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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 macr
by 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 agoI 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.