Comment by viccis
2 days ago
If anyone here hasn't read Borges, I'd strongly recommend him. Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break. The common recommendation would be to try out Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and see if you like it. If so, it's part of Labyrinths, which is (in my opinion) his best collection of short stories. The best edition in English is probably Penguin's Collected Fictions.
Regarding the content of this interview:
>If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?
This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge would be necessary to create Borges out of a world without Borges.
In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead end for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism is accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of creating synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so with categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this be?)
Somewhat relevant to this overall conversation is "pierre menard author of the quixote". Which takes the concept of death of the author in an amusing direction.
> Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break.
Yes, his writings are short, but man they are dense!
To anyone who cares, do this exercise: read short story by Borges, probably the shorter the better. Then go ahead say, next day, and try to write it down again in your own words. I tried a couple of times, and I ended with at least twice the number of pages. Amazing.
There's definitely a Pierre Menard joke in here somewhere
Tlön is one of my favorite short stories. Weirdly (and perhaps appropriately) that's despite being unable to remember basically anything about it once I've finished reading.
Starting with TUOT is definitely an interesting suggestion! I think most people would recommend The Library of Babel or The Garden of Forking Paths as a first read. But TUOT is probably my favourite, and a very apt recommendation for a post-truth world.
>but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge.
Do you think that a LLM has the ability to identify a new a priori knowledge?
It seems like it would be a lower threshold to meet but If you combine that with a stochastic process then it seems inevitable that it would be able to ruminate until it came up with new a priori knowledge.
I've said this in another comment but an example would be to train an LLM on a corpus with ALL mathematic content removed. Nothing at all. Then ask it what the shortest distance between two points is. That's an example of synthetic a priori knowledge.
I think it would be nearly impossible to prove that your corpus had no mathematical content. In fact it would be extremely contentious as to what was considered mathematical content. Do you remove all reference to numbers and counting? How about the words and, or and not.
I think the only criteria of no math that would satisfy some people would by definition fail because the model would have no concept of points or distance because some would certainly count those as mathematical content.
I first encountered Borges in high school, reading “The House of Asterion” as an assignment. Probably not one of his most well known short stories, but I would still recommend it.
Reading Borges is anything but easy. It requires a certain state of mind. I myself would pick Cortazar over Borges any day, buy I have appreciated some of his writings.
I have the opposite experience. I find Cortazar impenetrable, but the Borges stories "speak to me".
Highly recommend his Fictions too. Grabbed a worn copy for 1€ on the street months ago, and I still think about Uqbar from time to time.
Did you ever read House of Leaves?
I've tried, but never made it all the way through. Cool to realize the author's sister (Poe) made a hit song "Haunted" when inspired by the same house iirc. There's my random fact of the day.
Let me give you some probably bad advice. Skip the Johnny Truant parts and skim past all the creative layout stuff. It's just decoration, and decoration is often suspicious. Focus on the core story. It’s fantastic. There’s a shot at building a full-on American mythology, Lovecraft-style, from that alone.
Sadly, almost no one talks about it. Ditch the form and embrace the substance. ← It also nods to the mystery behind The Navidson Record.
I wish I had known this when I first read it.
3 replies →
I was interested in what this house looks like but after a quick internet search it seems that her album was inspired by the novel itself, not any particular house.