Comment by tbrownaw
17 days ago
> 2. People need to let go of this strange and erroneous idea that humans somehow have this privileged access to 'the real world'. You don't.
You are denouncing a claim that the comment you're replying to did not make.
They made it implicitly, otherwise this:
>(2) language only somewhat models the world
is completely irrelevant.
Everyone is only 'somewhat modeling' the world. Humans, Animals, and LLMs.
Completely relevant, because LLMs only "somewhat model" humans' "somewhat modeling" of the world...
LLMs aren't modeling "humans modeling the world" - they're modeling patterns in data that reflect the world directly. When an LLM learns physics from textbooks, scientific papers, and code, it's learning the same compressed representations of reality that humans use, not a "model of a model."
Your argument would suggest that because you learned about quantum mechanics through language (textbooks, lectures), you only have access to "humans' modeling of humans' modeling of quantum mechanics" - an infinite regress that's clearly absurd.
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You're wrong about this: "People need to let go of this strange and erroneous idea that humans somehow have this privileged access to the 'real world'. You don't."
People do have a privileged access to the 'real world' compared to, for example, LLMs and any future AI. It's called: Consciousness and it is how we experience and come to know and understand the world. Consciousness is the privileged access that AI will never have.
> It's called: Consciousness
Ok, explain its mechanism and why it gives privileged access. Furthermore I'd go for the Nobel prize and describe the elementary mechanics of consciousness and where the state change from non-conscious versus conscious occurs. It would be enlightening to read your paper.
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