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No. > The sun feels hot on your skin. No matter how many times you read that, you cannot understand what the experience is like. > You can read a book about
by ThinkBeat 2y ago
No.
> The sun feels hot on your skin.
No matter how many times you read that, you cannot understand what
the experience is like.
> You can read a book about Yoga and read about the Tittibhasana pose
But by just reading you will not understand what it feels like.
And unless you are in great shape and with greate balance you
will fail for a while before you get it right.
(which is only human).
I have read what shooting up with heroin feels like.
From a few different sources.
I certain that I will have no real idea unless I try it.
(and I dont want to do that).
Waterboarding.
I have read about it.
I have seen it on tv.
I am certain that is all abstract to having someone do it to you.
Hand eye cordination, balance, color, taste, pain, and so on,
How we encode things is from all senses, state of mind, experiences
up until that time.
We also forget and change what we remember.
Many songs takes me back to a certain time, a certain place, a certain feeling
Taste is the same. Location.
The way we learn and the way we remember things is incredebily more complex than text.
But if you have shared excperiences, then when you write about it, other people will know.
Most people felt the sun hot on their skin.
To different extents this is also true for animals.
Now I dont think most mice can read, but they do learn with many different senses,
and remeber some combination or permutation.
- spyder 2y ago> No. Huh, text definitely encodes multimodal experiences, it's just not as accurate and as rich encoding as the encodings of real sensations.
- bmitc 2y agoIt's just a description, not an encoding.
- ambicapter 2y agoI don't think GP is asserting that the multimodal encoding is "more rich" or "more accurate", I think they are saying that the felt modality is a different thing than the text modality entirely, and that the former isn't contained in the latter.
- heyjamesknight 2y agoText describes semantic space. Not everything maps to semantic space losslessly.
- Terr_ 2y ago> text definitely encodes multimodal experiences Perhaps, but only in the same sense that brown and green wax on paper "encodes" an oak tree.
- fluidcruft 2y agoLanguage encodes what people need it to encode to be useful. I heard of an example of colors--there are some languages that don't even have a word for blue. https://blog.duolingo.com/color-words-around-the-world/ https://blog.duolingo.com/color-words-around-the-world/
- deepGem 2y agoDoesn't this imply that the future of AGI lies not just in vision and text but in tactile feelings and actions as well ? Essentially, engineering the complete human body and mind including the nervous system. Seems highly intractable for the next couple of decades at least.
- maigret 2y agoYes it’s why robotics is so exciting right now
- csomar 2y agoAll of these "experiences" are encoded in your brain as electricity. So "text" can encode them, though English words might not be the proper way to do it.
- chongli 2y agoNo, text can only refer to them. There is not a text on this planet that encodes what the heat of the sun feels like on your skin. A person who had never been outdoors could never experience that sensation by reading text.
- pizza 2y agoIn this case, there kind of is. It’s ‘spicy’. The TRPV1 receptor is activated by capsaicin as if it were being activated by intense heat.
- tgma 2y ago> There is not a text on this planet that encodes what the heat of the sun feels like on your skin. > A person who had never been outdoors could never experience that sensation by reading text. I don't think the latter implies the former as obviously as you make it to be. Unless you believe in some sort of metaphysical description of human, you can certainly encode the feeling (as mentioned in another comment it will be reduced to electrical signals after all). The only question is how much storage you need for that encoding to get what precision. However, the latter statement, if true, is simply constrained by your input device to the brain, i.e. you cannot transfer your encoding to the hardware in this case a human brain via reading or listening. There could be higher bandwidth interfaces like neuralink that may do that to human brain and in the case of AI, an auxiliary device might not be needed and the encoding would be directly mmap'd.
- chongli 2y agoElectrical signals are not the same as subjective experiences. While a machine may be able to record and play back these signals for humans to experience, that does not imply that the experiences themselves are recorded nor that the machine has any access to them. A deaf person can use a tape recorder to record and play back a symphony but that does not encode the experience in any way the deaf person could share.
- golergka 2y ago> No matter how many times you read that, you cannot understand what the experience is like. OK, so you don't have qualia. But if know all the data needed to complete any tasks that can be related to this knowledge, does it matter?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rcpt 2y agoI can't see as much color as a mantis shrimp or sense electric fields like a shark but I still think I'm closer to AGI than they are
- MITSardine 2y agoEven beyond sensations (which are never described except circumstantially, as in "the taste of chocolate" says nothing of the taste, only of the circumstances in which the sensation is felt), it's very often people don't understand something another person says (typically a work of art) until they have lived the relevant experiences to connect to the meaning behind the (whatever medium of communication).