> There’s no set definition for what a chair is.
Sure there is: a chair is anything upon which I can comfortably sit without breaking it.
I find this very amusing. In philosophy of science some 20+ years ago I had a wonderful prof who went through 3(?) periods of thought. He laid out this argument, followed by the arguments seen below in this thread in various ways, in a systematic way where he convinced you that one way of thinking was correct, you took the midterm, then the next day he would lead with "everything you know is wrong, here's why.". It was beautiful.
He noted that this evolution of thought continued on until people generally argued that concepts/definitions that let you do meaningful things (your definition of meaningful, doesn't really matter what it is), are the way to go. The punchline at the very end, which happened to be the last thing I regurgitated on my last undergraduate exam, was him saying something along the lines of "Science, it beats hanging out in malls."
All this to say that if we read a little philosophy of science, that was done a long time ago (way before the class I took), things would make more sense.
I have definitely broken chairs upon sitting in them, which someone else could have sat in just fine. So it's unclear why something particular to me would change the chair-ness of an object.
Similarly, I've sat in some very uncomfortable chairs. In fact, I'd say the average chair is not a particularly comfortable one.
For a micro-moment before giving in it was a chair, then it broke. Now its no longer a chair. Its a broken chair.
That's not one, but two particularities that aren't latent to the chair itself: me (the sitter), and time.
Do you really have a personal ontology that requires you to ask the tense and person acting on a thing to know what that thing is? I suspect you don't; most people don't, because it would imply that the chair wouldn't be a chair if nobody sat on it.
A stump isn't a chair until someone decides to sit on it, at that point it becomes chair _to_ that person. Chair is only capable of acting as "chair" object if constraints are met in regards to sitter.
This is very complicated, because it now implies:
1. I can intend to sit on a chair but fail, in which case it isn't a chair (and I didn't intend to sit on it?)
2. I can intend to have my dog sit on my chair, but my dog isn't a person and so my chair isn't a chair.
This is-use distinction you're making is fine; most people have an intuition that things "act" as a thing in relation to how they're used. But to take it a step forwards and claim that a thing isn't its nature until a person sublimates their intent towards it is very unintuitive!
(In my mind, the answer is a lot simpler: a stump isn't a chair, but it's in the family network of things that are sittable, just like chairs and horses. Or to borrow Wittgenstein, a stump bears a family resemblance to a chair.)
I'm the person who asked about the definition of a chair up thread.
Just to make a very obvious point: Nobody thinks of the definition for a chair as a particularly controversial idea. But clearly:
- We don't all agree on what a chair is (is a stump a chair or not?).
- Nobody in this thread has been able to give a widely accepted definition of the word "chair"
- It seems like we can't even agree on what criteria are admissible in the definition. (Eg, does it matter that I can sit on it? Does it matter that I can intend to sit on it? Does it matter that my dog can sit on it?)
If even defining what the word "chair" means is beyond us, I hold little hope that we can ever manually explain the concept to a computer. Returning to my original point above, this is why I think expert systems style approaches are a dead end. Likewise, I think any AI system that uses formal or symbolic logic in its internal definitions will always be limited in its capacity.
And yet, I suspect chatgpt will understand all of the nuance in this conversation just fine. Like everyone else, I'm surprised how "smart" transformer based neural nets have become. But if anything has a hope of achieving AGI, I'm not surprised that:
- Its something that uses a fuzzy, non-symbolic logic internally.
- The "internal language" for its own thoughts is an emergent result of the training process rather than being explicitly and manually programmed in.
- That it translates its internal language of thought into words at the end of the thinking / inference process. Because - as this "chair" example shows - our internal definition for what a chair is is seems clear to us. But it doesn't necessarily mean we can translate that internal definition into a symbolic definition (ie with words).
I'm not convinced that current transformer architectures will get us all the way to AGI / ASI. But I think that to have a hope of achieving human level AI, you'll always want to build a system which has those elements of thought. Cyc, as far as I can tell, does not. So of course, I'm not at all surprised its being dumped.
What if it breaks in a way which renders it no longer a chair for you but not others?
This seems to imply that what is or is not a chair is a subjective or conditional.
> Sure there is: a chair is anything upon which I can comfortably sit without breaking it.
« It is often said that a disproportionate obsession with purely academic or abstract matters indicates a retreat from the problems of real life. However, most of the people engaged in such matters say that this attitude is based on three things: ignorance, stupidity, and nothing else.
Philosophers, for example, argue that they are very much concerned with the problems posed by real life.
Like, for instance, “what do we mean by real?”, and “how can we reach an empirical definition of life?”, and so on.
One definition of life, albeit not a particularly useful one, might run something like this: “Life is that property which a being will lose as a result of falling out of a cold and mysterious cave thirteen miles above ground level.”
This is not a useful definition, (A) because it could equally well refer to the subject’s glasses if he happens to be wearing them, and (B) because it fails to take into account the possibility that the subject might happen to fall onto, say, the back of an extremely large passing bird.
The first of these flaws is due to sloppy thinking, but the second is understandable, because the mere idea is quite clearly, utterly ludicrous. »
— Douglas Adams
So a warm and smelly compost pile is a chair? A cold metal park bench is not a chair (because it's uncomfortable)?
A beanbag is a chair? Perhaps a chair should be something on which one can comfortably sit without breaking that has a back and four legs. I suppose then a horse would be a chair.
Is a mountain a chair?