• 0 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 12th, 2023

help-circle






  • Your first two paragraphs seem to rail against a philosophical conclusion made by the authors by virtue of carrying out the Turing test. Something like “this is evidence of machine consciousness” for example. I don’t really get the impression that any such claim was made, or that more education in epistemology would have changed anything.

    In a world where GPT4 exists, the question of whether one person can be fooled by one chatbot in one conversation is long since uninteresting. The question of whether specific models can achieve statistically significant success is maybe a bit more compelling, not because it’s some kind of breakthrough but because it makes a generalized claim.

    Re: your edit, Turing explicitly puts forth the imitation game scenario as a practicable proxy for the question of machine intelligence, “can machines think?”. He directly argues that this scenario is indeed a reasonable proxy for that question. His argument, as he admits, is not a strongly held conviction or rigorous argument, but “recitations tending to produce belief,” insofar as they are hard to rebut, or their rebuttals tend to be flawed. The whole paper was to poke at the apparent differences between (a futuristic) machine intelligence and human intelligence. In this way, the Turing test is indeed a measure of intelligence. It’s not to say that a machine passing the test is somehow in possession of a human-like mind or has reached a significant milestone of intelligence.

    https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238


  • There are different things which could be called “infinite numbers.” The one discussed in the other reply is “cardinal numbers” or “cardinalities,” which are “the sizes of sets.” This is the one that’s typically meant when it’s claimed that “some infinities are bigger than others,” because e.g. the set of natural numbers is smaller (in the sense of cardinality) than the set of real numbers.

    Ordinal numbers are another. Whereas cardinals extend the notion of “how many” to the infinite scale, ordinals extend the notion of “sequence.” Just like a natural number always has a successor, an ordinal does too. We bridge the gap to infinity by defining an ordinal as e.g. “the set of ordinals preceding it.” So {} is the first one, called 0, and {{}} is the next one (1), and so on. The set of all finite ordinals (natural numbers) {{}, {{}}, …} = {0, 1, 2, 3, …} is an ordinal too, the first infinite one, called omega. And now clearly {omega} = omega + 1 is next.

    Hyperreal numbers extend the real numbers rather than just the naturals, and their definition is a little more contrived. You can think of it as “the real numbers plus an infinite number omega,” with reasonable definitions for addition and multiplication and such, so that e.g. 1/omega is an infinitesimal (greater than zero but smaller than any positive real number). In this context, omega + 1 or 2 * omega are greater than omega.

    Surreal numbers are yet another, extending both the real and hyperreal numbers (so by default the answer is “yes” here too).

    The extended real numbers are just “the real numbers plus two formal symbols, “infinity” and “negative infinity”.” This lacks the rich algebraic structure of the hyperreals, but can be used to simplify expressions involving limits of real numbers. For example, in the extended reals, “infinity plus one is infinity” is a shorthand for the fact that “if a_n is a series approaching infinity as n -> infinity, then (a_n + 1) approaches infinity as n -> infinity.” In this context, there are no “different kinds of infinity.”

    The list goes on, but generally, yes-- most things that are reasonably called “infinite numbers” have a concept of “larger infinities.”