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

[John Clark]

On Sat, Feb 14, 2026 at 9:29 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*>>> Both reflect the physical world. Directness or indirectness I don't
>>> see as relevant. Throughout your brain there are many levels of
>>> transformation of inputs.*
>>>
>>
>> *>> But most of those transformations make sense only in light of other
>> things that the brain knows, chief among them being an intuitive
>> understanding of everyday physics. Nevertheless as it turns out, that fact
>> doesn't matter. Perhaps I shouldn't have been but that surprised me.  *
>>
>
> *> I don't think much knowledge of physics is pre-wired.*
>

*I agree, most physical intuition is the result of direct contact with the
outside world with no intermediary between. Human teachers were able to
help me learn to read English because they had brains similar to mine and
they, like me, had direct contact with the outside world; for example: they
showed me this sequence of squiggles "tree" and then they pointed to a tall
thing with green stuff on top, and I got the idea. But how did an AI that
has never known anything except squiggles manage to make that same
connection? I don't know but somehow it did. *

*> The informational complexity of an adult human brain is approximately a
> million times that of the informational complexity of the genome.*
>

*Yes, and that's why I always thought the argument that true AI would never
be possible because it would need to be so ridiculously complex we could
never understand it, was bogus. The amount of information required to make
a seed AI is actually quite small.  *

*> what's important to take away from the Chess example is that an
> understanding of how things interact can be extracted *merely from textual
> examples and descriptions* of those things interacting.*
>

*Even i**f the fundamental laws of physics were radically different it
would not change chess anymore than it would change the fact that there are
an infinite number of prime numbers, but the vast majority of things that
we believe are the most important would change.   *

*John K Clark*





>
>
>> *Humans have found lots of text written in "Linear A" that was used by
>> the inhabitants of Crete about 4000 years ago, and the even older writing
>> system used by the Indus Valley Civilization, but modern scholars have been
>> unable to decipher either of them even though, unlike the AI, they were
>> written by members of their own species. And the last person who could read
>> ancient Etruscan was the Roman emperor Claudius. The trouble is those
>> civilizations are a complete blank, we have nothing to go on, today we
>> don't even know what spoken language family those civilizations used. *
>>
>> *Egyptian hieroglyphics would have also remained undeciphered except that
>> we got a lucky break, we found the Rosetta Stone which contained the same
>> speech written in both hieroglyphics and an early form of Greek which
>> scholars could already read. Somehow AI has found their own "Rosetta
>> Stone", I just wish I knew what it was. *
>>
>
>
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