5 ms·

ChatGPT has had more conversations than you or I have. And it's conversed with people from a wider range of backgrounds in a wider range of situations.

keiferski 3mo ago
And? Can you tell me what it feels like to eat a hamburger by asking a thousand people about it?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- rahimnathwani 3mo ago
  Yes, of course.
  - keiferski 3mo ago
    That’s a pretty lacking theory of knowledge. How can you know what taste is, if you’re never tasted anything? If you read a thousand books about living in New York City, is that the same thing as the experiential knowledge that comes from living there in person? I certainly don’t think so.
    - rahimnathwani 3mo ago
      keiferski didn't ask for a theory of knowledge. You're moving the goalposts.
      - keiferski 3mo ago
        That's literally what the conversation is about: what is knowledge? You cannot claim that descriptive knowledge of something is equivalent to experiential knowledge of it, unless you have a theory of knowledge explaining why this is the case.
        rahimnathwani 3mo ago
        You asked for a description: "Can you tell me what it feels like to eat a hamburger" I am sure I Fable (or GPT-5.6-Sol) could answer this question very well. It can probably even tell us what it feels like to eat a hamburger for the first time when you spent the first 18 years of your life as a vegetarian.
        keiferski 3mo ago
        I don't think you understand the premise of the question. Asking another person or Fable what it feels like to eat a hamburger will give you a description of what it feels like. It will not give you the actual feeling. You are merely repeating words that someone else has told you. The description of something is not equivalent to the experience that comes from doing it yourself, as an experiencing subject. Reading a war journal about being in battle is not equivalent to the actual experience of being in battle. To illustrate the point again: if we gathered ten people that all spoke different languages and gave them a hamburger, they would all gain the knowledge of what it feels like to eat a hamburger, even if none of them are able to communicate this to the others in language.
        rahimnathwani 3mo ago
        I understand the premise. My answer was meant to illustrate that, no, the 'original experience' is not needed, and that AI can produce a good answer relying only on '"data that mirrors" experiences'.
        keiferski 3mo ago
        It can provide a description. Not an actual answer of what it feels like. I can't keep repeating myself.
        rahimnathwani 3mo ago
        It can provide an actual answer of what it feels like. If I've understood you correctly, your objection is that this description is second hand, rather than being a description of the model's own feelings. Like if I write a description of what it's like being a soldier in a war zone, despite never having been a soldier and never having been in a war zone. Perhaps I can write something plausible if I've read enough and use my imagination. snakeboy (whose commend started this subthread) seems to claim that having real experiences (not just having learned of others' experiences through reading) is a prerequisite to creating something 'truly original'. Is that your position also? If so, is there any possible demonstration that could change your mind?
- lordnacho 3mo ago
  That's what we all did in school, didn't we? Nobody did any original research, you didn't discover gravity, and you didn't participate in any historically significant events. Yet we say that people who have been through education know about such things.
  - keiferski 3mo ago
    That is descriptive knowledge. Not firsthand qualia. You may know every detail of the American Civil War, from every book ever written on the topic. You may read every journal from every person that wrote one about it. You do not have firsthand knowledge of what it was like to participate in the war. Any assumption of that knowledge is a (false) generalization of what you think a person “would have thought or felt” based on contemporary ideas of the personality, psychology, etc. Reading a journal entry about a soldier seeing his comrade killed is not equivalent to actually having that experience yourself.
    - wild_egg 3mo ago
      So only people who have fought in wars can write novels about fighting in wars?
      - keiferski 3mo ago
        If the aim is to have actual knowledge of the experience, then yes. Of course not all works need to be this way, and many, many books are written about war by people that haven't been in it. The broader point is that LLMs cannot have original experiences.
        lordnacho 3mo ago
        But that's purely a matter of having sensors? Stick a camera and a touch sensor on the machine, now it is experiencing the world. Besides that, there is a lot of value in redigested experience. Quite a lot of history is only really examined in a larger context, where the person describing it cannot have experienced all the original events.
- vitorfblima 3mo ago
  He probably could tell you something about it, based on other people's experiences. Doesn't mean he would actually know what he was talking about.
  - keiferski 3mo ago
    He could tell you a collection of descriptions. Not actual knowledge firsthand. Does reading an infinite number of cookbooks mean you know what the ingredients in each taste like?
- everdrive 3mo ago
  I think this is actually a tough one. Yes, I agree that an LLM can never experience this. But -- when a real human needs to translate that experience back into words, it can actually do so just fine. In other words, when a real human needs to translate an experience into words to share it, A LOT of information is lost. The LLM might actually be better-suited for the the task in your example, even if the point you were driving at stands.
  - keiferski 3mo ago
    I don't think it's all that difficult. Language is not a 1-1 match to reality. Ergo any entity which is inherently language-only, will fail to accurately describe the experience.
    - brazzy 3mo ago
      Not if the only result you can judge is also language-only, and the entity has access to a large corpus of descriptions produced by people who have had the experience.
      - keiferski 3mo ago
        Then you're just comparing descriptions, and you're also dependent on the language skills of the experiencers, and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality. So an LLM may be able to give you the optimal description of a feeling, on par with what a person would give you; but it won't be equivalent to the actual feeling.
        brazzy 3mo ago
        Does it matter (why and how) if you can't tell the difference, no matter how hard you tailor the question towards that end? It's basically the Turing test.
        everdrive 3mo ago
        >and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality. Definitely agreed, but at least when talking about experience we've been stuck in this position for most of human history. How do I know what it's like to eat a hamburger? Perhaps, like the cute visual in Ratatouille there is a deep inner experience but (also like in Ratatouille) when I need to communicate that experience with another person I'm stuck relying on language, and the language is found lacking. I know it's just a kid's cartoon, but interestingly Ratatouille was making this exact same point -- he really lacks any meaningful way to convey his inner experience. It's locked behind language. The film tackles this by showing an Remy's complex and interesting visual, but his friend only gets the fuzziest, dullest visual when he attempts to communicate it. Remy's immediate rat & family peers actually _never_ get to understand his experience, and instead later help him out of love an allegiance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizttM_Cbuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizttM_Cbuc
perrygeo 3mo ago
Billions of conversations. Zero lived experience. The difference is huge. An LLM conversation can contain within it a batshit crazy model of the world and still produce a plausible stream of tokens. No skin in the game. If you don't test your ideas against reality, you don't have a model of reality; you have a model of written human thought. It's critical to understand the difference.

keiferski 3mo ago

And? Can you tell me what it feels like to eat a hamburger by asking a thousand people about it?

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
rahimnathwani 3mo ago
Yes, of course.
- keiferski 3mo ago
  That’s a pretty lacking theory of knowledge. How can you know what taste is, if you’re never tasted anything? If you read a thousand books about living in New York City, is that the same thing as the experiential knowledge that comes from living there in person? I certainly don’t think so.
  - rahimnathwani 3mo ago
    keiferski didn't ask for a theory of knowledge. You're moving the goalposts.
    - keiferski 3mo ago
      That's literally what the conversation is about: what is knowledge? You cannot claim that descriptive knowledge of something is equivalent to experiential knowledge of it, unless you have a theory of knowledge explaining why this is the case.
      - rahimnathwani 3mo ago
        You asked for a description: "Can you tell me what it feels like to eat a hamburger" I am sure I Fable (or GPT-5.6-Sol) could answer this question very well. It can probably even tell us what it feels like to eat a hamburger for the first time when you spent the first 18 years of your life as a vegetarian.
        keiferski 3mo ago
        I don't think you understand the premise of the question. Asking another person or Fable what it feels like to eat a hamburger will give you a description of what it feels like. It will not give you the actual feeling. You are merely repeating words that someone else has told you. The description of something is not equivalent to the experience that comes from doing it yourself, as an experiencing subject. Reading a war journal about being in battle is not equivalent to the actual experience of being in battle. To illustrate the point again: if we gathered ten people that all spoke different languages and gave them a hamburger, they would all gain the knowledge of what it feels like to eat a hamburger, even if none of them are able to communicate this to the others in language.
        rahimnathwani 3mo ago
        I understand the premise. My answer was meant to illustrate that, no, the 'original experience' is not needed, and that AI can produce a good answer relying only on '"data that mirrors" experiences'.
        keiferski 3mo ago
        It can provide a description. Not an actual answer of what it feels like. I can't keep repeating myself.
        rahimnathwani 3mo ago
        It can provide an actual answer of what it feels like. If I've understood you correctly, your objection is that this description is second hand, rather than being a description of the model's own feelings. Like if I write a description of what it's like being a soldier in a war zone, despite never having been a soldier and never having been in a war zone. Perhaps I can write something plausible if I've read enough and use my imagination. snakeboy (whose commend started this subthread) seems to claim that having real experiences (not just having learned of others' experiences through reading) is a prerequisite to creating something 'truly original'. Is that your position also? If so, is there any possible demonstration that could change your mind?
lordnacho 3mo ago
That's what we all did in school, didn't we? Nobody did any original research, you didn't discover gravity, and you didn't participate in any historically significant events. Yet we say that people who have been through education know about such things.
- keiferski 3mo ago
  That is descriptive knowledge. Not firsthand qualia. You may know every detail of the American Civil War, from every book ever written on the topic. You may read every journal from every person that wrote one about it. You do not have firsthand knowledge of what it was like to participate in the war. Any assumption of that knowledge is a (false) generalization of what you think a person “would have thought or felt” based on contemporary ideas of the personality, psychology, etc. Reading a journal entry about a soldier seeing his comrade killed is not equivalent to actually having that experience yourself.
  - wild_egg 3mo ago
    So only people who have fought in wars can write novels about fighting in wars?
    - keiferski 3mo ago
      If the aim is to have actual knowledge of the experience, then yes. Of course not all works need to be this way, and many, many books are written about war by people that haven't been in it. The broader point is that LLMs cannot have original experiences.
      - lordnacho 3mo ago
        But that's purely a matter of having sensors? Stick a camera and a touch sensor on the machine, now it is experiencing the world. Besides that, there is a lot of value in redigested experience. Quite a lot of history is only really examined in a larger context, where the person describing it cannot have experienced all the original events.
vitorfblima 3mo ago
He probably could tell you something about it, based on other people's experiences. Doesn't mean he would actually know what he was talking about.
- keiferski 3mo ago
  He could tell you a collection of descriptions. Not actual knowledge firsthand. Does reading an infinite number of cookbooks mean you know what the ingredients in each taste like?
everdrive 3mo ago
I think this is actually a tough one. Yes, I agree that an LLM can never experience this. But -- when a real human needs to translate that experience back into words, it can actually do so just fine. In other words, when a real human needs to translate an experience into words to share it, A LOT of information is lost. The LLM might actually be better-suited for the the task in your example, even if the point you were driving at stands.
- keiferski 3mo ago
  I don't think it's all that difficult. Language is not a 1-1 match to reality. Ergo any entity which is inherently language-only, will fail to accurately describe the experience.
  - brazzy 3mo ago
    Not if the only result you can judge is also language-only, and the entity has access to a large corpus of descriptions produced by people who have had the experience.
    - keiferski 3mo ago
      Then you're just comparing descriptions, and you're also dependent on the language skills of the experiencers, and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality. So an LLM may be able to give you the optimal description of a feeling, on par with what a person would give you; but it won't be equivalent to the actual feeling.
      - brazzy 3mo ago
        Does it matter (why and how) if you can't tell the difference, no matter how hard you tailor the question towards that end? It's basically the Turing test.
      - everdrive 3mo ago
        >and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality. Definitely agreed, but at least when talking about experience we've been stuck in this position for most of human history. How do I know what it's like to eat a hamburger? Perhaps, like the cute visual in Ratatouille there is a deep inner experience but (also like in Ratatouille) when I need to communicate that experience with another person I'm stuck relying on language, and the language is found lacking. I know it's just a kid's cartoon, but interestingly Ratatouille was making this exact same point -- he really lacks any meaningful way to convey his inner experience. It's locked behind language. The film tackles this by showing an Remy's complex and interesting visual, but his friend only gets the fuzziest, dullest visual when he attempts to communicate it. Remy's immediate rat & family peers actually _never_ get to understand his experience, and instead later help him out of love an allegiance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizttM_Cbuc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizttM_Cbuc

perrygeo 3mo ago

Billions of conversations. Zero lived experience. The difference is huge. An LLM conversation can contain within it a batshit crazy model of the world and still produce a plausible stream of tokens. No skin in the game. If you don't test your ideas against reality, you don't have a model of reality; you have a model of written human thought. It's critical to understand the difference.