How is it delusion? If they don't want to work with certain types of government contracts they have the right to state so. Its just thuggery from Trump.
As an example, the naming of Turing computers is really unfortunate. People who don't know what it is vastly underestimate its modeling power. As of yet all physical laws we know are turing computable, so for instance if you want to go "outside" you have to show hypercomputation.
If Turing computers are so powerful, then what do say about ethics and morality? Have the various ethical dilemmas been completely solved by computation now?
This is kind of the point of the thread - being mathematically and scientifically knowledgeable and rigorous can lead to different perceptions and definitions of "reality" (and maybe "truth"). But right now, we need ethics more than ever, and that's largely outside the realm of science.
The reality of a scientist is that everything is made of atoms, which are made of electrons & protons (even that's oversimplifying), there are various biological pathways to do whatever, planets orbit the sun, blah blah.
The reality of the person on the street is that they are hungry and would like a warm place to sleep, out of the rain.
Another thing to remember is that the "common people" example you gave aren't much better. Bible belt would be a good example, statistically a lot of them for instance hate gays. People are fucking assholes, people with more money just have more means to execute it.
Herein lies the problem: assuming that all people in a location/area are like that. Black and white thinking is the antithesis to a humanistic approach. Even worse is thinking your perspective is the "best" one and that whatever decisions you make are, of course, best for everyone.
We'd do a lot better if we accepted that everybody is different and homogeneity and the drive to force it on others is a disease of the mind. Yeah, there are plenty of assholes, but consider why: because someone taught that person as they were growing up (either directly or indirectly) that being an asshole protects you. I'm frequently an asshole because I got picked on when I was younger. But guess what? For the right situations, it works. For others a more gentle touch is fitting. That's the dynamic to encode into tech: leveraging a combination of deterministic and non-deterministic systems to create adaptable systems that relish in a mess as opposed to fall apart because they're too rigidly shaped to accommodate the most and only favor the perspective of the few. That's how you get inhumane systems: they're designed and maintained by people living completely different lives from the people they're building for.
I just feel people project unnatural evil to billionaires. Interacting with "everyday common" people leaves me with a no better view. I have had to repeatedly lower my opinion of humanity. If anything I think billionaires are better in many ways. Whatever the reasons be, the big ai labs are doing high end math and science problems for free even though there is no need to. Or if people think billionaires don't pay enough to society, what percentage of their own money have they donated? If you are a person with a house in San Francisco or New York, you are actually "elite" and you should ask yourself how much you have contributed to others if you think billionaires don't.
You said it much better than me. Without a grounding in physical sciences, philsophies about topics like consciousness just end up in pointless circles or even absurdities. The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example. So a lot of problems that feel "metaphysical" today may soon fall to the grinding tank of natural science, as they always did over the past several centuries. Another thing is, people who don't know thermodynamics will be prone to thinking things like aphysical items can cause thoughts, without explaining how you are able to reconcile it with energy conservation since information requires energy. Not knowing turing computability makes people posit things like claiming quantum something and thus not a computer.
> Another thing is, people who don't know thermodynamics will be prone to thinking things like aphysical items can cause thoughts, without explaining how you are able to reconcile it with energy conservation since information requires energy.
Yes. This is one of the main key insights that hasn't percolated to the humanities just yet. It's even not fully appreciated in STEM. Computer science is not a pure branch of mathematics anymore, because computation is an actual thermodynamical phenomenon, with identified and measured energy requirements. CS is part of physics now, and not in a trivial sense of "computers are physical devices", but a fundamental one - "computation itself is a physical process".
> The atomism theory itself was a circular endless philosophical debate until we got sharper tools and better data for example.
(EDIT: matched GP's typo fix in quote)
Exactly, and same is true about everything from medicine or sociology - better tools allowed us to see answers to questions that previously were just discussed in abstract by philosophers.
I'm convinced cognitive sciences and sociology are about to see this happening to them, thanks to LLMs. It doesn't matter whether an LLM "truly thinks" or is just a facsimile - it's similar enough behaviorally to be interesting, and unlike a human mind, LLM "intelligence" is a computational artifacts in the engineering sense, reified as a big bag of floats configuring a structurally simple circuit. We can study that directly - slice nad and dice and prod, and what's more, we can study how they're forming - how the training turns the values from completely random to something that makes the circuit understand natural language and perform feats of general-purpose intelligence.
I bet it's gonna solve a lot of philosophical questions too, by allowing us to observe how the thing works in practice.
(Though it might still take decades for those observations to sink in; I mean LLMs are already direct empirical evidence disproving various ideas of Chomsky and Searle, yet I still see people talking about symbolic semantics and Chinese room in earnest every other day on HN...)
Yes atomism felt equally inresolvable back then, but after hard data and better tooling suddenly it is a scientific and physical problem. Consciousness will succumb too most probably. But of course there is the usual difficulty of religious people and others with hidden supernatural beliefs.
My preferred or natural way to engage with the arts is through music. It doesn't make me change my philosophical views usually as most musicians, at least the ones I listen to are poor philosophers/mathematicians. Mathematics, I fully agree, its a foundational language of all structure and form. Equally important to what you call "tech" or "humanities" or any other human endeavor. Law, etc, obviously important. Philosophy, depends on the branch, but some of it is quite important to mathematics. I am not inclined toward literature (as in its just entertainment for me not a philosophical engagement) but I understand it can work great as so.
Do we have any examples of societies or governments ran by humanities people? I at least don't know any country ran by tech execs. If we can find examples of both, then we can compare and see.
Tech exec's don't always veer STEM, eg. Musk is a Business Grad who took "Physics for Business Grad" bridging courses, Paul Graham is a Philosophy grad.
China is said to be top heavy in actual STEM graduates at the party committee five year plan level.
A number of countries are top heavy in politico's with a formal Law degree, eg. Australia.
China inherited the dictatorship from communists. I am not sure if we can blame the dictatorial rule to the STEM people. But still, China seems quite good otherwise.
I think Law could be a example in favor of humanities, as eg many of the founders of the American government were from a background in law.
I was about to add if Law is considered part of humanities. Many of the better governments have been founded by law background people, so I'd say that is at least a data point.
That's just the Prime Minister. One person being from tech background doesn't make it a system ran by techs if the rest are of some other viewpoint or profession. So we would need examples of both governments ran by a group of humanities people having the "real power" and compare it to a government ran by a group of technical/engineering people.
You said the current UK government is mostly Philosophy background people. So how would you rate its performance?
See for example 'philosophers' of consciousness who can't do thermodynamics, turing computability and information theory. One would expect these three fields are the basic and inexhaustive baseline requirements to put any theory on consciousness.
I won't blame Kieerkegaard for using the only knowledge available to him at that time. Let us take David Chalmers as an example. His degree is not in Physics or Computer Science and a quick google doesn't show me if he has any capability in thermodynamics. He could still have learned the subject and be capable of solving thermodynamics problems and placing thermodynamic arguments. If you are familiar with Chalmers, can you confirm or deny that?
Michael Polanyi seems a bonafide physicist, I'd be fine with his works on consciousness.
David Chalmers is Australian university educated, like myself, Dominic Hyde (metaphysics), Jerome Gauntlett (quantum field theory), and others all of the same generation - we all had the same undergraduate exposure to physics, pure applied mathematics, and can handle thermodynamics, information theory, Turing computability, and related undergraduate topics.
Chalmers specialised in pure mathematics, was broad enough to get a Rhodes Scholarship and jumped ship for being a global leader(?)(according to some) in philosophy of the mind.
Perhaps you're thinking of Dennett who was more of a biology nerd, although I see no reason to think he is incapable of grasping thermodynamics, information theory, and Turing computability given his broad autodidact tendencies.
It might be an issue with how you think of Philosophers then, you've just essentially given a seal of approval to Dennett and Chalmers who are regarded by some as the leading names in philosophy of the mind.
( Also, say, Stan Dahaene, David Rosenthal, Jesse Prinz, Guilio Tononi, and others also I guess )
Stuff like information theory and computability are part and parcel of educating about thinking, math, and physics for late 20th century universities.
Yes then thank god. Without thermodynamics/information theory/computability its easy to fall into nonsense. What I have read of Chalmers and Dennett I haven't found much issue with (Chalmers is a bit subtler but at least he doesn't seem to have any issue believing an ai could be conscious). I have planned to read more of their work.
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