[ExI] GPT-4 on its inability to solve the symbol grounding problem

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 07/04/2023 00:00, billw  wrote:
> man DNA is less than a gigabyte of information, which is surprisingly 
> simple, simpler even than modern video games which often are 60+ 
> gigabytes in size.
>
> Now you are telling me that a video game is as complex as a person.  
> Can't be.  The combination of genes is for practical purposes 
> infinite.   bill w

You are correct, but making the wrong comparison. A videogame is more 
complex than the instuctions for starting a person off (Creating an 
embryo. Actually, not even that), which is a vastly different thing to 
an actual person. Just like the Game of Life, etc., the initial 
instructions plus environmental input plus time, with many feedback 
loops, results in something vastly more complex than the instructions 
themselves. And vastly more complex than any videogame.

Another thing that's easily overlooked is the pre-existing (huge!) set 
of metabolic reactions and reagents that this process takes place in and 
relies on. When an egg is fertilised, it's really a new set of 
instructions coming in to a massive biochemical factory that was there 
all along. It's not just about genetics. These estimates of the 
information required to make a human always seem to ignore that. If you 
factor that in, we simply don't know how much information is needed, 
because we only understand a fraction of our biochemistry.

Maybe it can be estimated, though, from the average number of molecules 
in an egg cell, and the concent... Hmm, I'm not the right person to 
tackle that kind of thing.

Ben
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