[ExI] Language models are like mirrors

Brent Allsop brent.allsop at gmail.com
Sat Apr 1 00:54:04 UTC 2023


When you say: "almost everybody disagrees with you", it's just popular,
clearly mistaken bleateters and tweeters.
In addition to me, there are currently 45 supporters of RQT
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness/6-Representational-Qualia>
which all agree with Gordon, and that abstract systems can't know what
redness is like, and such.  And there are quite a few world class peer
ranked experts <https://canonizer.com/topic/81-Mind-Experts/1> in the field
participating.  No other camp has any significant amount of support
compared to this camp.
Gordon, could we get you to support RQT
<https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Theories-of-Consciousness/6-Representational-Qualia>
?
Typical of bleaters and tweeters of popular mistaken thinking, they will
never expend the effort (far less effort than constantly bleating stuff) to
create a camp.  And even if they did, there will not be near as many
supporters of such camps as the well thought out camps, with very
convincing arguments about how competing camps are mistaken.

Now I would agree with you that large language models do understand
definitions of lots of words that aren't just labels for physical
qualities, and such.  Probably most of the disagreement is people talking
about different types of words, talking past each other.



On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 5:37 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 2:18 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Gordon,
>> *almost everybody disagrees with you. *
>>
>
> ChatGPT-4 itself agrees with me. It says it cannot solve the symbol
> grounding problem for itself as it has no conscious experience, and says it
> therefore does not understand the meanings of the words as humans do, and
> that in this respect it is at a disadvantage compared to humans. See my
> thread on the subject.
>
>
> Spike also agrees these are only language analysis tools. Brent also seems
> to agree that they have no access to referents and therefore  no way to
> know meanings of words.
>
> And this is not democracy, in any case. I’m not afraid to be in the
> company people who disagree wit me.
>
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