this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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If the only thing you feed an AI is words, then how would it possibly understand what these words mean if it does not have access to the things the words are referring to?
If it does not know the meaning of words, then what can it do but find patterns in the ways they are used?
This is a shitpost.
We are special, I am in any case.
It is akin to the relativity problem in physics. Where is the center of the universe? What "grid" do things move through? The answer is that everything moves relative to one another, and somehow that fact causes the phenomena in our universe (and in these language models) to emerge.
Likewise, our brains do a significantly more sophisticated but not entirely different version of this. There are more "cores" in our brains that are good at differen tasks that all constantly talk back and forth between eachother, and our frontal lobe provides the advanced thinking and networking on top of that. The LLMs are more equivalent to the broca's area, they havent built out the full frontal lobe yet (or rather, the "Multiple Demand network")
You are right in that an AI will never know what an apple tastes like, or what a breeze on its face feels like until we give them sensory equipment to read from.
In this case though, its the equivalent of a college student having no real world experience and only the knowledge from their books, lectures, and labs. You can still work with the concepts of and reason against things you have never touched if you are given enough information about them beforehand.
The two rhetorical questions in your first paragraph assume the universe is discrete and finite, and I am not sure why. But also, that has nothing to do with what we are talking about. You think that if you show the computers and brains work the same way(they don't), or in a similar way(maybe) I will have to accept an AI can do everything a human can, but that is not true at all.
Treating an AI like a subject capable of receiving information is inaccurate, but I will still assume it is identical to a human in that regard for the sake of argument.
It would still be nothing like a college student grappling with abstract concepts. It would be like giving you university textbooks on quantum mechanics written in chinese, and making you study them(it would be even more accurate if you didn't know any language at all). You would be able to notice patterns in the ways the words are placed relative to each other, and also use this information(theoretically) to make a combination of characters that resembles the texts you have, but you wouldn't be able to understand what they reference. Even if you had a dictionary you wouldn't be, because you wouldn't be able to understand the definitions. Words don't magically have their meanings stored inside, they are jnterpreted in our heads, but an AI can't do that, the word means nothing to it.