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

[Brent Allsop]

The issue is people are failing to distinguish between and failing to
include both reality AND knowledge of reality.
If you think there is only one, you're going to think someone is saying
that one (or the other one) isn't real.
People think that if something 'seems' yellow, that there isn't really
anything that has that yellowness quality, which is false.
The redness quality is absolutely a quality of something in your brain.
Your knowledge of that quality's reality, and what it is like, cannot be
mistaken, even though that quality tells you nothing about the quality of
the apple.
The apple, and your knowledge of the apple are both very real, physical
things.
When you say that the apple is red, you are saying two things (two
referents):

1. a non qualitative fact about the property of the apple which causes it
to reflect light in a certain way.
2. a qualitative statement about a fact of your knowledge of that apple, in
your brain.

The apple reflects the kind of light it does, because of its light physical
reflecting properties.
We represent properties like this with knowledge in our brain that is false
colored to have a redness quality.
Whatever it is, in the brain, that has this quality behaves the way it
does, because of its quality, the same way the apple reflects red light,
because of its physicaL property.
Our brain computes with knowledge that has a redness quality, so we can
focus on what is important, so we know what to eat (not the green stuff),
and so on.










On Sun, Mar 26, 2023 at 11:57 PM Tara Maya via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 26, 2023 at 4:35 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
>> 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> 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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