[FloorEgg]

That's a segue into an important and rich philosophical space...

What is truth? Can it be attained, or only approached?

Can truth be approached (progress made towards truth) without interacting with reality?

The only shared truth seeking algorithm I know is the scientific method, which breaks down truth into two categories (my words here):

1) truth about what happened (controlled documented experiments) And 2) truth about how reality works (predictive powers)

In contrast to something like Karl friston free energy principle, which is more of a single unit truth seeking (more like predictive capability seeking) model.

So it seems like truth isn't an input to AI so much as it's an output, and it can't be attained, only approached.

But maybe you don't mean truth so much as a capability to definitively prove, in which case I agree and I think that's worth adding. Somehow integrating formal theorem proving algorithms into the architecture would probably be part of what enables AI to dramatically exceed human capabilities.

[simonh]

I think that in some senses truth is associated with action in the world. That’s how we test our hypotheses. Not just in science, in terms of empirical adequacy, but even as children and adults. We learn from experience of doing, not just rote, and we associate effectiveness with truth. That’s not a perfect heuristic, but it’s better than just floating in a sea of propositions as current LLMs largely are.

[FloorEgg]

I agree.

There's a truth of what happened, which as individuals we can only ever know to a limited scope... And then there is truth as a prediction ability (formula of gravity predicts how things fall).

Science is a way to build a shared truth, but as an individual we just need to experience an environment.

One way I've heard it broken down is between functional truths and absolute truths. So maybe we can attain functional truths and transfer those to LLMs through language, but absolute truth can never be attained only approached. (The only absolute truth is the universe itself, and anything else is just an approximation)