What does the end of mathematics look like? • Hacker News Board

Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?

#91

Post by lioeters » Wed, May 21, 2025, 9:54 PM UTC

daveguy wrote: post #68

lioeters wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next logical step, perhaps ethically questionable, seems to be growing human brains for computational purposes (parallel or quantum) with high bandwidth and very efficient power consumption.

Unfortunately we are much farther from growing a human brain than we are from a scaling up an LLM to a 29 megawatt-consuming behemoth. With growing a brain, we barely know where to begin. Not in terms of growing a few neurons in a petri dish. Nourishing the complex interconnecting structure of neurons that is a human brain is nowhere even on the horizon. Much less growing the structure from cells. At least with the L…

These Living Computers Are Made from Human Neurons - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/these-living-comp...

Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?

#92

Post by southernplaces7 » Thu, May 22, 2025, 5:57 AM UTC

Chris2048 wrote: post #89

southernplaces7 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we haven't really begun to explore optimisation possibilities. So you're questioning the above comment's argument based on a hand-wavy claim about completely speculative future possibilities? As it stands, there's no disagreeing with the human brain's energy efficiency for all the computing it does in so many ways that AI can't even begin to match. This to not even speak of the whole unknown territory of whatever it…

Is it speculative to suggest that technology will improve? No. > whatever it is that gives us consciousness talk about hand-wavy; "consciousness" might not be a real thing. You might as well ask if AI has a soul.

It is indeed speculative to not just suggest that technology will improve but make specific claims about how and in what way based on no clear connection to any current development.

Also, there's nothing hand wavy about pointing out -aside from all the vastly efficient parallelism and generalist computing that the brain does with absurdly minimal power needs- that it also seems to be where our consciousness is housed.

You can go ahead and naval gaze about "how do we know if we're conscious? How do we know an LLM isn't?" but I certainly feel conscious, and so do you, and we both demonstrably have self-directed agency that indicates this widely, solidly accepted phenomenon, and is very distinct from anything any LLM can demonstrably do, regardless of what AIbros like to claim about consciousness not being real.

Arguments like these remind me of relativist fall-back idiocies of asking "but what is a spoon" whenever confronted with any hard counterargument to their completely speculative claims about X or Y.

Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?

#93

Post by auggierose » Thu, May 22, 2025, 7:00 AM UTC

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #62

lmm wrote: post #38

The camera didn't kill painting. Neither the bicycle nor the motor-car killed running. There are already subfields of mathematics where it's believed that all the interesting discoveries have been found and no-one is looking except for the occasional amateur - and other subfields where to even have a hope of doing cutting edge research you would need to both do multiple years of postgraduate study and then get accept…

A recurring problem I see is that people have absolutely drunk the koolaid of the utilitarian worldview. They've been marinating in it for so long, with no exposure to anything else beyond this parochial and base existence, that they have no idea they've been marinating in it. Everything is reduced to economic exchange. Everything is reduced to economic output. Learning is reduced to something that has value only if…

I agree with much of that, but of course, we MUST eat and shit (at least for the time being). So the economic part MUST function, otherwise all other parts are not important anymore.

Re: What does the end of mathematics look like?

#94

Post by daveguy » Thu, May 22, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

lioeters wrote: post #91

daveguy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately we are much farther from growing a human brain than we are from a scaling up an LLM to a 29 megawatt-consuming behemoth. With growing a brain, we barely know where to begin. Not in terms of growing a few neurons in a petri dish. Nourishing the complex interconnecting structure of neurons that is a human brain is nowhere even on the horizon. Much less growing the structure from cells. At least with the L…

These Living Computers Are Made from Human Neurons - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/these-living-comp...

You are confusing organoids with "growing a brain". Organoids are a handful of cells of a given type derived from pluripotent stem cells and growing together. A neural organoid is nothing at all like a brain -- not even a brain slice. It is a loose connection of cells that have just enough context to somewhat behave natively or just not croak immediately (which is what most individual stem cells do when they differentiate in a petri dish).

It's like calling a 1 bit half-adder circuit a computer.

Organoids are very interesting scientifically because we will need to start with organoids to grow any sort of biological system. And they do behave closer to native than individual cells so they can be used to research things like cell metabolism and drug response. But they are not anywhere close to an organ. And unfortunately they aren't even close enough to replace animal testing, yet.