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by superloika 10 days ago
There is no intelligence. If anything, this just shows that natural language and mathematics are both fields which are structured in a logically computable way. And if you have a machine that can compute symbolic logic, you can process both natural language and mathematics.

A second corollary is that rational consciousness and thought is less likely to be contained in language than previously thought, because if language is so simple that a machine can process it, it can't contain consciousness.
2 comments
ben_w 10 days ago
If natural language was structured in a logically computable way, we'd have had interesting chatbots by the late 80s, basically as soon as a dictionary fit in local RAM, and for the same reason we got compilers.

Da hole raisin y nat-lang be v. hard is dat i kan rite lik dis an it be cool 4 native engrish speekrs 2 unerstand. LLMs are of course fine with this sentence in exactly the way that Zork's engine couldn't be.

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superloika 10 days ago
The underlying structure of language, which is grammar, is obviously logical. That the symbols used to represent this grammar can be sometimes fuzzy or ambiguous, is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure.
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ben_w 10 days ago
It's not "obviously logical", it's a pattern which we mimic to avoid mockery.

example For, semi-randomise I word order can this like, Yoda worse than, and be understood.

> is no problem for a machine that takes context and probability into account when translating words to the underlying grammar structure.

We had to invent Transformers to be able to do that with reliability anything close to being worth caring about. Transformers have to learn from examples, not be pre-programmed.

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EnergyAmy 10 days ago
The idea that grammar is all it takes to process natural language is absolute beans.
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AgentME 10 days ago
That's just defining intelligence or consciousness as whatever we specifically can't put in a machine. It's not a very useful definition. (And it's one that completely breaks down to nothing if we do manage to fully put these things into machines or somehow prove it's possible.)
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