[xamuel]

Long before Erdös, we had Plato and Socrates develop the theory of anamnesis, that there is no such thing as learning, but rather, whatever we supposedly learn, we actually remember (we knew it already and had forgotten it). Presumably this should be understood only of universal facts (like mathematics), not contingent facts (like who was the president of the U.S. in 1950).

[teiferer]

Remember from ...when?

[xamuel]

Before birth. ...Hey, don't point that pitchfork at me, point it at Socrates. In his defense, that kind of does describe when LLMs acquired their knowledge (if we consider "birth" to be the moment when the already-trained weights are sent to the GPU) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)

[teiferer]

> Before birth

Any scientific basis for this claim?

Pre-conception is unlikely to be really possible outside some esoteric circles. While in the womb there could be some limited experiences that get ingrained in the mind as memories, but I don't think that's the topic here.