Comment by bwfan123

Nice commentary and I enjoyed the poetic turn of phrase. I had to respond to it with my own thoughts if only to bookmark it for myself.

> how many people are continually ready to mistake language for thought

This is a fundamental illusion - where, rote memory and names and words get mistaken for understanding. This was wonderfully illustrated here [1]. Few really grok what understanding actually is. This is an unfortunate by-product of our education system.

> Are they all P-zombies or just obedience-conditioned into emulating ones?!?!?

Brilliant way to state the fundamental human condition. ie, we are all zombies conditioned to imitate rather than understand. Social media amplifies the zombification, and now LLMs do that too.

> Starting with the sophomoric questions of the optimist who mistakes the possible for the viable

This is the fundamental tension between operationalized meaning and imagination. A grokking soul gathers mists from the cosmic chaos and creates meaning and operationalizes it for its own benefit and then continually adapts it.

> it's amazing if sad that they cracked it by more data and not by more model

I was speaking to experts in the sciences (chemistry). They were shocked that the underlying architecture is brute force. They expected a compact information-compressed theory which is able to model independent of data. The problem with brute-force approaches are that they dont scale, and dont capture the essences which are embodied in theories.

> The physical limits of human language as information processing device have been hit at some point in the XX century

2000 years back when humans realized that formalism was needed to operationalize meaning, and natural language was too vague to capture and communicate it. Because the world model that natural language captures encompasses "everything" whereas for making it "useful" requires to limit it via formalism.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2483976