[ExI] Why do the language model and the vision model align?

[John Clark]

On Sun, Feb 8, 2026 at 10:30 AM Stefano Ticozzi <stefano.ticozzi at gmail.com>
wrote:

*> The article you linked here appeared to refer to a convergence toward a
> Platonic concept of the Idea; it therefore seemed relevant to recall that
> Platonic Ideas have been extensively demonstrated to be “false” by science.*
>

*No. You can't use a tape measure to prove that a poem is "false". Science
deals with what you can see, hear, feel, taste and smell, Plato was dealing
with the metaphysical, the underlying nature of being. However, far from
disproving it, in the 20th century Quantum Mechanics actually gave some
support to Plato's ideas. In Plato's Allegory of the Cave we can only see
the "shadows" of the fundamental underlying reality, and in a similar way
modern physics says we can only observe reality through a probability (not
a certainty) obtained by the Quantum Wavefunction.  *

*> human language has grown and developed around images, driven almost
> exclusively by the need to emulate the sense of sight.*
>

*We may not be able to directly observe fundamental underlying reality but
we are certainly affected by it, and over the eons human language has been
optimized to maximize the probability that one's genes get into the next
generation. So although words are not the fundamental reality they must be
congruent with it. That has been known for a long time but very recently AI
has taught us that the connection is much deeper and far more subtle than
previously suspected. *

*Just a few years ago many people (including me) were saying that words
were not enough and that for a machine to be truly intelligent it would
need a body, or at least sense organs that can interact with the real
physical world. But we now know that is untrue. It is still not entirely
clear, at least not to me, exactly how it is possible for words alone to do
that, but it is an undeniable fact that somehow it is.*

* John K Clark*
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