Feed themselves? You mean pick up a burger from the local McDonald's? There's got to be a better Turing test.

Are you making the argument that children do not come with an innate ability to read text and thus cannot learn from it, or are you making the argument that the internet does not contain, among other things, fairly detailed instructions on various ways to feed oneself?

I'm saying that without the context of experiencing the underlying reality, text of itself is meaningless. What is a 'spoon' anyway??

So you're saying one needs some sort of reference for which words refer to which real-world sensory experiences such as "the thing that looks like this is a spoon", and text models do not have sensory associations?

Isn't "meaning" just how a word is used within a specific context? I think that was one of Wittgenstein's points. The word "dog" doesn't need to reference the underlying reality to have meaning. Its meaning emerges from its usage in relation to all other words. Language isn't a mirror of the external world, which is probably one of the reasons LLMs are so successful.

I haven’t experienced cocaine. I haven’t ever seen cocaine (IRL). Nevertheless I think I have a decent grasp of what it is, how it works, how it affects people, and what I could (mis)use it for. Would you imply that my knowledge of cocaine isn’t true/real/useful? Is snorting a line the only way to reify the knowledge? (The answer is: the indirect way of obtaining information is sufficient for building a correct/useful/accurate world model, and there is no such thing as direct experience anyway - it’s signals coming down the wire all the way down.)

I think it's straightforwardly true that you cannot understand what it feels like to be under the influence of cocaine in the same way as someone that has been.

> Our written corpus is but a particular reflection of this reality - the shadows on the wall in Plato's cave if you will.

The irony here is that us humans (both individuals and collectives) experience a very "Plato's-cave-esque" version of reality, pretty much by design. The same Ancient Greeks built a functioning civilization that gave the world logic and physics and philosophy while believing utter nonsense about themselves and the world. We, the enlightened modern humans, also believe all kinds of nonsense about ourselves and the world, and have careful defense mechanisms against exploring anything beyond the "shadows on the wall" that we're allowed to observe by our tribal authorities. How many people still watch the "news", or even read "horoscopes", for instance? We are designed by evolution to simulate a tiny biased shadow/hallucination of reality that helps us/our tribes to thrive, and that includes self-delusions and collective blindness towards obvious BS (so we could organize around imaginary, but evolutionarily beneficial causes).