Comment by josephg
8 months ago
If we’re gonna talk trip philosophy, then:
This is only true at the physical level. At another level, the only thing that “exists” is a mind. If all you have is a bunch of rocks floating through space with nothing to perceive it, the universe is indistinguishable from emptiness. Experience lives at the intersection of instantiated reality and thought / perception. You need both.
You can also imagine travelling along the axis of an idea or an archetype through time and space. For example, the idea of lovers or warriors or something. Each instantiation of that idea in someone exists along that axis. The idea can only come into being inside a physical reality or simulation. But the idea itself is eternal. The idea of the number 1 doesn’t “need” the universe.
Ideas aren’t made out of atoms.
It's a nice thought. If an idea could be encoded... that each persons idea of a concept, viewed in the right dimensionality, has a rough, similar outline. At least, that's my interpretation of your idea. :-) Your comment either triggered, or made me notice an ongoing shift in my worldview. Thank you!
> But the idea itself is eternal. The idea of the number 1 doesn’t “need” the universe.
Ideas are mental concepts, thoughts, or notions that exist in the mind.
As far as we know, there’s no evidence of mind-independent ideas. We can only access ideas through our minds, so we have no way to verify they exist without minds.
Is an LLM "a mind"? They certainly seem to encode brain-independent ideas.
> We can only access ideas through our minds, so we have no way to verify they exist without minds.
Its symmetric. We can also only access the physical world through our minds too. We have no way to verify it exists without a mind. Actually we have no way to verify it exists at all in the form we perceive it - since it might just be a big simulation.
In that sense, I have more direct evidence of my ideas than I do the world, since I can perceive ideas directly. (I say "my ideas" not "our ideas" because I can't tell as easily if you exist.)
This is trivially untrue.
If you see a large enough, dangerous-looking enough animal in person and up close, you will respond physically without a single thought or idea. If you didn't, evolutionarily you wouldn’t exist.
This is because you are parallel systems. Ideas are not primary experience.
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LLMs are basically a collective copy of brain generated ideas.
I don't believe ideas are eternal.
Their instantiations are based on either some physical hardwiring (instincts) or cultivated though observations. If an idea has the appearance of being eternal, it's because either there's a process in place for that physical structure to be replicated though time, or because new minds are making essentially the same observations.
I suspect even some of the most "eternal" of ideas are less so than you might think. If we were capable of communicating with a human from 100,000 years ago, in detail, how many identical ideas would we share? I think it would be very few, given that many people's ideas already differ subtlety even when they live in similar environments.
If you crushed all the atoms in the universe into dust, would the number 2 also be destroyed in the process? I don't know if the mathematical idea of 2 exists in the physical world at all. I don’t know if that’s even a well formed question.
Obviously humans perceive 2-ness. And if you crushed all our minds to dust, nobody would remember 2. But would that really destroy the number? If an alien civilisation in another universe counted things, I think it might be the very same number 2 that they use to count.
I'm not a Platonist.
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The only way we see ideas manifest is in a physical world, and via minds (predominantly human at that). While ideas are not made out of atoms, they exist within atoms (brains, computers, sound, books and so on). We can imagine ideas exist on their own independent of their manifestation - but its just that - an imagination.
But plenty of ideas can’t be made manifest in the physical world. Like the idea of infinity doesn’t - and can’t - exist in the physical. Yet it’s still a useful idea in mathematics.
And again, the physical cannot be perceived except through a mind of some kind. To play devils advocate, we can imagine the universe existing without a mind to observe it - but it’s just that - an imagination.
I do not mean manifest physically, but manifest in our minds