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> There's considerable debate over whether humans can have a coherent idea before it is reduced into symbolic language, and it's not clear how you would disting
by abernard1 6y ago
> There's considerable debate over whether humans can have a coherent idea before it is reduced into symbolic language, and it's not clear how you would distinguish this sequence of events, anyway.
This sounds like the thing that is so silly a person has to be very educated to believe it.
You know how I know that humans have coherent ideas before rendering it into symbolic language... because they do. The GPT-3 paper, itself, is a bunch of ideas that were formed and then rendered into symbolic language. Literally every new book/work/presentation that a person decided to write because they said to themselves "I have a great idea, I should share it with the world" comes from this.
GPT-3 doesn't even know when it thinks it has a new idea. Contrast this with humans, which have to go out of their way to communicate and promote their idea because they understand it's novel.
- t_von_doom 6y agoI think the idea here is that symbolic language is the tool with which we forge our ideas. To continue with the GPT example, the ideas are not rendered into symbolic language only at the point of writing - the ideas are formed in the mind using symbols and then expressed afterwards I see it like this: With no way to represent my thoughts and the context around them succinctly, I would not be able to string various complex ideas together coherently