Yes... kind of.
I know how NOs little siblings like CNNs have done cool stuff with images, and it makes
sense to hope NOs (Neural Operators) might do similar things in "big boy"
applications like fluid mechanics, weather modelling, and robotics control. I agree, that
would be great!.
But this is still a top-down approach. We're building tools that are smart in
some ways, but they don’t really think like people. I don’t expect this to lead
to true human-like intelligence.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone out there is quietly working on a bottom-up
way to build AI—and I think that’s where big breakthroughs could happen.
For now, NOs and similar models will keep giving us amazing results. But
they're still just tools. Useful, potentially absolutely amazing. Human-like?
No way, Jose.
On Thu, 17 Jul 2025 at 16:50, glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I'm confident nobody but me cares. But just one more post, I promise. Perplexity is not
normally my sycophant. She flat out rejected my extrapolation from Powell's "The Kraken"
to the entirety of the Stop the Steal suits. And she flat out rejected my claim that the term
"Scientific Materialism" is the best term to use for those of us who want to avoid
teleo[logy|nomy]. But, here, she agrees with me that:
"It is feasible and indeed a valuable research direction to use Neural Operators
like those in the NNs-to-NOs repo to computationally approximate the full multi-scale
stack from microscopic particle systems to macroscopic fluid equations that Deng et al.
prove mathematically."
Whew! So I'm not crazy, right? Of course, I'm too lazy to actually do it ... or maybe
I'll just blame it on "brain fog" ... another term I absolutely loathe. >8^D
On 7/17/25 6:55 AM, glen wrote:
> Sabina's recent defense of Weinstein [⛧] seems to follow in this vein. And I can't
help but feel similarly when I try to understand Geometric Algebra. What is the value of
these games over and above their binding to the world? Or, maybe more importantly, what's
their value when they fail to bind well to the world? My favorite writer about Gödel was
Torkel Franzén, who spent more time debunking the runaway [ab]use of the incompleteness
theorems than he did inferring anything from them - or maybe I was simply more attracted to
his debunking than I was to his in-theory work. I guess the same is true of Barwise's
tinkering around with anti-foundations or Shapiro's foundations without foundationalism. Now
that we have things like Isabelle/HOL, the "theory" seems to take on a life of its
own. Inference tools like this help me play the games I could only imagine when I was a kid,
even if my games are childish or of no use to anyone but me. Then again, I don't spew
grievance on
> everyone I meet when *they* don't want to play the games I enjoy.
>
> Since we're still in the [F]NO thread, they do seem to fall directly in
line with the way even the most banal of us are using AI. This result:
>
> Hilbert's sixth problem: derivation of fluid equations via Boltzmann's
kinetic theory
> https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01800 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01800>
>
> is out of my reach. And even with https://github.com/neuraloperator/NNs-to-NOs
<https://github.com/neuraloperator/NNs-to-NOs>, it's not clear to me whether I'd
be able to understand enough to mimic the analyses Anandkumar presented in the talk. But
like with Isabelle or Lean (plus tools like Claude) I can just barely *taste* it. I can
just barely taste what it might be like to be a theorist - to have the cognitive power
to think such things through in the way Eric describes Einstein. At the end of the day,
though, Franzén's more my speed.
>
>
> [⛧] Though her less recent discussion of Thiel and the relationship
between Thiel and Weinstein smells like smoke. Of course Carroll is exactly the
type of person the anti-establishment would accuse of Scientism.
:face_with_rolling_eyes:
>
> On 7/16/25 9:30 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>> It reminds me of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.
>>
>> Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that any formal system powerful
enough to describe arithmetic will always have true statements it can’t prove. This
seems like a purely theoretical result, but the proof itself is highly
constructive—Gödel uses very practical techniques like numbering symbols and
mimicking logic inside arithmetic.
>>
>> In a way, it’s a perfect example of applied technique informing theory.
A deep theoretical truth was uncovered not just by abstract thinking, but by rolling
up sleeves and working with the system from the inside. Faraday/Maxwell, steam
engines/thermodynamics all show how hands-on methods can push theory forward.
>>
>> On Thu, 17 Jul 2025 at 03:20, Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>>
wrote:
>>
>> I _very often_ have the thought that, were the nature of people
such that grievance and misanthropy simply didn’t do them any good, and so they
simply never engaged in it, so many conversations would go on in such different ways,
that we might have to adjust a bit to realize they started from the same query.
>>
>> One such query is whether the nature of anti-theory people is
mainly an aesthetic style of thought (seems very possible), or mainly motivated by a
dislike of people they met earlier who (whether with warrant or just to serve other
needs of their own) they label as “theory people”. I would like it if it were mostly
the former; that anti-theory people were “born this way”; it would give me a
conversation that seems interesting in several dimensions and that I could navigate.
Let’s suppose that such conversations are available somewhere, even if not everywhere.
>>
>> The start of this went something along the lines of “Faraday locked
in electromagnetism by its empirical evidences, and Maxwell put some pretty symbols
onto it.” (The original wasn’t exactly as I just wrote it, and I am over-drawing
here to take the direction to its cartoon-simplified limit. I am also _sure_ I can
find some truly anti-theory people who believe this is the absolutely right take on
it. Within Chemistry, where I have the counterpart to this conversation fairly
often, I have a good list of names, because it is still the prevalent aesthetic of
the field.)
>>
>> The sort of mind that believes that the former take on Maxwellian
electromagnetism is indeed the only real-man’s hard-headed take, is likely (to the
extent that it has any patience with formal logical analysis at all as not a priestly
self-indulgent waste of time) inclined to think that Popper has a good description of
the criteria for scientific meaningfulness and truthfulness.
>>
>> But then we can do it recursively all the way down. Is Newtonian
gravity just one among an infinitude of data-compressions of Keplerian orbits (since,
at the end, everything moving under gravity and approximating away other effects such
as friction is on a Keplerian orbit, including apples, so there “isn’t” really
anything else).
>>
>> Let’s not answer, but simply add attested observations:
>>
>> It was studying Maxwell’s field equations in school that led
Einstein to try to construct general relativity within similar concepts. And
presumably the very geometric flux-sphere picture that comes with Newtonian gravity
that causes geometry to be retained as the phenomenon for Einstein’s gravitational
field theory to be about.
>>
>> One can go through such idea-chains across the sciences. In some,
people don’t leave pithy accounts of why they believed it occurred to them to do
things one way rather than another; in other cases they do leave such trails, at
least about their beliefs. Or philosophers come along later and do forensics and
argue that their work shows their reasons to be such-and-such.
>>
>> A compact representation of the latter collection of
asserted-observations is that there is some kind of work that theory is doing as
itself, not as a proxy for something else (like description-length shortening for a
pile of data-instances). I remember how it seemed an insightful turn for me when my
graduate advisor commented that the particle physicists had felt a sense of
liberation when they could throw away the Particle Data Book, with the advent of
first Murray’s symmetry classification and eventually the settling in of QCD as a
theory in which one could stably compute things, and then the whole symmetry-grouping
of all the elementary particles by a few terms.
>>
>>
>> Circling back to thermodynamics, Harold’s “Emergence of
Everything”, and what is or isn’t substantial in the world of observations and states
of mind that we take on in relation to them:
>>
>> Harold was happy invoking Popper, and didn’t want to sweat a lot
over how much Popper was trying to take over a dichotomy from first-order logic, and
the asymmetry between there-exists and for-all, and how much it doesn’t work to press
that into service as a formalization for empiricist reasoning. Harold was,
generally, an easy-going guy, and willing for things to be rough, or half-wrong,
supposing that if he could intuitively get them half-right, that would be much better
than nothing, and there would be time to come back and fix whatever parts may have
been wrong. So he could like Popper as one of his half-right positions, even though
it was the inability to deal with being half-right where Popper ultimately undermined
himself. btw., that’s where a very useful study of metaphor in science, along the
lines that DaveW gave a definition of it from Quine, can get built up.
>>
>> Probably likewise with thermo and steam engines. For the purpose
of making a certain point — that theory doesn’t arise in a vacuum or from direct
access to the Mind of God — Harold would be happy to overstate the simplicity of this
position, and to evangelize for empiricism.
>>
>> But of course, in the world we live in — and especially the world
where I live, which is almost-all thermodynamics almost-all the time, and almost-none
of it about steam engines, or even anything having to do with mechanics or energy —
we have learned much, much more about nearly-everything, from thermodynamics, than
there even was of thermodynamics, to have learned from steam engines. At the end of
the day, the lessons of thermodynamics, when properly understood, constitute the
explanation for why there even are stable macro-worlds. Of more-or-less anything.
In other working conversations, with other aims, Harold would of course have seen
that too, and been happy with the statement putting it on record. Even though that
statement would have seemed, to a debaterly-type mind, to have contradicted the
earlier one.
>>
>>
>> I have seen a lot of chat over the years about what is “the nature”
of theory as something that can do work that deserves to be called different-in-kind,
and not just different-in-cost, than listing data instances, thus making theory
particular among data compressions (the latter, as a kind of generic category;
obviously theories are, as one of their aspects, compressions of data instances; the
question here is whether to say that is “all” they are is as good or as useful an
account as we can give). But at the end, I just hear the same positions reiterated,
some of them more rhetorically elegantly (Cris Moore did a very nice job in a tiny
soliloquy in one of the SFI public lectures), or more tritely and conventionally.
But I haven’t heard somebody with something really original to say on the question,
that makes me stop and think I see things better, for a long time now. I think the
Philosophers of Science (I’ll capitalize both for DaveW) put a lot of time into
this.
>> If I had more time I would probably try to listen to them, and I
might find they have interesting things to say.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Jul 17, 2025, at 2:19, Steve Smith <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
<mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> * Anima's presentation reminded me quite nicely of the
Numenta/Redwood work of Jeff Hawkins et al? Cortical columns, etc.
>>> * Did Harold Morowitz make a strong assertion to the tune: "we
learned more about thermodynamics from steam-engines than vice-versa"? EricS or StephenG
might have first-hand knowledge?
>>> * Is this theory/practice dichotomy just another form of meta-scaffolding in
evolution (of any system) with the cut-and-try providing the mutation/selection and the theory/formalism
binding the "lessons learned" into well... "lessons learned"?
>>>
>>> On 7/16/2025 2:12 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>>>> Both the video of Anima Anandkumar’s Stanford seminar and her
scientific paper on Neural Operators really got me excited—the ideas feel fresh and
powerful.
>>>>
>>>> The paper is quite technical and digs into the math behind Neural
Operators, without talking much about robotics. In her talk, though, she clearly links the
work to robots, and it sounds as if robotics is a big focus for her team.
>>>>
>>>> What jumped out at me is how different her style is from Elon
Musk’s approach with Tesla’s Optimus robot. Anandkumar begins with deep theory, building
firm mathematical foundations first. Musk takes a “just build it” path—make it, test it,
break it, fix it, and keep going.
>>>>
>>>> This contrast reminds me of engineering school and the
Faraday‑Maxwell story. Faraday was the hands‑on experimenter who uncovered the basics of
electricity and magnetism through careful tests. Maxwell came later and wrote the elegant
equations that explained what Faraday had already shown.
>>>>
>>>> So I wonder: will the roles flip this time? Will deep theory from
researchers like Anandkumar guide the breakthroughs first, with practice following? Or will
practical builders like Musk sprint ahead and let theory catch up afterward?
>>>>
>>>> Either way, watching these two paths unfold side by side is
thrilling. It feels like we’re standing on the edge of something big.
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, 16 Jul 2025 at 04:11, Jon Zingale <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>>
wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Even if just for the freedom of scale, learning infinite
dimensional function spaces, etc...
>>>>
>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caZyFlSSKtI
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caZyFlSSKtI> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caZyFlSSKtI
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caZyFlSSKtI>>
>>>> https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10973 <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10973>
<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10973 <https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.10973>>
>>>>
