<div dir="ltr">I mean, Jason that is much better English speaker than I'm said it perfectly here. Argument closed. <br><br><div dir="auto" style=""><b style=""><font color="#ff0000">Consider also: our brains never make any direct contact with the outside world. All our brains have to work with are "dots and dashes" of neuronal firings. These are essentially just 1s and 0s, signals without referents. Yet, somehow, seemingly magically, our brains are able to piece together an understanding of the outside world from the mere patterns present in these neural firings.</font></b></div><div dir="auto" style=""><b><font color="#ff0000"><br></font></b></div><div dir="auto" style=""><b><font color="#ff0000">These LLMs are in a similar position. They receive only a patterns of signals as it exists in a corpus of text, the text is itself the output of minds which are similarly trapped in their skulls. Now, can a LLM learn some things about the minds that produced this text, just as our minds learn some things about the external world which produces the pattern of neural firings our brains receive?</font></b></div><div dir="auto" style=""><b><font color="#ff0000"><br></font></b></div><div dir="auto" style=""><b><font color="#ff0000">I see no reason why LLMs could not, when we clearly can and do.</font></b></div><div dir="auto" style=""><b><font color="#ff0000"><br></font></b></div><div dir="auto" style=""><b style=""><font color="#ff0000">Jason </font></b></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 10:55 PM Giovanni Santostasi <<a href="mailto:gsantostasi@gmail.com">gsantostasi@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">GPT-4 said that mathematics has ABSTRACT referents, and in that sense it was more precise I was in using language. I meant to say referents as concrete objects, that is the crucial matter here. Language can be understood with concrete objects like stones and threes. So computers can understand language without any physical referent. Gordon your argument then is completely wrong. </div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 8:00 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto"><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 10:49 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 7:35 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 6:18 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">I think it was Adrian who asked you that question. A referent as I use the term is something that exists outside of language to which a word refers. You have an apple in your hand and you say "this is an apple." The apple in your hand is the referent that corresponds to your word "apple." <br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br>As for whether referents are data, it is unclear to me how referents could be data. I am inclined to say no but I am not sure what Adrain is getting at here.<br></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Ah, I thought you meant that the referent was the *fact that* that was an apple, rather than the referent being the apple itself. Facts are data; objects (such as apples) are not.</div></div></div></blockquote><div><br>I wouldn't say that referents are necessarily physical objects, however. They are simply whatever the word is pointing to outside of language, which could be an idea or abstract concept to which we assign a label in order to verbalize it.<br> <br>Giovanni, from your other post, it is not it is not at all clear to me that the language of mathematics has no referents. ChatGPT explained that is not the case when you asked it, but nevermind what it says. I think a sentence like 1+1=2 refers to a mathematical truth that exists separate from the numerical expression of it. The expression is the "word" or "sentence" and abstract mathematical truth is the referent.<br></div></div></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I agree, you could say mathematical truth exists outside language. But one thing this does highlight is there are many things you know about despite never having that object in hand to point and look at. You've never seen the abstract object '2'. You've never seen the core of the earth, or an electron. We lack sensory access to these things and so everything we know about them we know only through language. How do we come to understand things like '2' or electrons?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Jason</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br>-gts</div></div></div>
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