing.
Is zero apples the same thing as zero bananas or zero meters? No, they're different because the unit "apple" is orthogonal to the unit "meter".
The precision of zero is what's so special about it.
Re: What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
#68A childhood moment when I learned what a period meant in a sentence. A joy so rare I have yet to recreate it.
Re: What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
#69It skips over the arts rather. I'd rate the music of Bach and Beethoven above the theories of Chomsky and the like.
Re: What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)
#70One should also mention the creation of "God(s)" in any religion (sub)context. We are probably the only mammalian creature who delegated all his existential angst to an abstracted entity responsible for anything that it didn't make sense at the time. I think it is THE intellectual pinnacle of a brain trying to survive and process information full of null pointers without halting its programming:/)
Nicely written! I was thinking about this the other day. What is the benefit from your point of view of procesing information full of null pointers? (I know what the benefit of not halting its programming is :P)