Comment by josephg
8 months ago
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.
Sorry, I’m not sure how that disproves my claims? Or which claim it disproves. Say more?
> We can also only access the physical world through our minds too. We have no way to verify it exists without a mind.
The physical responses that could save your life are pre-mind, and testably extant within you.
> I have more direct evidence of my ideas than I do the world, since I can perceive ideas directly.
Also, and perhaps to be considered separately, you have no evidence that your ideas are directly perceived, only that they are qualitatively different from what you have been educated to second-order understand as sensory input.
2 replies →
LLMs are basically a collective copy of brain generated ideas.