The Thoughts the Civilized Keep

&gt;&gt; Yet the connections GPT-3 makes are not illusory or concocted from thin air. It and many other machine learning models for natural language processing and generating do, in fact, track and reproduce real features of the symbolic order in which humans express thought. And yet, they do so without needing to have any thoughts to express.<p>Unfortunately there are plenty of people who seem to do that as well.<p>&gt;&gt; But the purpose of thought — what thought is good for — is a question widely neglected today, or else taken to have trivial, self-evident answers. Yet the answers are neither unimportant, nor obvious.<p>I thought the entire purpose of having a brain is to A) predict the future and B) plan for it ahead of time by C) making predictions about outcomes based on our various possible actions. The entire purpose of the brain is to predict and control. That&#x27;s why projection is so important.

&gt; Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever.<p>Ah, right, it won&#x27;t work because it doesn&#x27;t have a soul. Got it.

&gt; Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated computation or behavior, no matter how clever. Understanding is not an act but a labor. Labor is entirely irrelevant to a computational model that has no history or trajectory in the world.<p>For more along these lines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Situated_cognition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Situated_cognition</a>

&gt; Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.<p>I can&#x27;t help but read this as &quot;automation&quot;.<p>I think there is an interesting philosophical overlap between automation and intelligence. Perhaps some virtuous cycle exists between these things. Like, consciousness is probably only feasible because so much of what happens in our biology occurs without actual intent. If you had to actively process the dilation of your blood vessels or digestion of food, there wouldn&#x27;t be much room left over for other higher functions.<p>You see this in tech too. For instance, build automation makes it feasible to then go and do certain things that otherwise would have seemed too complex or costly if someone was baking software by hand.

Why does this read to me like an overview of a D&amp;D module where our intrepid PCs fight their way to the emotionless lich king at the heart of the keep? Is it the language use? The priming effect of the image?

&gt; For AI researchers to move past the behaviorist conflation of thought and action, the field needs to drink again from the philosophical waters that fed much AI research in the late 20th century, when the field was theoretically rich, albeit technically floundering.<p>Well, gosh. Fancy a professor of philosophy deciding that AI needs more philosophy. Clearly, if the price of making progress in the field is to engage in all this ugly mathematics and -eww- <i>engineering</i>, then it&#x27;s no price worth paying.