[ExI] Bender's Octopus (re: LLMs like ChatGPT)

[Giovanni Santostasi]

You dismiss GPT 4 as being a chatbot. He is not a chatbot. He is much more
than that.
Listen you are over rating referents because it is all what you have right
now. People that believe that humans are not mere machines are of the
religious kind and they have been cornered more and more and there is
little left. This referent business seems to be their last castle.
I would point out to the fact that what you call a referent is not even a
primary experience. In fact, if I pointed to a stone and uttered the word
Pietra to you (in Italian stone) how sure you are I'm talking about a
Stone?
I could point to the stone and mean "Grey" (the color of the stone), or
maybe I point to the stone and I mean just an object, or a particular type
of stone, like obsidian and so on. If in doubt you could point to other
stones, maybe different and say Pietra and if they are not obsidian I would
say no, that is Granito and so on. But what if meant Hard instead of stone?
Also Eskimos have several words for snow according to many different
situations. How do you deal with referents in that situation?

Pointing is not really what helps us here, it is a shortcut, what matters
is the ABSTRACTION I'm doing that is to generalize the idea of a stone to
many different objects, with different shapes, color, sizes and so on. How
do I do this generalization without an initial referent that is universal?
What comes first, the abstraction or the direct experience? I think the
direct experience is overrated. It is important for survival, but has no
relevance in terms of understanding or conscious experiences.
Read this please, you can build the numerals from nothing. Once you do that
you can build anything else. So no concrete referent needed.
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4039712/how-do-you-generate-the-numbers-from-an-empty-set
Giovanni









On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 11:58 PM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 12:46 AM Giovanni Santostasi <
> gsantostasi at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> *Now, what if they don't beam down to the planet and listen to only
>> digital radio signals coming from the planet and send digital radio signals
>> in return? No communication is possible as there are no referents. It's all
>> noise.*Gordon on you are so wrong.
>>
>
> Yes, we can do math, I agree, but this is only because we are
> conscious beings with access to the referents. We can "see" the meaning of
> pi and understand its relevance because as conscious beings we have access
> to mathematical truths, the referents. Digital calculators and computers
> and chatbots can only blindly process the numbers.
>
>
>
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