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Comment by david-gpu | Hacker News Reader

Good luck writing a Lean proof of a nontrivial theorem by giving a keyboard to a thousand coke-fueled monkeys. If only it was that easy.

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To an extent, that is what automated theorem provers (e.g., SAT/SMT solvers) do quite successfully. The monkeys have very good heuristics and avoid going down unnecessary paths, but they are still monkeys. Similarly, AI might be very good at recognizing patterns (which is very useful!), but doesn't necessarily demonstrate any kind of real understanding.

> doesn't necessarily demonstrate any kind of real understanding

That is an unfalsifiable non-argument, a thought-terminating cliché.

Not at all. It's an open question and it's also probably semantically ambiguous. It's cliche to the extent that recently it comes up repeatedly. Regardless of all that it's nonetheless a valid question.

Please go ahead and provide a working definition of what "understanding" means, in a way that an information processing system can be objectively classified as "understanding" or "non-understanding".

Bonus points if it is able to discriminate between human understanding and nonhuman understanding, without vaguely referring to biology.

Failing that, the question seems to me unfalsifiable as per Popper.

You seem to be agreeing with me. I said it's an open question so expecting me to rigorously answer it in an HN comment is quite absurd, no?

There's nothing unfalsifiable about pointing out that we don't know something.

Closely related, "is this machine conscious" is an important question when it comes to ethics yet runs into the exact same problem. Yet you can hopefully see the issue with blindly deciding in either direction on that one.

It's not just an open question. It's such a fundamentally vague and imprecise concept, that it is not approachable, even in principle. Just like consciousness, as you correctly point out.

We don't have a tool or a ruleset to determine whether something is "conscious" or "has real understanding", as the other user put it. And, thus, the statement "X has real understanding" is unfalsifiable.

It is also a thought-terminating cliche [0], because by opening that can of worms the conversation is automatically derailed, as we just saw exemplified here.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

Strange to be against this when it works so well in other industries.

1. Well, mathematics isn't other industries

2. It really doesn't work well in other industries either.

My point is that the AI agents are not trying things at random.

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