131–140 of 157 posts
For those who don't know about Plato's Theory of Forms, the remarkable empirical fact is that all humans learn roughly the same concepts representing words like "dog", "house", "person", "boat", and so on, even if those people grew up in different places and never had any overlap between their observational experience. You and I may never have observed the same dog, but we still agree on what a "dog" is. This phenome…
The example given for inverting an embedding back to text doesn't help the idea that this effect is reflecting some "shared statistical model of reality": What would be the plausible whalesong mapping of "Mage (foaled April 18, 2020) is an American Thoroughbred racehorse who won the 2023 Kentucky Derby"? There isn't anything core to reality about Kentucky, its Derby, the Gregorian calendar, America, horse breeds, etc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm I'm not convinced we don't have a lot of shared experience. We live on the same planet. We both hunger, eat, and drink. We see the sun, the grass, the sky. We both have muscles that stretch and compress. We both sleep and yawn. I mean who knows, maybe their perception of these shared experiences would be different enough to make communication difficult, but still, I think it's undeniably shared experience.
That's fair. To me, the point of Wittgenstein's lion thought experiment though was not necessarily to say that _any_ communication would be impossible. But to understand what it truly meant to be a lion, not just what it meant to be an animal. But we have no shared lion experiences nor does a lion have human experiences. So would we be able to have a human to lion communication even if we could both speak human speec…
Obviously it's impossible to communicate even 90% of human experience with lions or people with mental disabilities. But if a translation model increases communication even 1%, brings everybody up to the level of a Kevin Richardson it's a huge win E.g. A pair of smart glasses that labeling the mood of the cat. Nobody cares about explaining why humans wear hats to a lion and of course no explanation is better than being a old human who has worn hats for a variety of reasons.
I think it's unlikely you could make a LLM that gives a lion knowledge via audio only, but very possibly other animals
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Observation has proven enough to understand the meaning of animal calls. People proved they correctly identified, for example, an distressed animal call for assistance, by playing it to their peers in the wild. They go look for the distressed animal. Other calls don't provoke the same reaction.
Analogies are always possible. I believe in the philosophical context though, understanding the meaning of something is not possible through analogy alone. Reminds me of the quote: “But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a mic…
For those who don't know about Plato's Theory of Forms, the remarkable empirical fact is that all humans learn roughly the same concepts representing words like "dog", "house", "person", "boat", and so on, even if those people grew up in different places and never had any overlap between their observational experience. You and I may never have observed the same dog, but we still agree on what a "dog" is. This phenome…
For those who don't know about Plato's Theory of Forms, the remarkable empirical fact is that all humans learn roughly the same concepts representing words like "dog", "house", "person", "boat", and so on, even if those people grew up in different places and never had any overlap between their observational experience. You and I may never have observed the same dog, but we still agree on what a "dog" is. This phenome…
This "roughly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting to support the "Plato was right" thesis. The fact is we inhabit a shared reality with shared laws of physics and evolutionary pressures and so on; there are only so many ways to float a boat.
That doesn't necessarily mean Platonic Forms exist and that everyone arrives independently at the same Form.
Indeed you will find that people have fundamentally different ideas of what words like "freedom", "economy", "government" mean, despite using the same syntax.
I agree LLMs are converging on a current representation of reality based on the collective works of humanity. What we need to do is provide AIs with realtime sensory input, simulated hormones each with their own half-lifes based on metabolic conditions and energy usage, a constant thinking loop, and discover a synthetic psilocybin that's capable of causing creative, cross-neural connections similar to human brains. W…
I’m so incredibly tired of reading about AI but if I saw “we gave an AI shrooms” I’d be all over it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You made a lot of bold assertions there. It's as if you have a complete and definitive theory of human intelligence to compare it against. Which if true, would be incredible, because there isn't a scientifically accepted theory, nor is there consensus from a philosophical standpoint. I can't say that you are wrong, you might be right, especially about AGI. And I think it's unlikely that LLMs are the direct path to AG…
When an LLM can re-tokenize on the fly, due to newly learned data, let me know. It won't prove intelligence, but at least it won't be static like a book.
LLMs have problems, in practice being "static" aint one of them.
For those who don't know about Plato's Theory of Forms, the remarkable empirical fact is that all humans learn roughly the same concepts representing words like "dog", "house", "person", "boat", and so on, even if those people grew up in different places and never had any overlap between their observational experience. You and I may never have observed the same dog, but we still agree on what a "dog" is. This phenome…
This vastly oversimplifies the notion of what is "good" or "fair" in a given situation. Just because we can generally agree on classifying simple objects like a boat or a house doesn't entail that we share a universal notion about the virtuous thing to do in a given situation. Humans (even in the same society/environment) have wildly differing ideas about moral issues like abortion, assisted suicide, medical testing…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You're implying that all reality is cultural, Let's look at two examples of cultural reality: Fan death in South Korea. Where people believe that a fan running while you sleep can kill you. The book "Pure, White and Deadly". Where we discredited the author and his findings and spent decades blaming fat, while packing on the pounds with high fructose corn syrup. An LLM isn't going to find some intrinsic truth, that…
You are describing the state of LLMs from 2 years ago. Which basically means they were just pre-trained on the internet and then fine tuned to follow a particular instruction format. Current models still use this as a first step, but are then trained a lot using reinforcement learning, which has given them much better skills at reasoning and logic than human tainted data ever could. See how Grok 4 for example still e…
