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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

johnsalvatier.org

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Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#151
post #20

Reality does not have amount of details, it is infinite in all directions. Its only that we perceived certain amount of details, some more some less. One can spend their whole life mastering a single aspect and there always will be room to improve.

This is not my field, but are we sure that reality is not quantised at some level? Infinite is a very big claim.

I can't prove it in scientific ways, the thing is at some point scientists defined an atom as something indivisible, today we know they study sub atomic particles, and even finer things, waves or strings or whatever. In the same way 100 years from now our science will look primitive, physics will be few levels deeper, but there always be the next thing. Its like a pattern of nature.

I'm saying this from a perspective of practicing powerful spiritual practices and having certain experiences. They actually make one experience infinitive nature of consciousness, and somehow realize this is the way everything is made.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because for me it's pretty simple, it's basically free to give access to reality. Just add "sensory organs" as it were. I dunno what you mean by "free". The model is trained on text. To "give" the model sensory organs it would need to be trained on those sensory organs. Current models can predict text, because that's what the weights represent. Models with sensory organs will need to be trained on the output of tho…

>I dunno what you mean by "free". Reality is free. You don't have to waste any resources to model it, you just need to capture it. >The model is trained on text. See in my previous reply: >LLM/AI/AGI/whatever will be LLMs don't even have a sense of time because they work differently to a human brain.

Sense of time: just positional encodings on the tokens. Solved issue.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said anything about vision and audio?

Those are like the sensory organs.

> Those are like the sensory organs.

Sure, in much the same way that veggie burgers are "like" beef burgers, and NES Duck Hunt is "like" clay pigeon shooting, or Dirt Rally is "like" driving a real rally race!

But no one is going to claim that being good at Duck Hunt means you know anything about firing a gun, nor winning all the races in Dirt Rally is anything close to driving a real car.

Re: Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)

#157
post #62

Related, amazing read about Meccano teaching you reality-based work, in contrast with Lego: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/truth-in-inconvenien...

I want to thank you for the following reasons: - that's an amazing, mind-opening essay; - I've been looking for this toy (Meccano) for my entire adult life. I remember playing with a set that my mom got me when I was a kid, but I didn't know what it was called, and neither did my mom. And when I describe it to people, everyone kept telling me it was Lego (Lego is a much better-known toy brand in this part of the worl…

Very happy to have helped you with this :)

Venkatesh Rao is an amazing writer as well, I invite you to read some other of his posts. One of my personal favourites: Text is All You Need.

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/text-is-all-you-need

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