It's language Jim, but more as Chomsky said. or maybe Chimpsky.

I 100% agree with your rant. This time fly likes your arrow.

This metaphor of the pachinko machine (or Plinko game) is exactly how I explain LLMs/ML to laypersons. The process of training is the act of discovering through trial and error the right settings for each peg on the board, in order to consistently get the ball to land in the right spot-ish.

People also can lose your time or resources (first line support, women’s shopping, etc) and the reaction is the same.

I don’t know why there’s still no LLM with a constant reality feedback loop yet. Maybe there’s a set of technical issues that prevents it. But until this happens, pretrained AI will bullshit itself and everyone cause there’s nothing that could hit it on the head.

And fruit flies like bananas. :)

Really the way people use the Chomsky hierarchy in practice (both in linguistics and computer science) is “let’s agree to ignore the finitude of language” - a move borrowed from classical mathematics

I don't believe it is. Somewhere inside our brain there is some perception of self related to the outside world. So we can project self into the future using information from the now and make better choices and survive better ("Information is that which allows you [who is in possession of that information] to make predictions with accuracy better than chance"- Chris Adami). Why do we need all these difficult words?

I bet animals also have some image of self inside there somewhere, and make decisions based on simulated scenarios. Perhaps to a lesser degree, perhaps because of a lack of language they experience it in a different way? Not being able to label any of the steps in the process... Who knows?

Perhaps when we get to simulate a whole brain we can get some idea. But then there is the ethics. We do attribute great value to organisms that have this image of self.

And I don't get why, it seems to me quite self evident that you yourself can experience reduced-consciousness states, be it being half-asleep or quite drunk.

If we create an analogy with audio - audio can have 2 properties: frequencies and volume. Frequencies are the content of the audio and volume is how "present" the sound is.

Well the same could be applied to consciousness. When we say reduced consciousness do we mean that the mind experiences less content (frequencies) or do we mean that all the frequencies are there but at a reduced volume?

In any.

C. is a complex thing, and these can fail to lower level in myriads of ways. You have to align millions* of things to make it work. The biological (in our case) nature of it allows for some slack rather than immediate breakdown, so there are thousands of parameters to play with.

* numbers arbitrary

E.g. I have aphantasia - I don't picture things in my "inner eye". Through discussions with people about that, a lot of people described own differences from the perceived norm, and it is clear a not insignificant numbers also have other differences, such as not thinking consciously in words.

A lot of people then tend to express disbelief, and question the whole thing on the basis of a belief that if people's inner life does not match theirs, people couldn't possibly be conscious or reason.

People make far too many assumptions about the universality of their own experience of consciousness.

If you could wouldn't that involve you imagining what the building looks like from the inside and how the rooms are connected together?

Or would do it some other way?

(I'm assuming you could do it, since if you couldn't I think that would be a majorly debiliating condition rather than just some amusing fact)

I can "imagine" what a building looks like, but I can't see it. Even our language makes this hard to describe, and the reason why I didn't realise that this isn't how other people do it, because most of our language for remember how something looks uses terms that implies we see them, so I just assumed until a few years ago (and I turn 50 this year) that that was just a metaphor to everyone else too.

How do you imagine (there's that word again...) blind people remember places they can't see?

To me, the notion that I'd need to "see" what the building looks like to draw it is bizarre because I know where everything is in relation to each other, and their shapes, so why would I need to see it?

EDIT: increasingly, and in part drive by split-brain experiments, I tend to think that a whole lot of what we see as our conscious decision-making, are instead shallow retroactive attempts by parts of the brain at rationalising decisions largely already taken autonomously into a cohesive self/ego.

As a molecular biologist I often deal with minute quantities of substances in small containers, but I just picture them there, the molecules, what happens to them as I dilute a sample or add some enzyme. Reading a book is like watching it play out.

I have a colleague who is also much more text oriented. I really wondered how she can function without seeing all the departments in an overview and the connections between them, and how governance structures overlap with those departments, etc. For me it's a lot to hold in, overwhelming at times. But she's absolutely great in these types of things, just masterful, very structured as well. Her mind must be very alien to me, I always wonder what her experience of life looks like (or not "looks like", apparently... But how it is to her...)

But with some works - like Tolkien's, I will still enjoy the descriptions because the language itself is beautiful.

Just to make this weirder: I remember many things by appearance. E.g. I can find my place in a paper I've read years ago by what the page looks like. But I can't see it.

I do however see things when I'm dreaming, and I have one solitary experience I think of seeing things awake, during meditation. I say "I think", because there is the possibility that I fell asleep even though I don't believe I did, and the imagery was far clearer than during my dreams.

But I also can't recall images from my dreams while awake, and usually don't remember dreams at all past the first 30 seconds or so awake.

If you wanted me to draw an abstract floorplan of my house, or the layout of my town, I can do that easily. I can navigate an extended road trip unassisted by simply looking at a map ahead of time and mentally storing an abstraction of where I need to go. But if you wanted, say, an image of my house, or the main intersection in the middle of town, or anything like that -- I'm no good. I can't "see" it, and I would not be able to draw anything remotely accurate.

To circle back around too your "imagine" vs. "see" problem -- my response to the often-referenced "imagine a ball rolling on a table" exercise often elicits some confusion from people. I can imagine a ball rolling on a table just fine. What color is the ball, though? It has no color. What size is it? It has no size. It is just "a ball", in the abstract -- its only property is shape (spherical), which is ultimately all that is necessary for imagining rather than seeing. If you wanted me to visualize a large red ball on a green table, though, that's beyond me.

E.g. if I draw a fantasy drawing, it will be closer to impressionism in style, the same way as if I draw something in front of me. It'll be messy. If I draw from memory, the lines are clear, and stylized.

The clearest example of that was an art class at school where we were asked to draw our shoes first from memory and then while looking at it, and both were highly detailed, but without any conscious decision, the line-work was entirely different.

Same as you when it comes to the "ball rolling" scenario. It "has" the properties people add to it, but if they're not affecting the behaviour, they're just verbal labels attached to an abstract concept - I'll remember them, but they won't change anything about the "imagined" scenario.

It’s as though the connections among things are dimensional rather than visual. I can “render” blueprints as this thread discussed, or know which way I’m facing deep in an intricate tube station, but am not “picturing” it, it’s just, this is how these things relate in space time. Although I can do the same with exterior architecture (is that an image?) or street corners. I don’t think I’ve ever “seen” anything: picture yourself on a beach, counting sheep, always assumed were metaphorical expressions.

I also feel concepts are dimensional, and can tell if a piece of a concept is missing because where it should be is empty. Think how periodic table of elements worked.

A red ball on a green table maps to billiards in dimensional concept space so I can render that too.

Also fifty. Realized this when I was about seven and it hasn’t materially changed since. I have no problem drawing things like blueprints of my house but when it comes to more curvy objects I’m a terrible artist.

My impression is we attribute great value to organisms that can effectively push back against us.

respect based on force.

Not saying I want things to be that way.

Imagine this: language is an innate ability that all speakers have mastered, yet none are experts in—unless they are also linguists. And what, according to experts, is the source of such mastery? A rigid set of rules capturing the state of a language (langue) at a given time, in a specific geographical area, social class, etc., from which all valid sentences (syntactically and beyond) can supposedly be derived. Yet this framework never truly explains—or at best relegates to the background—our ability to understand (or recognize that we have not understood) and to correct (or request clarification) when ill-formed sentences are thrown at us like wrenches into a machine. Parsers work this way: they reject errors, bringing communication to an end. They do not ask for clarification, they do not correct their interlocutors, let alone engage in arguments about usage, which, under the effect of rational justification, hardens into "rules."

Giving in to the temptation of an objective description of language as an external reality—especially when aided by formal languages—makes us lose sight of this fundamental origin. In the end, we construct yet another norm, one that obscures our ability to account for normativity itself, starting with out own.

Perhaps this initial concealment is its very origin.

If me and you play tennis in a world where tennis doesn't exist, yet somehow we both know the rules, that would be interesting. Then the question becomes, why would one of the tennis players suggest a rule or an interpretation of a rule in a certain way that differs from the other tennis player? Well, why would anyone coopt agreed upon rules? To be the ruler! You listen to my rules.

If say to you, I don't like your way of constructing sentences, you should do it more like me - then I am trying impose a rule on you. Why do I have this impulse? Orwell's whole thesis was about how language is a form of rule-making and control.