[soloist11]

My point is that when people say computers and software can have intentions they're stating an unfounded and often confused belief about what computers are capable of as domains for arithmetic operations. Furthermore, the Curry-Howard correspondence establishes an equivalence between proofs in formal systems and computer programs. So I don't consider what the social media gurus are saying about algorithms and AI to be truthful/verifiable/valid because to argue that computers can think and have intentions is equivalent to providing a proof/program which shows that thinking and intentionality can be expressed as a statement in some formal/symbolic/logical system and then implemented on a digital computer.

None of the people who claimed that LLMs were a hop and skip away from achieving human level intelligence ever made any formal statements in a logically verifiable syntax. They simply handwaved and made vague gestures about emergence which were essentially magical beliefs about computers and software.

What you have outlined about minds and patterns seems like what Leibniz and Spinoza wrote about but I don't really know much about their writing so I don't really think what you're saying is controversial. Many people would agree that there must be irreducible properties of reality that human minds are not capable of understanding in full generality.

[skissane]

> My point is that when people say computers and software can have intentions they're stating an unfounded and often confused belief about what computers are capable of as domains for arithmetic operations. Furthermore, the Curry-Howard correspondence establishes an equivalence between proofs in formal systems and computer programs

I'd question whether that correspondence applies to actual computers though, since actual computers aren't deterministic – random number generators are a thing, including non-pseudorandom ones. As I mentioned, we can even hook a computer up to a quantum source of randomness, although few bother, since there is little practical benefit, although if you hold certain beliefs about QM, you'd say it would make the computer's indeterminism more genuine and less merely apparent

Furthermore, real world computer programs – even when they don't use any non-pseudorandom source of randomness, very often interact with external reality (humans and the physical environment), which are themselves non-deterministic (at least apparently so, whether or not ultimately so) – in a continuous feedback loop of mutual influence.

Mathematical principles such as the Curry-Howard correspondence are only true with respect to actual real-world programs if we consider them under certain limiting assumptions–assume deterministic processing of well-defined pre-arranged input, e.g. a compiler processing a given file of source code. Their validity for the many real-world programs which violate those limiting assumptions is much more questionable.

[soloist11]

Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism. Even if you include syntax for randomness it still corresponds to a proof because there are categorical semantics for stochastic systems, e.g. https://www.epatters.org/wiki/stats-ml/categorical-probabili....

[skissane]

> Even with a source of randomness the software for a computer has a formal syntax and this formal syntax must correspond to a logical formalism.

Real world computer software doesn't have a formal syntax.

Formal syntax is a model which exists in human minds, and is used by humans to model certain aspects of reality.

Real world computer software is a bunch of electrical signals (or stored charges or magnetic domains or whatever) in an electronic system.

The electrical signals/charges/etc don't have a "formal syntax". Rather, formal syntax is a tool human minds use to analyse them.

By the same argument, atoms have a "formal syntax", since we analyse them with theories of physics (the Standard Model/etc), which is expressed in mathematical notation, for which a formal syntax can be provided.

If your argument succeeds in proving that computer programs can't have intentionality, an essentially similar line of argument can be used to prove that human brains can't have intentionality either.

[soloist11]

> If your argument succeeds in proving that computer programs can't have intentionality, an essentially similar line of argument can be used to prove that human brains can't have intentionality either.

I don't see why that's true. There is no formal theory for biology, the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling it with formal language but that's not true for computers. The formal theory of computation is why it is possible to have a sequence of operations for making the parts of a computer. It wouldn't be possible to build computers if that was not the case because there would be no way to build a chip fabrication plant without a formal theory. This is not the case for brains and biology in general. There is an irreducible complexity to life and the biosphere.

[skissane]

> There is no formal theory for biology, the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling it with formal language but that's not true for computers.

We don’t know to what extent that’s an inherent property of biology or whether that’s a limitation of current human knowledge. Obviously there are a still an enormous number of facts about biology which we could know but we don’t. Suppose human technological and scientific progress continues indefinitely - in principle, after many millennia (maybe even millions of years), we might get to the point where we know all we ever could know about biology. Can we be sure at that point we might not have a “formal theory” for it?

The brain is composed of neurons. Even supposing we knew everything we ever possibly could about the biology of each individual neuron, there still might be many facts about how they interact in an overall neural network which we didn’t know. Similarly, with current artificial networks, we often have a very clear understanding of how the individual computational components work - we can analyse them with those formal theories of which you are fond - but when it comes to what the model weights do, “the complexity exceeds our capacity for modeling” (if the point of the model is to actually explain how the results are produced as opposed to just reproducing them).

> There is an irreducible complexity to life and the biosphere.

We don’t know that life is irreducibly complex and we don’t know that certain aspects of computers aren’t. Model weights may well be irreducibly complex in that they are too complex for us to explain that they work and how they work even though they obviously do. Conversely, the individual computational elements in the model lack irreducible complexity, but the same is true for individual biological components - the idea that we might one day (even if centuries from now) have a complete understanding at the level of an individual neuron is not inherently implausible, but that wouldn’t mean we’d be anywhere close to a complete understanding of how a network of billions of them works in concert. The latter might indeed be inherently beyond our understanding (“irreducibly complex”) in a way in which the former isn’t

[soloist11]

There are lots of things we don't know and that's why there is no good reason to attribute intentionality to computers and algorithms. That's been my argument the entire time. Unless there is a good argument and proof of intentionality in digital circuits it doesn't make sense to attribute to them properties possessed by living organisms.

The people who think they will achieve super human intelligence with computers and software are free to pursue their objective but I am certain it is a futile effort because the ontology and metaphysics which justifies the destruction of the biosphere in order to build more computers is extremely confused about the ultimate meaning of life, in fact, such questions/statements are not even possible to express in a computational ontology and metaphysics. But I'm not a computationalist so someone else can correct my misunderstanding by providing a computational proof of the counter-argument.