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I was interested to see a paper from a philosophical perspective but it seems this one fails to grapple with some of the more foundational critiques, primarily

by lsy 3y ago

I was interested to see a paper from a philosophical perspective but it seems this one fails to grapple with some of the more foundational critiques, primarily around reference where it claims that externalism militates for a view where reference is purely situated. I read the cited paper (Mandelkern & Linzen) and the arguments seem very weak to me that an intelligent agent "refers" in the absence of any grounding whatsoever beyond relative semantics between text. What it seems to argue is that because we sometimes are able to refer without absolute grounding (due to lack of direct experience of the referent), then reference overall does not require the referrer to have any world-grounding whatsoever. To me that's a leap. I would like to see more working against phenomenology here, especially Brian Cantwell Smith's so-far-unanswered critique of machine learning as intelligence. One of their other arguments, which is under the umbrella of the "re-description fallacy" hinges on the observation that describing (e.g.) a piano as "hammers hitting strings" doesn't preclude it from more complex behavior like harmony, and so a simple description of LLMs as autocomplete etc doesn't preclude more advanced understanding. While it's true that any complex process can be inappropriately dismissed by simplifying its description, I think this too-neatly sidesteps more complex critiques which advance from simple descriptions of LLM behavior as contrasted with complex behavior from sentient intelligence that cannot be implemented by those simple mechanisms.

cubefox 3y ago
Language model understanding could still be reconciled with internalism about meaning if we conceptualize text itself as a form of sensory input. Like sense data, text is ultimately caused by external reality. The language model "perceives" reality through text. Indeed, modern multimodal language models like Gemini treat text similar to pictures or audio. The conceptual difference between text and usual sensory input is that the causal story that produces the text is much more complex than the causal story that produces, say, photos. Photons bouncing off objects and hitting the retina or a CCD sensor, a very simple mechanism. For text the mechanism involves intelligent humans writing it down, so the relation to reality is much more indirect. So inferring an internal world model from text is much harder than from pictures. Then again, language models are trained on a lot of text, much more than a human could ever read.

by lsy 3y ago

cubefox 3y ago

Language model understanding could still be reconciled with internalism about meaning if we conceptualize text itself as a form of sensory input. Like sense data, text is ultimately caused by external reality. The language model "perceives" reality through text. Indeed, modern multimodal language models like Gemini treat text similar to pictures or audio. The conceptual difference between text and usual sensory input is that the causal story that produces the text is much more complex than the causal story that produces, say, photos. Photons bouncing off objects and hitting the retina or a CCD sensor, a very simple mechanism. For text the mechanism involves intelligent humans writing it down, so the relation to reality is much more indirect. So inferring an internal world model from text is much harder than from pictures. Then again, language models are trained on a lot of text, much more than a human could ever read.