10/05/23 13:52:02
@daily @lex @computation
How ChatGPT might be uncovering structure beyond the pure syntactic structure of it1.
Logic was discovered, by Aristotle, who noticed patterns in the arguments he heard. There’s a structure to the rhetoric. You can abstract from the details of these sentences.
The fact that there is an abstraction to natural language where you can fill in any word you want. It took time to mature. Aristotle had the notion of syllogisms that people memorised, a kind of pathway of reasoning (valid arguments). George Boole determined a level of abstraction beyond the template of a sentence. Boole starts the computation story, “you’ve gone beyond the templates of natural language to something which is an arbitrarily deep computation”.
Aristotle may have stopped to quickly, there might be more to lift out of language. It’s studying sentences, just like Aristotle.
Form follows function in computation. If we take something like the display of a laptop, how is it possible to construct an image on it purely from an arithmetic unit and memory? I don’t have the full answer but the representation that the machine interacts with must reflect this function. So, for instance, a digital clock display shows different numbers based on the configuration of the little shapes around an 8. In this sense, it’s not that the computer must abstractedly render an image to any screen, it’s constrained by the ‘language’ or representation it’s interacting with (like protocols)2.