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You say this, yet people such as Helen Keller suggest that a full sensorium is not necessary to be a full human. She had some grasp of the idea of colour, of so
by madaxe_again 2y ago
You say this, yet people such as Helen Keller suggest that a full sensorium is not necessary to be a full human. She had some grasp of the idea of colour, of sound, and could use the words around them appropriately - yet had no firsthand experience of either. Is it really so different?
I think “we” each comprise a number of models, language being just one of them - however an extremely powerful one, as it allows the transmission of thought across time and space. It’s therefore understandable that much of what we recognise as conscious thought, of a model of the world, emerges from such an information dense system. It’s literally developed to describe the world, efficiently and completely, and so that symbol map an LLM carries possibly isn’t that different to our own.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoIt's not about the necessity of specific sensory inputs, but rather about the difference in type of model that will be built when the goal is passive, and auto-regressive, as opposed to when the goal is interactive. In the passive/auto-regressive case you just need to model predictive contexts. In the interactive case you need to model dynamical behaviors.
- madaxe_again 2y agoI don’t know that I see the difference - but I suppose we’re getting into Brains In Vats territory. In my view (well, Baudrillard’s view, but who’s counting?) a perfect description of a thing is as good as the thing itself, and we in fact interact with our semantic description of reality, rather than with raw reality itself - the latter, when it manifests in humans, results in vast cognitive dysfunction - Sachs wrote somewhat in the topic of unfiltered sensorium and the impact on the ability to operate in the world. So yeah. I think what these models do and what we do is more similar than we might realise.