Mazviita Chirimuuta

I've enjoyed it.

One of the answers that might seem obvious to people is that we pursue science because we're curious.

We just want to know how the world works.

We want to reveal, discover the underlying principles of the universe, which apply in all cases.

Switching off the idea that you're just interested in nature for its own sake out of curiosity and saying, okay, how can we engineer these systems to actually do things that we want?

getting them to behave in artificial ways if those simplifications sort of allow you to achieve your technological goals there's no in principle problem with oversimplification if you're gonna say i'm not just interested in nature for its own sake i just want applied science

Seeing that as a philosopher, I thought, that's Plato.

Because Francois precisely says, we have the world of appearance.

It's complicated.

It looks intractable.

It's messy.

But underlying that real reality is neat, mathematical, decomposable.

It's not...

an argument that AI is impossible so much as why does it seem so possible, so inevitable to people?

And saying that what I'm arguing is that if you look at the history of the development of the life sciences of psychology, there are certain shifts towards a much more mechanistic understanding of both what life is and what the mind is.

which are very congenial to thinking that whatever is going on in animals like us in terms of the processes which lead to cognition, they're just mechanisms anyway.

So why couldn't you put them into an actual machine and have that actual machine do what we do?

So with all of that mechanistic history in the background, AI could seem very inevitable.

But if that mechanistic hypothesis is actually wrong, then

These claims for the inevitability of a biological like AI would not actually be well founded, but we could be subject to a kind of cultural historical illusion that this is just going to happen.