Do you avoid red meat? Also, do you worry about cholesterol intake from the meat and eggs?
512 karma · joined May 15, 2015
As the article hints at, his line of argument was a completely valid criticism of AI based on a set of rules written with symbolic logic. He arrived at this conclusion after studying Heidegger's concept of dasein. The best way to describe dasein is through a classic example [1]:
"...the hammer is involved in an act of hammering; that hammering is involved in making something fast; and that making something fast is involved in protecting the human agent against bad weather. Such totalities of involvements are the contexts of everyday equipmental practice. As such, they define equipmental entities, so the hammer is intelligible as what it is only with respect to the shelter and, indeed, all the other items of equipment to which it meaningfully relates in Dasein's everyday practices. "
In Heidegger's mind, meaning is distributed across the web of interrelationships between objects and their various uses and ideas to humans. Intelligence was thus a process of knowing those relationships, and being a part of them. Being-in-the-world (dasein is a German word related to 'being') is a result of us as humans being 'thrown' into the web of meaning, in fact we are born already finding ourselves in it.
Dreyfus' objections to AI stemmed from the idea that computers are thrown into the world differently from us. They are the hammer in the anecdote, and not the human. During the class, we argued a lot with him about whether humans are the only creatures that have 'being-in-the-world'. We asked about the idea of the soul, and why humans are unique in this paradigm. My feeling after the end was that his entire philosophy comes directly from Heidegger. And since Heidegger didn't mention animals, or the lack of souls, his conclusion was "dunno".
Related to this, Dreyfus had an understanding of physics that was quite antiquated and classical. One example was the concept of time. According to Dreyfus, the physicists' notion of time was a series of discrete observations along a timeline, whereas humans experience time in stretches and long segments. I remember telling him that the notion of a single instant of time is poorly defined in quantum physics, and that we do recognize that every event has some time uncertainty. I remember asking him why we couldn't model human experience with some complicated function. For him, everything came back to Heidegger. To him, we physicists were being too reductionist, and there is indeed something about humans that cannot be described using physics. He stopped shy of calling it a soul, but it was essentially that.
[ETA: I now remember talking to him about Conway's game of life, and how a simple set of rules could result in complex, often hard to model behavior. My point was emergent systems exist within physics, and the way we describe them is different from single particles. His reply suggested that he was certain that human experience wasn't just 'emergent' - it was fundamentally different from anything in physics, no matter what.]
The class was on physics vs philosophy, and we disagreed. I don't think he really understood what I was trying to tell him. This was in 2013, before most of the deep learning revolution, but I think he would have the same objections with what we have now. Here are two possible directions we can go from here:
1) Argue with continental philosophers about reductionism and whether humans have a unique essence that cannot be modeled.
2) Understand Heidegger's and Dreyfus' thoughts about being and time, and drive AI research in better directions.
I prefer (2), because I already tried (1) with Dreyfus and it wasn't successful or productive.
I think understanding and modeling the graph of inter-relationships between objects and humans is exactly where we need to improve when it comes to AGI. It's probably going to need a good degree of embodiedness, an idea of a computer being thrown-into-the-world. Dreyfus would tell us that it's fundamentally impossible, and that we should all just give up on it. I think he came to the wrong conclusion. What I get from Heidegger is not "AGI is impossible" but rather "hey, this is what we should be worrying about. This is how humans see the world".
TLDR: Dreyfus had some good ideas about AI. I think it's extremely insightful to pay attention his thoughts. Don't waste time worrying about his arguments against physicalism.
But more generally, I'm often out of the service area when I'm backpacking here in the US, so no internet for a week or more. I suppose by backpacking I strictly mean multi-day wilderness camping on remote trails, and not well-established treks between huts or campgrounds.
I ended up losing my camera charger too, so I had to sketch everything I saw in my journal. I got pretty good at it, and realized how much more methodical, thoughtful, and slow sketching is, compared to photography. It was an enlightening experience. I bet you treasure your journal a lot. I certainly do.
I'm trying to interact with superfluids. I use CUDA + OpenGL to simulate the superfluid, and then interact with the mouse or a leap motion.
Check out Carol Dweck's research. Here's an early article: [https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/14/science/praise-children-f...]. Note that there are some criticisms of her work, and like many other studies in psychology, reproducibility is an issue. However, I found this quite useful in diagnosing my own thinking patterns towards effort.
Could you elaborate a bit on this? I think I know what you mean, but I'd like to hear more if you don't mind.
[ETA: a large number of media lab projects are still really good, as the other commenter mentioned]
Questions of understanding lead to scientific research and analytical thinking, and that's exactly what a large fraction of the human population lacks. I'd say that's the only goal of education: to create people who can think for themselves.
* Eh. Running around the Charles in the fall is glorious. Mt Auburn cemetery is awesome. There's a crazy diversity of architecture from Mass Hall in Harvard Yard to the Stata Center.
* It's a windy city. The average wind speed of the Boston area is higher than Chicago.
* Affordable housing is a serious issue in a lot of cities, especially ones with a rapidly growing population of high-salary tech jobs.
* As much as people hate the Red line, it's old, and it works. Yes it's delayed often, but at rush hour it's packed with people who don't want to use cars.
* Central is central. There's tons of ok restaurants, and it's lively enough for me. As 'downtowns' go, it's not intolerably dirty or worse, dead. As public art goes, it's not Lisbon, but it's quite fun.
* They're clearly trying to improve the bike lanes. It's gotten a lot better over the 6 years I've been here.
* More specific road issues: yes, it's in a state of change, and there are a bunch of old streets. I'll always have complaints about cities. Considering it started as the oldest grid-planned town in the US, it's not all that bad.
It's interesting to see the political pushback from conservatives. Still, removing parking seems like a good way to get rid of cars (especially that large fraction of traffic that circles around cities searching for parking).