> It's hypothesized (and, I think, likely) that the machine learns some of those hidden/latent properties, though, obviously, only to the extent that they are u

> It's hypothesized (and, I think, likely) that the machine learns some of those hidden/latent properties, though, obviously, only to the extent that they are useful to recreate the images. Notably, this precisely describes humans too. We don't know the "true" properties of anything we interact with. We just have models - some more sophisticated than others - but only to the extent that we care for reasoning about the objects. From "This stone is too heavy to lift." to "Oh yeah Becky is always late."