[haltIncomplete]

All we’re doing is engineering new data compression and retrieval techniques: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668

Are we sure there’s anything “net new” to find within the same old x86 machines, within the same old axiomatic systems of the past?

Math is a few operations applied to carving up stuff and we believe we can do that infinitely in theory. So “all math that abides our axiomatic underpinnings” is valid regardless if we “prove it” or not.

Physical space we can exist in, a middle ground of reality we evolved just so to exist in, seems to be finite; I can’t just up and move to Titan or Mars. So our computers are coupled to the same constraints of observation and understanding as us.

What about daily life will be upended reconfirming decades old experiment? How is this not living in sunk cost fallacy?

When all you have is a hammer…

I’m reminded of Einstein’s quote about insanity.

[aldousd666]

Einstein didn't say that about insanity, but... systems exist and are consistently described by particular equations at particular scales. Sure we can say everything is quantum mechanics, even classical physics can technically be translated as a series of wave functions that explain the same behaviors we observe, if we could measure it... But it's impractical, and some of the concepts we think of as fundamental to certain scales, like nucleons, didn't exist at others, like equations that describe the energy of empty space. So, it's maybe not quite a fallacy to point out that not every concept we find to be useful, like deep learning inference, encapsulate every rule at every scale that we know about down to the electrons, cogently. Because none of our theories do that, and even if they did, we couldn't measure or process all the things needed to check and see if we're even right. So we use models that differ from each other, but that emerge from each other, but only when we cross certain scale thresholds.

[samus]

If you abstract far enough then yes, everything what we are doing is somehow akin to what we have done before. But that then also applies to what Einstein has done.