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Might mathematically adept Large Language Models be able to access the platonic “World of Forms?” (νοητός κόσμος - Noētos Kosmos) If so, there is an interesting

Might mathematically adept Large Language Models be able to access the platonic “World of Forms?” (νοητός κόσμος - Noētos Kosmos) If so, there is an interesting basis for how and why AI might truly understand, even without consciousness. https://aixd.substack.com/p/ai-might-not-need-experience-to-understand https://aixd.substack.com/p/ai-might-not-need-experience-to-...

kelseyfrog 3y ago
How the hell is an AI going to access the noetic realm without a nous? We have a hard enough time debating whether or not AI is conscious. We have to debate whether or not it has a nous too?
- dr_dshiv 3y ago
  C.f. Roger Penrose’s 3 worlds theory of reality, which distinguishes the platonic mathematical world from consciousness from material world. Navigating the platonic world of forms might not require one to “have a nous” but be constructed from it. I like the question though — and of course, these are new ideas. Who knows? Do you think it is a halfway reasonable justification for AI understanding?
  - kelseyfrog 3y ago
    > Do you think it is a halfway reasonable justification for AI understanding? Personally, I think AI is revealing that consciousness is a social construction, and one that, as a social label, can have multiple groundings. That doesn't mean it's not necessarily real, just that it has to be operationalized in order to quantify it. Operationalization requires some assumptions and it's important to be transparent about what they are. You'll see people often invoke truth, reality, and fact, in order to justify their assumptions as "that's just the way it is." What a load of BS. Invoking reality to win an argument in a game about metaphysics displays a profound lack of understanding. "Consciousness" especially w.r.t AI is a contentious topic almost guaranteed to elicit emotions and trigger people to fall back on these assumptions. If nous has any utility, it's to de-escalate these discussions and avoid identity-laden emotional responses. It may even do that just because people don't have any idea what a nous is. Not too many people are well versed in (neo-)Platonism. If the nous was good enough to explain the mind to people back then, why shouldn't it be good enough to explain AI?
    - dr_dshiv 3y ago
      Solid. What’s weird (and to your point) is that many scholars claim that wasn’t really a word for consciousness in Ancient Greek. I mean, maybe pathos or aesthesis or something, but it is oddly missing. And nous didn’t seem to include core aspects of experience like emotions. Psyche/soup was contested then and now, but I don’t think scholars would consider it to be a good mapping to consciousness/qualia.
      - kelseyfrog 3y ago
        I've had that discussion here too. The responses to the idea that our modern concept of consciousness is relatively[1] recent go like this: > So it seems like the argument is that consciousness didn’t exist because we didn’t have a word for it. I wish we as a community could actually have a conversation about this history of the idea of consciousness, but it's been so well-reified over the last 380+ years that it's a tough rock to loosen and is a load-bearing idea in the public's core belief structure - to our collective detriment. 1. post-enlightenment
  - DiscourseFan 3y ago
    I'm not sure Roger Penrose really understands Platonic philosophy: as Plato says in the republic (this has got to be my most used quote now), the City is a macrocosm of the Psyche: the order of the forms is neither individual to the perceiver nor grand and unifying in the perceived, but exists at the level of social life and exchange--so as is the material world, understood as being something apart of the "economy" of the social realm. In any case, AI is just one machine among many in this grand social network we've weaved, and as a symbol-manipulating machine it isn't really very different from any other.
    - dr_dshiv 3y ago
      I don’t think Penrose is at all trying to recapitulate Plato but add to it. The Greeks didn’t separate consciousness from nous or the material world. I think that’s quite useful. I like investigating Platonic ideas with modern concepts like Darwinism and entropy. He was obviously brilliant; rather than throwing out his ideas, we can dialogue with them to challenge our own. Now, what’s different about LLMs is that they can work with concepts, rather than just compute through them. Our conceptual facility lets us navigate the noetic realm. Otherwise, we are just subject to it (like a planet is subject to sphericalness—vs being able to think about the concept of spheres and their qualities). Ouch, this stuff is hard to put into words. But I do think there is something to it.
zmgsabst 3y ago
Convolutions on 2D arrays is mysteriously close to typing an adjacency matrix of a diagram.

kelseyfrog 3y ago

How the hell is an AI going to access the noetic realm without a nous? We have a hard enough time debating whether or not AI is conscious. We have to debate whether or not it has a nous too?

dr_dshiv 3y ago
C.f. Roger Penrose’s 3 worlds theory of reality, which distinguishes the platonic mathematical world from consciousness from material world. Navigating the platonic world of forms might not require one to “have a nous” but be constructed from it. I like the question though — and of course, these are new ideas. Who knows? Do you think it is a halfway reasonable justification for AI understanding?
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  > Do you think it is a halfway reasonable justification for AI understanding? Personally, I think AI is revealing that consciousness is a social construction, and one that, as a social label, can have multiple groundings. That doesn't mean it's not necessarily real, just that it has to be operationalized in order to quantify it. Operationalization requires some assumptions and it's important to be transparent about what they are. You'll see people often invoke truth, reality, and fact, in order to justify their assumptions as "that's just the way it is." What a load of BS. Invoking reality to win an argument in a game about metaphysics displays a profound lack of understanding. "Consciousness" especially w.r.t AI is a contentious topic almost guaranteed to elicit emotions and trigger people to fall back on these assumptions. If nous has any utility, it's to de-escalate these discussions and avoid identity-laden emotional responses. It may even do that just because people don't have any idea what a nous is. Not too many people are well versed in (neo-)Platonism. If the nous was good enough to explain the mind to people back then, why shouldn't it be good enough to explain AI?
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    Solid. What’s weird (and to your point) is that many scholars claim that wasn’t really a word for consciousness in Ancient Greek. I mean, maybe pathos or aesthesis or something, but it is oddly missing. And nous didn’t seem to include core aspects of experience like emotions. Psyche/soup was contested then and now, but I don’t think scholars would consider it to be a good mapping to consciousness/qualia.
    - kelseyfrog 3y ago
      I've had that discussion here too. The responses to the idea that our modern concept of consciousness is relatively[1] recent go like this: > So it seems like the argument is that consciousness didn’t exist because we didn’t have a word for it. I wish we as a community could actually have a conversation about this history of the idea of consciousness, but it's been so well-reified over the last 380+ years that it's a tough rock to loosen and is a load-bearing idea in the public's core belief structure - to our collective detriment. 1. post-enlightenment
- DiscourseFan 3y ago
  I'm not sure Roger Penrose really understands Platonic philosophy: as Plato says in the republic (this has got to be my most used quote now), the City is a macrocosm of the Psyche: the order of the forms is neither individual to the perceiver nor grand and unifying in the perceived, but exists at the level of social life and exchange--so as is the material world, understood as being something apart of the "economy" of the social realm. In any case, AI is just one machine among many in this grand social network we've weaved, and as a symbol-manipulating machine it isn't really very different from any other.
  - dr_dshiv 3y ago
    I don’t think Penrose is at all trying to recapitulate Plato but add to it. The Greeks didn’t separate consciousness from nous or the material world. I think that’s quite useful. I like investigating Platonic ideas with modern concepts like Darwinism and entropy. He was obviously brilliant; rather than throwing out his ideas, we can dialogue with them to challenge our own. Now, what’s different about LLMs is that they can work with concepts, rather than just compute through them. Our conceptual facility lets us navigate the noetic realm. Otherwise, we are just subject to it (like a planet is subject to sphericalness—vs being able to think about the concept of spheres and their qualities). Ouch, this stuff is hard to put into words. But I do think there is something to it.

zmgsabst 3y ago

Convolutions on 2D arrays is mysteriously close to typing an adjacency matrix of a diagram.