3 ms·

I'd say the symbols themselves are meaningless without their ground truths, whatever that is. We can call this "experience" or "thinking". The results of these

I'd say the symbols themselves are meaningless without their ground truths, whatever that is. We can call this "experience" or "thinking". The results of these opaque processes are somehow amenable to be encoded into symbols which are themselves deprived of any significance. Which I guess makes them usable as such in the first place. Extreme example: if a random algorithm picked out a few words from a dictionary and somehow cobbled a sentence together using those words, would you say "meaning" has been transported? The "generation" of these symbols should be the result of a process equivalent to whatever we are doing when we "experience" or "cognate" or whatever, otherwise the results will be only very superficially useful.

bheadmaster 3y ago
> I'd say the symbols themselves are meaningless without their ground truths, whatever that is. We can call this "experience" or "thinking". So you're basically dismissing the whole field of genetic algorithms?
- SanderNL 3y ago
  If said genetic algorithms were used to directly spew forth symbols that represent or point towards human experience (“language”) as if the underlying processes that ultimately form the foundation of said symbols could be approximated by slowly changing random walks, then, yes, I’d question the usefulness of that approach. If not, what do you mean?
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    I mean, just because an array of symbols is generated mechanically doesn't inherently make it meaningless, because meaning arises from the execution of those symbols (in case of computer programs; or interpretation, in case of human language). If you read a sentence (whose source is unknown to you) and it has meaning to you and affects you, what difference does it make if the sentence was written by a human or a machine?
    - SanderNL 3y ago
      That’s an excellent observation. I struggled with this too and because I am fond of defective analogies this made me think of the meaning of a personal note to, say, a lover. Does it matter by whom or indeed what it was written? The experience of reading occurs solely in the recipient’s mind. Surely it does not affect him/her differently if said note was produced by a romantic slot machine. Before I meander towards my confused and shaky conclusion, let me clear one thing out of the way: I did not mean to imply that mechanically generated sequences are meaningless. They absolutely carry meaning, because meaning is ultimately created by us. We are meaning-creation machines. We can find meaning in tea-leaves. Surely tea-leaves carry meaning, but sadly not the will-of-the-gods-kind. Although that doesn’t stop us from thinking they do. What I am tentatively suggesting is that the meaning of the lover’s note is as much found in the experience of the relationship they share as it is found in the symbols on the paper. The symbols reference that experience. Because it is ultimately a human that reads and interprets I think failure to take into account the origin of the material will be the source of a subtle and highly impactful, but inexorable error not dissimilar to that of the tasseographer: what you see doesn’t mean what you think it does. Language used to be a domain dominated by humans only. We are wired for it and biased by it. If it sounds intelligent, it is intelligent, right? This bias could make us defer to the machine quicker than we should. What’s the difference between GPT4 generating a good piece of code and a human? Maybe I should shut up now. I am open to interesting reading suggestions by the way.
      - namaria 3y ago
        The difference is in the temporal dimension of the message. Generated text and code are simply statistically likely to convey enough meaning for the purpose at hand. That's all good and dandy until you think about the repercussions of communication. A person facing a problem and finding a solution encodes a message. This message ideally conveys context and purpose. The situation changes over time and we need to adapt our systems and behaviors. So we can go back to the message and re-work it. If there is no inherent message, if it is just a byte array likely to get a desired result in a specific context, you are losing traction of mind over reality and letting an awful lot of noise into our delicate systems. Isn't letting accidental complexity aka noise into our systems bad? If you don't know the purpose and the context of the message, you already let that happen, and it will only get worse as the subsequent modifications to the systems described by the code or behaviors enacted due to the message starts to become an opaque box due to the fact that there is no meaningful blueprint behind the code or the texts underlying it.

bheadmaster 3y ago

> I'd say the symbols themselves are meaningless without their ground truths, whatever that is. We can call this "experience" or "thinking". So you're basically dismissing the whole field of genetic algorithms?

SanderNL 3y ago
If said genetic algorithms were used to directly spew forth symbols that represent or point towards human experience (“language”) as if the underlying processes that ultimately form the foundation of said symbols could be approximated by slowly changing random walks, then, yes, I’d question the usefulness of that approach. If not, what do you mean?
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  I mean, just because an array of symbols is generated mechanically doesn't inherently make it meaningless, because meaning arises from the execution of those symbols (in case of computer programs; or interpretation, in case of human language). If you read a sentence (whose source is unknown to you) and it has meaning to you and affects you, what difference does it make if the sentence was written by a human or a machine?
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    That’s an excellent observation. I struggled with this too and because I am fond of defective analogies this made me think of the meaning of a personal note to, say, a lover. Does it matter by whom or indeed what it was written? The experience of reading occurs solely in the recipient’s mind. Surely it does not affect him/her differently if said note was produced by a romantic slot machine. Before I meander towards my confused and shaky conclusion, let me clear one thing out of the way: I did not mean to imply that mechanically generated sequences are meaningless. They absolutely carry meaning, because meaning is ultimately created by us. We are meaning-creation machines. We can find meaning in tea-leaves. Surely tea-leaves carry meaning, but sadly not the will-of-the-gods-kind. Although that doesn’t stop us from thinking they do. What I am tentatively suggesting is that the meaning of the lover’s note is as much found in the experience of the relationship they share as it is found in the symbols on the paper. The symbols reference that experience. Because it is ultimately a human that reads and interprets I think failure to take into account the origin of the material will be the source of a subtle and highly impactful, but inexorable error not dissimilar to that of the tasseographer: what you see doesn’t mean what you think it does. Language used to be a domain dominated by humans only. We are wired for it and biased by it. If it sounds intelligent, it is intelligent, right? This bias could make us defer to the machine quicker than we should. What’s the difference between GPT4 generating a good piece of code and a human? Maybe I should shut up now. I am open to interesting reading suggestions by the way.
    - namaria 3y ago
      The difference is in the temporal dimension of the message. Generated text and code are simply statistically likely to convey enough meaning for the purpose at hand. That's all good and dandy until you think about the repercussions of communication. A person facing a problem and finding a solution encodes a message. This message ideally conveys context and purpose. The situation changes over time and we need to adapt our systems and behaviors. So we can go back to the message and re-work it. If there is no inherent message, if it is just a byte array likely to get a desired result in a specific context, you are losing traction of mind over reality and letting an awful lot of noise into our delicate systems. Isn't letting accidental complexity aka noise into our systems bad? If you don't know the purpose and the context of the message, you already let that happen, and it will only get worse as the subsequent modifications to the systems described by the code or behaviors enacted due to the message starts to become an opaque box due to the fact that there is no meaningful blueprint behind the code or the texts underlying it.