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I'm grappling too much with whether this argument has any meaning to give a cogent response. It kind of has a, "yeah, but if reality didn't exist" feel to it.

I'm grappling too much with whether this argument has any meaning to give a cogent response. It kind of has a, "yeah, but if reality didn't exist" feel to it. Could humans reason if we somehow lived in a void? I don't know. But, then I guess it really wouldn't matter.

visarga 3y ago
You should think about how we get our training data. That is important, we don't have in our DNA that much information, most of it comes by learning. If you don't include the provenance of the information we use to train ourselves you don't really look at the whole process. The brain by itself does nothing just like computers without software and input data. On the other hand scientists need experimentation to come up with anything new. It never comes from pure thinking, there is always the experimental validation. The place we get all our knowledge from is the environment. Without environment as grounding we are just language hallucinators, remember the string theory - that was a nice ungrounded hallucination that kept physicists busy for decades. Without validation our theories are worthless. So a LLM trained purely on human text can't make radical discoveries but when it learns from the environment it can. AlphaGo discovered move 37 from its self-play experience.
- unclebucknasty 3y ago
  Scientists do not "need experimentation to come up with anything new". The scientific method is explicitly starting with a hypothesis (i.e. something new), then experimenting to validate that hypothesis. Are these hypotheses frequently based on prior observations? Of course. But, reason is still being applied, so I don't know what you're trying to differentiate. You say alphago discovered move 37 from its self-play experience, but that explicitly has nothing to do with the environment. It's the equivalent of a human thinking through various scenarios (without experimentation or interacting with the environment) to come to a new conclusion. The environment is not required for that, which completely argues against what you seem to be saying. BTW, I have not made any statements about AI and reasoning, other than LLMs. AlphaGo, of course, is not LLM-based. Of course we don't all live in individual voids, so much of what we are concerned about are functions of our environments and will be expressed as such. I don't think there's anything groundbreaking in observing that a lot of our reasoning is applied to solving problems that have some intersection with our shared reality.
  - visarga 3y ago
    The go board and the opposing player are an environment. > then experimenting to validate that hypothesis. Proves my point that scientists can't secrete science from their pure brains, the environment is our teacher. We are just prying at its secrets with our limited brains, and usually need many of us to tackle one field, a distributed search for discoveries. None of us is smart enough to get even to Newtonian physics from scratch, we need to stand on the shoulders of previous generations to get anywhere. We're not smart enough to do it without the environment or without a large number of people working together.

visarga 3y ago

You should think about how we get our training data. That is important, we don't have in our DNA that much information, most of it comes by learning. If you don't include the provenance of the information we use to train ourselves you don't really look at the whole process. The brain by itself does nothing just like computers without software and input data. On the other hand scientists need experimentation to come up with anything new. It never comes from pure thinking, there is always the experimental validation. The place we get all our knowledge from is the environment. Without environment as grounding we are just language hallucinators, remember the string theory - that was a nice ungrounded hallucination that kept physicists busy for decades. Without validation our theories are worthless. So a LLM trained purely on human text can't make radical discoveries but when it learns from the environment it can. AlphaGo discovered move 37 from its self-play experience.

unclebucknasty 3y ago
Scientists do not "need experimentation to come up with anything new". The scientific method is explicitly starting with a hypothesis (i.e. something new), then experimenting to validate that hypothesis. Are these hypotheses frequently based on prior observations? Of course. But, reason is still being applied, so I don't know what you're trying to differentiate. You say alphago discovered move 37 from its self-play experience, but that explicitly has nothing to do with the environment. It's the equivalent of a human thinking through various scenarios (without experimentation or interacting with the environment) to come to a new conclusion. The environment is not required for that, which completely argues against what you seem to be saying. BTW, I have not made any statements about AI and reasoning, other than LLMs. AlphaGo, of course, is not LLM-based. Of course we don't all live in individual voids, so much of what we are concerned about are functions of our environments and will be expressed as such. I don't think there's anything groundbreaking in observing that a lot of our reasoning is applied to solving problems that have some intersection with our shared reality.
- visarga 3y ago
  The go board and the opposing player are an environment. > then experimenting to validate that hypothesis. Proves my point that scientists can't secrete science from their pure brains, the environment is our teacher. We are just prying at its secrets with our limited brains, and usually need many of us to tackle one field, a distributed search for discoveries. None of us is smart enough to get even to Newtonian physics from scratch, we need to stand on the shoulders of previous generations to get anywhere. We're not smart enough to do it without the environment or without a large number of people working together.