[s0ulphire]

A follow up question: as a human doesn't start with "knowing" something either and first creates definitions for objects or words, which it then uses to build increasingly abstract concepts that we eventually classify as "knowledge" on the thing, is there anything that would stop LLMs from being able to do the same thing? I fully agree the capability is not there yet, but I can't say what would stop an appropriately designed model from being able to do so myself.

[abeppu]

A human hears words in context. Those words tie to things in the environment, responses to the young human's actions, etc. A parent saying, "roll the ball" during playtime with their kid and actually pushing a ball back and forth, provides a grounding of words in actual experience.

> is there anything that would stop LLMs from being able to do the same thing?

If you built an AI system which could hear/see/touch/move etc, and it learned language and vision and behaviors together, such that it knows that a ball is round, can be thrown or rolled, is often used at playtime, etc, then maybe it could understand rather than just produce language. I don't know that we would still call it an LLM, because it could likely do many other things too.

[lurquer]

Socrates argued that we are born knowing everything, but we forgot most if it. Learning is simply the act of recalling what you once knew.

The point, for this thread, is not whether or not Socrates was correct.

Rather, it’s a warning that we must not confidently assume we are anything like a machine.

We may have souls, we may be eternal, there may be something utterly immaterial at the heart of us.

As we strive to understand the inner-workings of machines that appear, at times, to be human-like, we ought not succumb to the temptation to think of ourselves as machine-like merely in order to convince ourselves (incorrectly) that we understand what’s going on.

[s0ulphire]

We may indeed have souls or be eternal; although I call myself atheist, I don't agree with subscribing with 100% certainty to any idea. As CosmicSkeptic points out everyone holds bad ideas without knowing it, and unless you're open to questioning them you'll never find out.

With that said, there is quite literally zero evidence for the existence of a soul, despite it being posited for thousands of years, and increasing evidence that consciousness is simply a product of a sufficiently connected system. I'll draw an analogy to temperature, which isn't "created", but is a simple consequence of two points in space having different energy levels. I'm sure there's a better analogy that could be made, but I think you get the idea.

[int_19h]

And, conversely, we might just be so full of ourselves that we are willing resort to claims on the immaterial if that's what it takes to not give up the exceptionalism.