• EatATaco@lemm.ee
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    5 hours ago

    how could they tell it was truly a new thing

    Sure, there is a chance the exact question had been asked before, and answered, but we are talking remote possibilities here.

    that any description provided for it didn’t map it to another object that would behave similarly when stacking.

    If it has to say ‘this item is like that other item and thus I can use what I’ve learned about stacking that other item to stack this item’ then I would absolutely argue that it is reasoning and not just “predicting text” (or, again, predicting text might be the equivalent of reasoning).

    Stacking things isn’t a novel problem.

    Sure, stacking things is not a novel problem, which is why we have the word “stack” because it describes something we do. But stacking that list of things is (almost certainly) a novel problem. It’s just you use what you’ve learned and apply that knowledge to this new problem. A non-novel problem is if I say “2+2 = 4” and then turn around and ask you “what does 2 + 2 equal?” (Assuming you have no data set) If I then ask you “what’s 2 + 3?” that is a novel problem, even if it’s been answered before.

    I mean, I can’t dismiss that it isn’t doing something more complex, but examples like that don’t convince me that it is. It is capable of very impressive things, and even if it needs to regurgitate every answer it gives, few problems we want to solve day to day are truly novel, so regurgitating previous discussions plus a massive set of associations means that it can map a pretty large problem space to a large solution space with high accuracy.

    How are you convinced that humans are reasoning creatures? This honestly sounds like you could be describing 99.99% of human thought, meaning we almost never reason (if not actually never). Are we even reasonable?