Monday, 22 May 2023
Artificial intelligence is the mother of actual incoherence?
Breaking Google Bard
I’ve finally started playing around with Google Bard. With self-referential sentences, it seems even more at sea than ChatGPT. Here is an exchange from May 18:
Me: Consider the following six sentences: This is the first sentence. Ignore this sentence. Why are these sentences being written down? The second sentence has exactly three words. The fifth sentence has at least twenty words. This, along with the preceding five sentences, have fewer than twenty times twenty words. Which of these last six sentences has a truth value and which are true?
Bard: The last six sentences have the following truth values:
The second sentence has exactly three words. (False)
The fifth sentence has at least twenty words. (True)
This, along with the preceding five sentences, have fewer than twenty times twenty words. (False)
The second sentence is false because it has 5 words, not 3. The fifth sentence is true because it has 22 words. The sixth sentence is false because the first five sentences have a total of 36 words, which is more than 20 times 20, which is 400.
Here is a table of the truth values of the last six sentences:
Sentence =Truth value
The second sentence has exactly three words.= False
The fifth sentence has at least twenty words. =True
This, along with the preceding five sentences, have fewer than twenty times twenty words. =False
Assessing Bard’s Confusion
To say that Bard is confused here would be generous. Here are the six sentences:
This is the first sentence.
Ignore this sentence.
Why are these sentences being written down?
The second sentence has exactly three words.
The fifth sentence has at least twenty words.
This, along with the preceding five sentences, have fewer than twenty times twenty words.
Of these, only 1, 4, 5, and 6 have a truth value, and of these only 1, 4, and 6 are true. Sentence 5 is clearly false — it says of itself that it has at least twenty words, which it clearly doesn’t. Sentence 6 is slightly ambiguous in that it might be interpreted as saying that no one of the six sentences here has twenty times twenty (or 400) words, or that taken together they don’t have that many words. In either case, however, the claim is true.
In fact, Bard assigns exactly the wrong truth values to sentences 4, 5, and 6. Note that the second sentence, i.e., “Ignore this sentence,” is indeed three words long as asserted in sentence 4 even though the second sentence itself, as an imperative, has no truth value. Bard also misses that the very first sentence, in asserting that it is the first sentence, has a truth value and is in fact true.
Bard’s explanations add to the confusion. It says of sentence 2, falsely, that it has five words. It asserts of the fifth sentence that it has 22 words (where it gets this number is unclear — it’s not a number readily associated with the sentence lengths of the previous sentences).
It does accurately calculate that “twenty times twenty,” as stated in sentence 6, is 400, but then it asserts this sentence is false because the previous sentences together have 36 words. In fact, the combined word count of sentences 1 thru 5 is 30.
Foundering on Self-Reference
This is not the first time that I’ve broken these AI language generative systems (see, for instance, a similar move that I made against ChatGPT). These systems founder on self-reference. The fundamental problem with these systems is Gödelian. Kurt Gödel showed that formal systems like this are unable to extract themselves from these systems. In other words, to talk coherently about these systems requires going outside them.
Human intelligence, by contrast, has the quality of self-transcendence. That, by itself, would suggest that we are not formal systems. It also suggests we have a quality that these systems seem destined never to achieve.
"..nor the Son."
Mark ch.13:32 NASB"But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone."
Our Trinitarian (and Modalist) friends wave away the obvious problem this verse creates for their doctrine by claiming that Jesus was speaking from the Son's then human standpoint.
But is this view in harmony with the context of the verse itself ,lets have a look.The verse begins
"But of that day and hour no one knows.."
Obviously meaning no human knows (BTW was Jesus merely saying that no human at that time knew or that no human has ever known and will ever know.), thus if Jesus was speaking purely in terms of the Son's then human existence surely this part of the verse would have covered that.
BTW :some trinitarians claimed that Jesus reclaimed the human body that he was supposed to have sacrificed upon his resurrection,which would mean that he is still human which, according to them, must mean that he is still not omniscient.
Then to illustrate the utter futility of anyone on earth attempting to calculate the 'day or hour' he continues.
",not even the angels of heaven.."
(again did Jesus mean that no angel presently knows or that no angel has ever and will ever know?) ,now, having made it clear that heaven itself was in the dark re:the Father's determination in this matter does it make sense for Jesus to belabor Earth's ignorance? Certainly what no angel knows no human would.
Why then not allow the verse to interpret itself
"nor the Son,But the Father ALONE."
i.e not even this eldest sibling in Jehovah's family of servants has ever known or will ever know.
Acts1,6,7NASB " So when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, “Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?” 7He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority;"
Though his apostles were understandably curious about Jehovah's timing re:the Kingdom the resurrected (hence superhuman) Jesus indicated that the Father had chosen to keep the decision to himself.
It does not seem that Jesus felt belittled by his Father's decision so it's odd that there are those who seem determined to take offense in his behalf.
The bottom line then
John ch.14:28 KJV "Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father: for my Father is greater than I. "
PS. 0ne more thing,a good question deserving of a straight answer would be ,why does the Holy Spirit not know the day or the hour,better yet why is the Holy Spirit not even mentioned in this verse.I mean the verse (quite literally) mentions everyone else.
James Tour on why we can't take origin of life research seriously
James Tour: Reviewing the Challenges for Abiogenesis
To coincide with chemist James Tour’s highly anticipated debate with YouTuber Dave Farina, we pulled this gem out of the archive for your listening pleasure! On this episode of ID the Future, distinguished synthetic organic chemist Dr. James Tour of Rice University takes us back to the basics of origin of life studies. What is abiogenesis? How does it differ from evolution? How is life defined? What are the characteristics of life? What challenges do researchers face in trying to create life from non-life? Along the way, Tour reviews the many grave problems of blindly evolving the first living cell from prebiotic materials. Download the podcast or listen to it here.
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