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This Message Does Not Exist

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Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#221

Post by b112 »

andybak wrote: post #216
tempodox wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ludicrous. Failure to distinguish the person (“I”) from their recorded voice does not make a philosophical problem. It's pure and unadulterated stupidity.

I find that the joy many commenters here have in both denigrating philosophys and at the same time proudly demonstrating no interest in knowing anything about it to be one of the more embarrassing things regularly on display.

Oh "anything about it" isn't quite valid, now is it. We see gibberish with nonsensical blather thrown in, and zero logical reasoning behind it. It's not a science.

If you want to tell me it's akin to astrology, or some other pseudo made up framework, fine.

I don't have a problem with fantasy. I have a problem with those telling me it's real.

"I took a series of university classes, where we examined the natural laws in The Land, and Thomas Covenant's ring, and derived a measure of predictive weather patterns! I know science!" <-- philosophy

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#222

Post by jhbadger »

I was expecting this would be another version of This X does not exist (where X is a cat, person, molecule, etc.) where generative AI has been trained on messages and gives a plausible message that has never been given before.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#223

Post by andybak »

b112 wrote: post #221
andybak wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that the joy many commenters here have in both denigrating philosophys and at the same time proudly demonstrating no interest in knowing anything about it to be one of the more embarrassing things regularly on display.

Oh "anything about it" isn't quite valid, now is it. We see gibberish with nonsensical blather thrown in, and zero logical reasoning behind it. It's not a science. If you want to tell me it's akin to astrology, or some other pseudo made up framework, fine. I don't have a problem with fantasy. I have a problem with those telling me it's real. "I took a series of university classes, where we examined the natural laws i…

I rest my case.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#224

Post by layer8 »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #116

The problem is that the message does not speak the truth. If you can read a message it clearly must exist because you cannot read non-existent messages, can you? Can anyone? CAN ANYONE HERE READ NON-EXISTENT MESSAGES? The message should have said "This message is not saved on the server. If you close this window without copying and saving its text you cannot retrieve it from the server ever again.

Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when an AI hallucinates one, or when someone shows you a photoshopped screenshot of one, or even just when you copied one to a text document before deleting the message.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#225

Post by croniev »

dfabulich wrote: post #151

I think this is an example of the "answering machine paradox," which philosophers have been writing about since the 1970's. https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM > According to an intuitive semantics for 'I,' 'here' and 'now,' 'I am not here now' should always be false when uttered. But occurrences of 'I am not here now' on an answering machine seem to be true (when the speaker is not home). (If you're interested, you ca…

Many commenters here seem to be hostile towards philosophy. Heres a take for you:

This is only a paradox if you think of language as a way of describing some "real", static state of affairs in the world (look up " correspondence theory of truth"). There is no paradox here if we think of language as pragmatic, action directing, since it is obvious what the sentence should convey (look up "pragmatism"). Some people will argue that there is some sort of static meaning hidden behind the actual words which enters the consciousness of the listener, others will say that the meaning is only generated by the person hearing the words.

This is as philosophical of a question as it gets, and has been debated even more heatedly ever since Wittgenstein.

If you do not see that debating these questions is relevant and interesting, but would rather reduce all of philosophy to that first obvious-seeming and thus "not a real problem" position, then I wish you a good time bathing in your ignorance.

However, if you comprehend that what we take for granted in every area and discipline can be subjected to reasonable reflection, then I welcome you to the dark side. Nothing is clear, no knowledge absolute - many engineers seem to forget this while over-indulging in an overly simplistic world view :)

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#226

Post by bongodongobob »

sethammons wrote: post #179
bongodongobob wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangentially related, I used to work at a company where the C level was demanding all of our help documents be videos. They couldn't understand that it made them unsearchable, took way more time, did not allow branching or decision making in the processes, if anything in the workflow or even UI changed the entire thing would need to be redone, takes up a ton of space, is not easily skimmable etc. "but it's easier tha…

I was thinking you could do product demos / help videos combined as an acceptance test suite. You would programmatically build the self help tutorial like a ui test (use a test browser and it would be like cypress/selenium). You would write a script, (ai) text to speech, and you could even respond to user input for branching. These would be, de facto, your acceptance test suite and your tutorials will flag when they…

Sure, if they want to hire someone. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#227

Post by [deleted] »

kazinator wrote: post #7

It's very easy. "This message does not exist" can be taken to be a false statement, without introducing any contradiction. It is not like "this message is false" (Liar's Paradox) or "this sentence has no proof" (Gödel's sentence). Unfortunately, just because "this message does not exist" is a false statement, contradicted by existential evidence, doesn't mean that the remaining claims next to it can be dismissed as f…

[deleted]

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#228

Post by b112 »

andybak wrote: post #223
b112 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh "anything about it" isn't quite valid, now is it. We see gibberish with nonsensical blather thrown in, and zero logical reasoning behind it. It's not a science. If you want to tell me it's akin to astrology, or some other pseudo made up framework, fine. I don't have a problem with fantasy. I have a problem with those telling me it's real. "I took a series of university classes, where we examined the natural laws i…

I rest my case.

Your case was "that made up 'science' is real, and you can't say no because you haven't studied it for years".

I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's nonsense in about 10 minutes.

Yet I've hear a lot more philosophical blather than that, and so yes, I have enough data to make a determination.

There's an inner logic to tarot cards, books and books on it, but that doesn't make it useful or valuable.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#229

Post by ryukoposting »

andybak wrote: post #216
tempodox wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is ludicrous. Failure to distinguish the person (“I”) from their recorded voice does not make a philosophical problem. It's pure and unadulterated stupidity.

I find that the joy many commenters here have in both denigrating philosophys and at the same time proudly demonstrating no interest in knowing anything about it to be one of the more embarrassing things regularly on display.

I wouldn't call myself a philosphy expert by any means (love me some Epicurus) but I think the previous commenter is right. As far as philosophical dilemmas go, the answering machine problem is contrived at best.

It relies on a pretty obvious mischaracterization of the situation at hand - there isn't a person saying "I am not here" at all, it's a machine playing a recording. With the necessary context, the dilemma becomes a pretty obvious non-dilemma.

If you're saying we should be willing to explore our minds through philosophical problems, I agree with you. I just think this particular philosophical problem is pretty lame.

Is the conclusion supposed to be that that formal meaning of any particular word is less important than the ability to communicate abstract ideas? That's an interesting notion though I'd argue that notion isn't helped by a half-broken analogy.

Re: This Message Does Not Exist

#230

Post by madeofpalk »

layer8 wrote: post #224
galaxyLogic wrote: post #116

The problem is that the message does not speak the truth. If you can read a message it clearly must exist because you cannot read non-existent messages, can you? Can anyone? CAN ANYONE HERE READ NON-EXISTENT MESSAGES? The message should have said "This message is not saved on the server. If you close this window without copying and saving its text you cannot retrieve it from the server ever again.

Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when an AI hallucinates one, or when someone shows you a photoshopped screenshot of one, or even just when you copied one to a text document before deleting the message.

> Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when an AI hallucinates one

This message clearly exists. It's could be not factually correct, but a lie still exists.

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