Comment by CamperBob2
1 day ago
That allowed the assimilation of language operations, intellectual operations, into a machine.
The important part is how we've recently learned just how much of our reality is embodied by language. Language does vastly more than anyone thought it did, and that means that language models can do vastly more work than anyone thought they could.
There was no reason on Earth to think that "stochastic parrots" could solve original math problems and write novel proofs, for instance. The fact that they can do that sort of thing is a huge, huge deal... too big a deal to express in the terms you're using here.
Yeesh. Math itself is a constructed input-output modeling system that provides functional benefits to the computational organisms that support it. Language is the same type of system, but with more individual slack. "Stochastic parrots" is just your human minimization device, that will either serve you or not. Reality is not embodied by language, we are not in the business of reality representation, we are in the business of functional representation systems, that work to differing degrees based on our goals. That's why we have multiple languages, multiple religions, multiple doctrines. It's silly to measure someone's belief in astrology against 'reality', we measure ppl's beliefs against their observable effectiveness and success. Ppl talk about reality but it's inconceivable. Any representation of reality is a subjective exercise in prioritization, listen to anyone describe it and they have to make choices about what to cover. That's not reality.
> What is reality? Obviously, no one can say, because it isn’t words. It isn’t material—that’s just an idea. It isn’t spiritual—that’s also an idea; a symbol. Reality is this: [GONG]. You see? We all know what reality is, but we can’t describe it. Just as we all know how to beat our hearts and shape our bones, but cannot say how it is done. - Alan Watts
https://organism.earth/library/document/art-of-meditation