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Yes, it is impossible for anyone to figure out gravity by induction. That's the problem with AI.

The way we build explanations is largely by reasoning-by-analogy. We build physical models with our hands, to resolve ambiguities in our environment, ever more complexly -- and then, eventually, land upon the right analogy that then falls away.

Prior to gravity we had crystal spheres -- reasoning by ananlogy with such things.

Since machines arent in the world, as in my robot example, they can never build explantory conceptualisations of it.

Chess et al. are not worlds in any relevant sense. No one cares, or doubts, that a system with a fully mathematically specific "world" can be "learnt" by a computer.

The full specification of a "world" in mathematical terms doesnt require intelligence. At that point you can use the dumb strategies of alphago.

Intelligence is what you do when you don't know what you're doing. The "World Model"s we're interested in are those that arent already specified to the machine.

All these formal games are just outcomes spaces where every event is known a priori.

As I said, the AI people arent even operating in the category of intelligence. It just the profound lack of background knowledge of any field outside pytorch.lol() that their meglomania plausible

Go look at every paper in AI or ML that purports to build a model of anything: can you find a single one where the outcome space cannot be fully specified either formally (as with chess, etc.) or empirically (as with data samples)?

This has nothing to do with intelligence. We do not either start from the answers, or samples of the answers. We have no answers.

The resolution to this problem requires having a body: you have to move in order to think, in direct causal contact with the world beyond the capacities of clay, to think about it.



Guess this is the crux:

"The full specification of a "world" in mathematical terms doesnt require intelligence. At that point you can use the dumb strategies of alphago."

I fall in camp that humans are just glorified amoeba, twitching at stimuli.

Eventually an AI could model 'us' with dumb strategies, because really baked into the human brain/body are just dumb strategies.


Dumb is the wrong word, lets say, cheating.

All AI at the moment is just cheating with a fake UI.

We don't learn about the world by first being told what it is like. If you can fully specify an abstract system in mathematics, or use a historical corpus to answer questions --- you're nothing more than a kid cheating.

You seem to think that cynicism requires believing that animals are not, by construction, any different to incredibly absurdly dumb engineered works of our most over hyped morons.

This isnt cynicism, or scepticism, or erudition or sophistication. It's meglomania.

The whole history of evolution has not produced, in us and most animals, the most complex object (, likely,) in the entire universe to do something that alphago is doing. The level of ego here is off the charts.

This view is only a product of a pround ignorance of zoology (and so on) -- and a deep deep anti-intellectualism which says, "reality is easy to know, just build a computer program"




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