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

[Ben Zaiboc]

Reading these conversations over the last few days, it has struck me 
that some people keep referring to 'real' things, usually using the word 
'referents' (e.g. an apple), as though our brains had direct access to 
them and could somehow just know what they are.

But we don't.

Think about it, what is "An Apple"?

It's a term that we associate with a large set of sensory and memory 
data, including language data, but mostly things like visual, textural, 
taste, smell, emotional, etc., data stored as memories.

Seeing as we all have different memories associated with the label "An 
Apple" (because some of us were sick the first time we ate one, some of 
us are allergic to something in apples, some of us have a greater 
impression of sweetness, or sourness, when we eat one, some of us once 
discovered a maggot in one, some people have only ever eaten Granny 
Smiths, others only Braeburns, or Crab Apples, and so on and so on...), 
then 'An Apple' is a different thing to each of us.

There is no spoon! Er, Apple. There is no Apple!
Not as a 'real-world thing'.

"An Apple" is an abstract concept that, despite the individual 
differences, most of us can agree on, because there are a lot of common 
features for each of us, such as general shape, some common colours, a 
set of smells and tastes, how we can use them, where we get them from, 
and so on.. The concept is represented internally, and communicated 
externally (to other people) by a linguistic label, that refers, for 
each of us, to this large bunch of data extracted from our senses and 
memories: "Una Manzana".

It's all 'nothing but' Data. Yet we all think that we 'understand' what 
an Apple is. Based purely on this data in our brains (because we have 
access to nothing else).

So this idea of a label having 'a referent' seems false to me. Labels 
(data in our heads) refer to a big set of data (in our heads). Where the 
data comes from is secondary, diverse, and quite distant, when you trace 
the neural pathways back to a large and disparate set of incoming 
sensory signals, scattered over space and time. The meaning is created 
in our minds, not resident in a single object in the outside world.

This is my understanding of things, anyway.

Ben