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trhwayyesterday at 7:02 AM2 repliesview on HN

It starts to sound like medieval science - "understanding" instead of proofs. And like a medieval army loosing a battle in the open field tries to retreat back into the fortress, people, facing the prospects of machine doing intelligent tasks better than humans, start to retreat into areas like intuition which supposedly aren't reachable by the machine. Some go even further starting to talk about religion. It is very Hegelian that the crown jewel achievement of our civilization starts to drive people away from the foundational principles of that civilization.


Replies

card_zeroyesterday at 7:21 AM

Basing science on proof (or anyway believing that you can) is Logical Positivism, a mindset that opposes the method of falsifiability. But of course mathematics is all about proof, and for that reason I was wary of it for a very long time.

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QuesnayJryesterday at 11:00 AM

Understanding has been the point of mathematics for millenia. The idea that purpose of math is to produce machine-checkable proofs is an entirely modern idea.