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> an ML system operating only on text strings (a human-to-human communication medium), without access to the world the text describes, or even a human mind with which to interpret the words, is as those in the cave. This is not in principle an impossible task, but neither is it an easy one, and one wouldn't expect mere hill-climbing to solve it
Blind people can literally not picture red. They can describe red, with likely even more articulateness than most, but have never seen it themselves. They infer it's properties from other contexts, and communicated a description that would match a non-blind person. But they can see it.I would link to the Robert Miles video, but it is just blatant. It has read every physics book, and can infer the Newtonian laws even if it didn't. Micheal Crichton's Timeline, "the time machine drifts, sure. It returns. Just like a plate will remain on a table, even when you are not looking at it." It also knows Timeline is a book, time machines are fictional, and that Micheal Crichton is the best author. These are all just words, maybe with probability weights. > I'm not confident those four words actually mean anything. I...The computer waxes lyrical ... mere technobabble. Any perceived meaning exists only in your mind... people will see different meanings because the meaning isn't there.
Meaning only means something to people, which you are. That is axiomatically correct, but not very productive, as self-references are good but countering proofs.The whole "what is the purpose to life?" is a similar loaded question; only humans have purpose, as it is entirely in their little noggins, no more present materially then the flesh they inhabit. Science cannot answer "Why?", only "How?"; "Why?" is a question of intention, which would be to anthropomorphize, which only Humans do. The computers can infer, and imply, then reply. |
You're confusing "what it is possible to derive, given the bounds of information theory" with "how this particular computer system behaves". I sincerely doubt that a transformer model's training procedure derives Newton's Third Law, no matter how many narrative descriptions it's fed: letting alone what the training procedure actually does, that's the sort of thing that only comes up when you have a quantitative description available, such as an analogue sensorium, or the results of an experiment.