• queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      9 days ago

      I’m saying that the terms “natural” and “artificial” are in a dialectical relationship, they define each other by their contradictions. Those words don’t mean anything once you include everything humans do as natural; you’ve effectively defined “artificial” out of existence and as a result also defined “natural” out of existence.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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        9 days ago

        I haven’t defined artificial out of existence at all. My definition of artificial is a system that was consciously engineered by humans. The human mind is a product of natural evolutionary processes. Therefore, the way we perceive and interpret the world is inherently a natural process. I don’t see how it makes sense to say that human representation of the world is not natural.

        An example of something that’s artificial would be taking a neural network we designed, and having it build a novel representation of the world that’s unbiased by us from raw inputs. It would be an designed system, as opposed to one that evolved naturally, with its own artificial representation of the world.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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          9 days ago

          My definition of artificial is a system that was consciously engineered by humans.

          And humans consciously decided what data to include, consciously created most of the data themselves, and consciously annotated the data for training. Conscious decisions are all over the dataset, even if they didn’t design the neural network directly from the ground up. The system still evolved from conscious inputs, you can’t erase its roots and call it natural.

          Human-like object concept representations emerge from datasets made by humans because humans made them.

          • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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            9 days ago

            Human-like object concept representations emerge from datasets made by humans because humans made them.

            And humans made them that way because human minds evolved to represent data in this way. As I keep pointing out, we’re feeding data into neural networks that’s organized in a way that’s natural for our brains to operate on. It’s an artificial system that mimics the way we naturally represent data in our own minds.

            The artificial aspect of the system lies in the implementation details. The ways we’ve come up to encode data. These are not essential. It’s like a difference between an algorithm, and its concrete implementation in a programming language. The fact that the data is encoded using human designed formats is incidental to the structure of the data which is derived from the way our brains encode information.

            Human-like object concept representations emerge from the way our brains are structured. These are the representations that are encoded into data sets by humans.

            Also, you’ve talked about a dialectical relationship, but dialectics are about understanding evolution of dynamic systems. The contradictions represent the opposing forces within a system that guide its development over time. When we talk about a distinction between natural and artificial, what’s the system that we’re discussing here what are the opposing forces?