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

[Jason Resch]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2023, 2:45 AM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> I can already hear someone saying "but we will include photographs of
> objects in the training so they have referents," but this still does not do
> the trick. These digital photographs can be displayed to the human operator
> of the chatbot, but the bot itself sees only 1s and 0s, on's and off's. It
> can detect colors by wavelength, but still this is only digital data. It
> does not see the colors. Likewise with shapes. It is turtles (one's and
> zero's) all the way down with no referents.
>


But then: how do we?

Your answer: "the brain's a mystery" doesn't escape the fact that it's a
counterexample to your argument.

It only takes a single counterexample to disprove the validity of a theory.
In this case, our brains disprove the theory that "a system cannot learn
meaning just from patterns in information."

Jason


> -gts
>
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 12:18 AM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Nobody least of all me questions that GPT-4 will be capable of amazing
>> feats, and that eventually these language models will surpass humans in
>> terms of what we can call intelligence or what I might for sake of clarity
>> prefer to call apparent intelligence. The question here is whether they
>> will know what they are saying given that they are trained only on the
>> forms of words with no access to the meanings or referents.
>>
>> Adrian has made the excellent point a couple of times that this is like
>> the first contact problem in science fiction, and actually like the first
>> contact problem between any two cultures with completely different
>> languages. Q: When Kirk and Spock beam down to a new planet with
>> intelligent alien life, how will they learn to communicate? A: With
>> referents.
>>
>> Spock will point to himself and say "Spock." Kirk will point to himself
>> and say "Kirk." Kirk will point to a rock and say "rock." Kirk and Spock
>> use these kinds referents to initiate  communication. If our alien friend
>> wants to communicate, he will point to the rock and "fwerasa" (or whatever
>> is his word for rock). He will point to himself and say his name, and so
>> on. Eventually, Spock and the alien will learn how to translate a few
>> words, and from there the process of understanding begins.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> -gts
>>
>>>
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