Pope Francis has died

* As Pope Francis noted, the machine “makes a technical choice among several possibilities based either on well-defined criteria or on statistical inferences. Human beings, however, not only choose, but in their hearts are capable of deciding."

* In light of this, the use of AI, as Pope Francis said, must be “accompanied by an ethic inspired by a vision of the common good, an ethic of freedom, responsibility, and fraternity, capable of fostering the full development of people in relation to others and to the whole of creation.”

* As Pope Francis observes, “in this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity.”

* As Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading”

[1] https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

Yes, LLMs are more about knowledge than intelligence. AK rather than AI.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/knowledg...

Wikipedia even has it's own page with some of the various definitions people use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_knowledge

Then we have implicit/explicit knowledge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_and_explicit_knowledg...) where some people assume one of them when they say "knowledge", others refer to the other.

In fact, there is an entire scientific field to understanding what "knowledge" actually is/means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

So yeah, it isn't as simple as looking it up in a dictionary, unfortunately.

Though intelligence is possibly even less well defined than knowledge, so it's hard to tell.

I believe intelligence goes beyond that: knowing that such a system is a solution to an observed problem, architecting said system, using the output to solve a problem, analyzing the results, and deciding where to deploy additional systems.

I think both examples above can be done by AI (if not now, then soon)—but only after being prompted carefully by a human. However, a generalized AI that can do all of the above for any problem in the known universe is likely very far off.

I question both the organ and the action.

Are we sure? No. But neither should you be. Question but be open to answers you may not expect.

Biology has a working definitions of "living organism" that includes a way to calculate likelihood that something is a living organism, but it still is probabilistic.

Understanding is another concept that depends on philosophy of the mind as opposed to concrete physical processes.

There are nuances to definitions of common words "what is blue, what is a bicycle, what is a dollar, really?", but the magnitude of variance in definition is not shared with something like "knowledge" or "intelligence."

With these high-level concepts, most people are operating only on a "I know it when I see it" test (to reference the Supreme Court case on obscenity).

Oh, I understand, so the criteria is to have a Wikipedia page like that?

You know what's interesting, I couldn't find neither of these:

* تعريفات المعرفة

* 知識嘅定義

* Définitions de la connaissance

* Definiciones de conocimiento

Should we add "and it has to be written in English" as a requirement?

I know this is arguing ad absurdum, but the point is, again, that if you choose to be that strict, you wouldn't even be able to communicate with other people, because your desired perfect 1:1 map of concepts among them doesn't even exist.

To have hardware that displays blue, and code that manipulates blue, you must have a very clear and unambiguous definition of what blue means. Notice I did not say correct, only clear and unambiguous. Your whole point seems to be that words mean what a native speaker of the language understands them to mean, which is useful in linguistics and in the editing or dictionaries, but the context of this discussion is the representation of some concept in symbols that a computer can process, which is a different thing. Indeed, it's possible that the difference between code and 'vibes' will have to be in some way addressed by those very definitions of knowledge and intelligence, so I think these are relevant questions that can't be hand-waved away.

Like you say, all words of course have different definitions between individuals, but you and I are obviously able to communicate without specifying every definition. There exists a spectrum between well-agreed-upon definitions (like "and") and fuzzier ones. The definition of "knowledge" is divisive enough that many people disagree vehemently on definitions, which is illustrated by the fact that there is a whole Wikipedia article on it.

If there is a "midwit trap" related to this, there is certainly a Sorites paradox trap as well - that because all words have varying definitions, that it is no use to point out that some words' definitions are more variable than others.

This turns out to never be true once you get into actual details. Try to buy blue house paint for a basic example.

to give an example, a quite boring "philosophy question" that's bandied around, usually by children, is "if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?". the answer is that "sound" is a word without a commonly-accepted, logically-derived meaning, for the reasons given above. so if to you the word sound is something human, then the answer is no, but if to you a sound is not something human, then the answer is yes. there's nothing particularly interesting or complex about the thought experiment, it's just a poorly defined word

To me this is the usual "it doesn't _really_ understand" claim which people say because they feel like their human exceptionality is threatened.

To Chomsky? He'd have to speak for himself, but I suspect the answer is "yes, obviously, at least to be of interest to me."

Note that I'm not saying LLMs are useless or even that what they do is usefully described as "plagiarism."

But it seems entirely unsurprising to me that Chomsky would be unimpressed and uninterested -- even to the point of dismissiveness, he's pretty much like that -- precisely because they are unrelated to "cognition."

I’ll also add that many of his admirers as well as his detractors exaggerated his virtues, his merits, and his flaws. He was both the victim of a media and film industry all too eager to spin him into the “progressive pope” — never shying away from quoting him out of context to push an agenda — and the issuer of problematic and ambiguous documents and off-the-cuff remarks that only served to generate confusion.

Intellectually, Benedict XVI and John Paul II were in a different league. As far as the Jesuits are concerned, I know that in the popular imagination, the Jesuits are imagined to be some kind of “progressive”, intellectually superior order, but historically, they were sort of the shock troops of the Church. They certainly have merits to their name. While they did become involved in education, they drew from the traditions of education in the Church. Education and scholarship, however, are not their charism. Compare that with the Dominicans, for example, who have teaching and education as their mission (Thomas Aquinas is probably their most famous member).

This website was doing the rounds not long ago: https://ismy.blue/

I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you were asking questions in good faith, but I'm not sure that's true anymore, so good luck.

We ought to avoid anthropomorphizing LLMs. It is muddle headed.

Yes...it does. "AI" aka modern flavor LLMs as we understand them today are just doing certain things thats humans can do but orders of magnitude faster. What exactly is impressive about it being able to succinctly sum up any topic under the Sun aside from the speed? It will never create a new genre of music. It will never create a new style of art from the ground up. It lacks the human spark of ingenuity. To even suggest that what it does anything close to human cognition is egregiously insulting.

If Francis held Thomistic views on the subject, then even the brain, while needed for human intelligence, does not suffice for its operation, as functions like abstraction require the intellect, which cannot be entirely physical in operation since form cannot exist in matter without also instantiating the form, something by definition opposed to abstraction.

the opinion you're parroting here completely misses the point of LLMs. their purpose is not to start artistic movements or liberally think for themselves and no one is claiming it is. their purpose is to accelerate information retrieval and translation and programming tasks, which they by and large are incredible at. even if they had the capacity to invent artistic movements, which in theory they most certainly do, starting an artistic movement is pretty much intrinsically a human thing, and it requires desire, inclination, trust and a grounding in the real world, such as it is. your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.

whether it is "cognition" or not is completely irrelevant to their purpose and use, and its a complete waste of time trying to litigate if it is or not because the word in itself is poorly defined. if you're trying to figure out if j=k but you can't define j or k, and you do know that k isn't a big factor in the usefulness of the system, then what is the point? is it jealousy? fear? I assure you, LLMs are not a threat to the special ingenuity of your mind

this opinion is the equivalent of watching the invention of the pocket calculator and complaining that it can't write calculus equations on a black board

There's a low bar if there ever was one

But as for the quote, it's incredibly clear how little empathy most people have towards others, to the point where AI will easily out-empathy them, both as a conversationalist and as a robotic assistant (such as a 24/7 robot nurse with no other patients).

I agree with the "ambiguous statements" though.

your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.

There are plenty of people/communities online that want it to be exactly that and want to remove the pesky human element from the equation. Dismissing them because it doesn't fit your argument doesn't mean they don't exist.

Sorry but not everyone is an American.

And as Conway's law applies, of course AI done by American or Chinese companies will be oppressive - with only superficial politeness à la GladOS.

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-12/vati...

others on this very thread are proposing this exact extension.

I'll ignore the supernatural suggestion.

An LLM doesn't deal with propositions, and it is propositions that are the subjects of truth claims. LLMs produce strings of characters that, when interpreted by a human reader, can look like propositions and result in propositions in the human mind, and it is those propositions that have intentionality and truth value. But what the LLMs produce are not the direct expression of propositional content, only the recombination of a large number of expressions of propositional content authored by many human authors.

People are projecting subjective convention onto the objective. The objective truth about LLMs is far poorer in substance than the conventional readings we give to what LLMs generate. There is a good deal of superstition and magical thinking that surrounds LLMs.

I didn't say the heart plays a role in intelligence. I simply allowed for the possibility for the sake of argument. The central claim is that no one (here, Francis and his writers) who uses the word "heart" colloquially is making the claim that the heart-as-organ is the seat of intelligence or what have you.

You're committing a vulgar equivocation fallacy that the average person with common sense would recognize. I have a difficult time believing you don't understand something so obvious.

Isn't that what I said? I merely said it is not their charism, not their specialty. The point is that in the popular imagination, people elevate them above orders who not only have a better historical record, but whose mission is to educate, study, etc.

That isn't to downplay the good contributions of the Jesuits, but I can point you to Jesuits (who, as an order, are in poor shape these days, tbh) who would say the same thing. The popular imagination is simply ignorant or tendentious on this point in its exaggeration relative to the others.