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A human also compresses many years of experience into one conversation. Does this reflect true understanding of the things described? Only the human doing the

A human also compresses many years of experience into one conversation. Does this reflect true understanding of the things described? Only the human doing the talking can know, and even that is on shaky ground. (if you don't understand something, will you always realize this? You have to know it a little bit to judge your own competence).

namaria 3y ago
We compress data from many senses and can use that to interactively build inner models and filters for the data stream. The experience of psychedelics such as psylocibin and lsd can be summarized as disabling some of these filters. The deep dream trick google did a while back was a good illustration of hallucinations and also seen in some symptoms of schizophrenia. In my view that shows we are simulating some brain data processing functions. Results from the systems conducting these simulations are very far from the capabilities of humans but help shed light into how we work. Conflating these systems with the full cognitive range of human understanding is disingenuous at best.
- FredPret 3y ago
  It clearly can't have human understanding without being a human. But that doesn't mean it can't have any understanding. You can represent every word in English in a vector database; this isn't how humans understand words, but it's not nothing and might be better in some ways. Fish swim, submarines sail.
- mistermann 3y ago
  > The experience of psychedelics such as psylocibin and lsd can be summarized as disabling some of these filters. I was thinking last night about where (during the trip) the certainty aspect of the "realer than reality" sensation comes from... The theory I came up with is that the certainty comes from the delta between the two experiences, as opposed to (solely) the psychedelic experience itself. This assumes that one's read on normal reality at the time remains largely intact, which I believe is (often) the case. Further investigation is needed, I'm working from several years old memories.

namaria 3y ago

We compress data from many senses and can use that to interactively build inner models and filters for the data stream. The experience of psychedelics such as psylocibin and lsd can be summarized as disabling some of these filters. The deep dream trick google did a while back was a good illustration of hallucinations and also seen in some symptoms of schizophrenia. In my view that shows we are simulating some brain data processing functions. Results from the systems conducting these simulations are very far from the capabilities of humans but help shed light into how we work. Conflating these systems with the full cognitive range of human understanding is disingenuous at best.

FredPret 3y ago
It clearly can't have human understanding without being a human. But that doesn't mean it can't have any understanding. You can represent every word in English in a vector database; this isn't how humans understand words, but it's not nothing and might be better in some ways. Fish swim, submarines sail.
mistermann 3y ago
> The experience of psychedelics such as psylocibin and lsd can be summarized as disabling some of these filters. I was thinking last night about where (during the trip) the certainty aspect of the "realer than reality" sensation comes from... The theory I came up with is that the certainty comes from the delta between the two experiences, as opposed to (solely) the psychedelic experience itself. This assumes that one's read on normal reality at the time remains largely intact, which I believe is (often) the case. Further investigation is needed, I'm working from several years old memories.