”It's very tempting to say that they [large language models, and so on] can do everything human beings can do. And I disagree. I think that the work of the great mathematicians…shows that true discoveries in mathematics are really points of departure from what is known. It's very hard to imagine that these discoveries can be made by simply reshuffling and correlating and interpolating known data. It comes from somewhere else. It comes from this inspiration, which is very hard to quantify. But all of us…who do what we love, we all know this feeling of inspiration, this feeling when you start flying, when you are not in control anymore, when you are propelled. It's almost like you're possessed by something, by an idea, perhaps, by beauty, by love. And so to me,…that's what it's all about. It's about human creativity and how much we can do as humans when we let ourselves to do it…”
—Edward Frenkel
https://youtu.be/RX1tZv_Nv4Y?feature=shared&t=7971
#mathematics #llm #llms #ai #inspiration #love #creativity #edwardfrenkel #frenkel

Edward Frenkel, the mathematician who, e.g. wrote "Love and Math", has a pilot on Youtube for sth he want to do. (You may enjoy it even more than I do if you are a platonist :-) )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eejAeqYFCg
#EdwardFrenkel #math #platonism

"I was recently invited to a string theory conference. And it was a very interesting experience for me... I saw that it’s not a very healthy kind of situation. ... The fact...is that the original promise of string theory, which was to describe this universe ... has not worked out. And nobody knows how, in principle, it could work. ... Yet, this is not acknowledged. And how can you move forward ... if you're not acknowledging that your original program failed?" https://youtu.be/n_oPMcvHbAc?t=9716 #edwardfrenkel #physics #stringtheory

"Alan Turing is credited as the father of modern computation... What was the most important result that he immediately proved...? It was a statement that there are things which are not computable... In other words, computation, the paradigm of computation contains within itself its own demise, the realization that it’s not everything." https://youtu.be/n_oPMcvHbAc?t=3935 #edwardfrenkel #computation #ai

"Even in mathematics...there isn’t something that is objective and completely detached from our personalities... This is something that’s very important. ... 'Mathematics does have the appearance of objective reality... but what I’m trying to argue is that this is an illusiom." https://youtu.be/n_oPMcvHbAc?t=3664 #edwardfrenkel #mathematics #objectivity

"...in math, we don’t know what the ''axioms'' are... Usually people don’t realize [this] because most people think mathemtamtics is written in stone. No, it’s not. It is a very important issue." https://youtu.be/n_oPMcvHbAc?t=2020 #edwardfrenkel #mathematics #axioms

"You can kind of put yourself in a box where everything is computation, and then you start seeing things as being such. It's confirmation bias, if you will..."
--Edward Frenkel https://youtu.be/Osh0-J3T2nY?t=2369 #EdwardFrenkel

"I'm starting to question, why I am not giving as much credibility to my subjective understanding of the world... I'm thinking maybe it's a hint that I should take my first person perspective seriously as well... I think that...if we are declaring from the outset that all there is to life is...computation in the form of neural networks or something like this, however sophisticated they might be, I think we are from the outset denying to ourselves the possibility that yes, there is a side of me which is not faking it. Yes, there is a side of me which cannot be captured." --Edward Frenkel https://youtu.be/Osh0-J3T2nY?t=2108
#EdwardFrenkel