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.
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.
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.
Similarly, I've sat in some very uncomfortable chairs. In fact, I'd say the average chair is not a particularly comfortable one.