> "The basic topic of my address today concerns how much of cognition is in the head of the infant and how much in the mind of the theoretician. My general stance is that we are being treated to an interpretive flavor of infant behavior that is much too rich."

—— Who put the cog in infant cognition? Is rich interpretation too costly? https://home.fau.edu/lewkowic/web/Haith_Critique%20of%20Cogn...

What we now call food addiction is exactly what kept our ancestors alive during famines.

John Searle treated understanding like some magical binary property you either have or you dont. LLMs proved that understanding isnt a static noun, it is an emergent phenomenon.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48471908

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If we look beyond written languages which are late inventions of human civilization, oral languages are continuous and build with blocks not words.

Chomskyan school misled the entire field of linguistics for decades by ignoring spoken languages.

People can tolerate missing words surprisingly well. If a phrase is slightly clipped, masked by noise, or dropped, the listener can often infer it from context. That happens constantly in real speech.

But pauses and stalls are much more damaging. A sudden freeze in the middle of speech breaks turn-taking, timing, and attention. It feels like the speaker stopped thinking, the connection died, or the system got stuck.

For voice UX, a tiny omission is often less harmful than a perfectly complete sentence that freezes halfway.

Dawkins-style atheism is not “reject anything without a complete causal model.” It is a rejection of hypotheses with no explanatory gain, no empirical constraint, and unlimited ad hoc flexibility — like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Consciousness is different. It is first a phenomenon, not an already-settled causal model. We do not believe humans, infants, or animals are conscious because we possess a complete mechanism for subjective experience. We infer consciousness from a cluster of phenomena that need explanation.

So the lack of a full causal account warrants caution, not denial. It is reasonable to say current AI gives weak evidence for consciousness. But that is not the same as saying AI consciousness is equivalent to believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

History shows he fundamentally misunderstood the human capacity for adaptation. Rather than succumbing to a sea of printed garbage, society developed sophisticated new filters. We invented the modern bibliography, the peer-review process, the concept of a "trusted publisher," and the critical literacy skills required to navigate a world where information was no longer a rare luxury. Humans have an innate drive to seek out signal over noise. Just as the chaos of the early printing era eventually gave way to the Enlightenment, our current struggle with synthetic content will likely trigger a new evolution in how we verify truth and value human insight.

When it comes to long distance shipping or aviation, the energy density of liquid fuel is simply too hard to beat. Fossil fuels will stay dominant for decades, likely evolving into carbon captured or bio derived alternatives rather than being replaced by batteries.

Divorcing research from "learning by doing" is a recipe for a bureaucratic ivory tower. If you only funnel money into pure research without the messy, expensive, and often "wasteful" reality of large-scale deployment, you end up with an economy of academic metrics rather than industrial power.

The most damning evidence against the "research-only" model is the birth of the Transformer architecture. It did not emerge from an ivory tower funded by bureaucratic grants or academic peer-review cycles; it was forged in the fires of industrial practice.

History shows that a fixation on immediate social utility or "rational" cost analysis can be a strategic trap. During the same era, Qing Dynasty bureaucrats employed your exact logic, arguing that the astronomical costs of industrialization and rail were a waste of resources better spent elsewhere. By prioritizing short-term stability over "expensive" technological leaps, they missed the industrial window entirely. Two decades later, they faced an industrialized Japan in 1894 and suffered a total collapse. The "waste" of one generation is frequently the essential infrastructure of the next.

Without an objective anchor to measure against, concepts like "mispricing" or "alpha" become logically impossible; you cannot have a "wrong" price if you don't believe a "right" probability exists. If we accept that the market signal is just a reflection of whale liquidity and "Persian bribes" rather than a calculated proximity to reality, then the platform is merely a math-washed gambling hall. Ultimately, a prediction market that abandons the pursuit of objective truth loses its epistemic utility and its entire reason to exist.

This redirection is precisely what fuels the expansion of the global economy into realms far beyond basic survival. When a primal drive is blocked by the cost of a physical object, it sublimates into the high-end art market, the pursuit of scientific breakthroughs, or the infinite scroll of digital entertainment. Entire industries exist solely to harvest this redirected energy.