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

[Tara Maya]

At some point, every child of mine has learned what an apple is by seeing it, pointing to it, tasting it and eating it and sometimes by throwing it on the ground refusing to eat it. 

Even our most abstract words all started as concrete metaphors. Ab-stract itself refers to a physical motion that any child could see and point to: "pull away." 

Words refer to real things, or else they aren't words, they are babble. Babies do babble, and then they learn language by applying those sounds to actual, tangible things. They pull away from the tangible into abstraction but that connection to the physical world is never lost. 

I get that some people don't "believe" in reality, but I personally don't find any argument about artificial consciousness convincing if it means the rest of the universe has to be condemned as unreal, mere flickerings in Plato's cave. 

Tara Maya


> On Mar 26, 2023, at 7:33 PM, Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Mar 26, 2023 at 8:10 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> On Sun, Mar 26, 2023 at 4:35 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>> wrote:
>>> On Sat, Mar 25, 2023 at 2:42 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>> wrote:
>>>> 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"?
>>>> ...
>>>> There is no spoon! Er, Apple. There is no Apple!
>>>> Not as a 'real-world thing'.
>>> 
>>> It would seem that you would rather say that apples are not real than say that the word "apple" has meaning.
>> 
>> I don't believe he is saying that at all.  Are YOU saying, we don't have knowledge of an apple, which has very real redness and greenness qualities, which can be computationally bound, which is what we know about the apple??  Redness is a quality of our knowledge of the apple.  THAT very real physical quality of our knowledge, in the brain, is the referent of redness.  We don't know the colorness qualities of the apple, or anything else out there, since our brains false colors all of our knowledge, so it can emphasize, in our understanding of the apple, what is important to us, as part of our computation process of needing to pick the apple.
> 
> I am not making any arguments about qualities or qualia at the moment (no time for it). I am saying simply that a word like "apple" has meaning, and that the meaning is derived from pointing at the existence of real apples in the real world -- the referents. The word apple is simply a pointer to those apples. Without those apples in the real world, the word has no meaning.
> 
> For whatever reason, Ben is saying apples are not real-world things.
> 
> -gts

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