> 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 the education system we have.
> 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 obedience conditioned to imitate rather than understand. Social media amplifies the zombification, and now LLMs 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 wherein a grokking soul gathers mists from the cosmic chaos and creates meaning 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) and they were shocked that the underlying architecture is brute force, and they expected some theory which turns out to be compact and information compressed not by brute-force but by theorization.
> 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. Only because the world model that natural language captures encompasses "everything" whereas for making it "useful" requires to limit the world model via formalism.
Starting with the sophomoric questions of the optimist who mistakes the possible for the viable: how definite of a thing is "the world", how knowable is it, what is even knowledge... and then back through the more pragmatic: by whom is it knowable, to what degree, and by what means. The mystics: is "the world" the same thing as "the sum of information about the world"? The spooks: how does one study those fields of information which are already agentic and actively resist being studied by changing themselves, such as easily emerge anywhere more than n(D) people gather?
Plenty of food for thought from why ontologies are/aren't a thing. The classical example of how this plays out in the market being search engines winning over internet directories. But that's one turn of the wheel. Look at what search engines grew into quarter century later. What their outgrowths are doing to people's attitude towards knowledge. Different timescale, different picture.
Fundamentally, I don't think human language has sufficient resolution to model large spans of reality within the limited human attention span. The physical limits of human language as information processing device have been hit at some point in the XX century. Probably that 1970s divergence between productivity and wages.
So while LLMs are "computers speak language now" and it's amazing if sad that they cracked it by more data and not by more model, what's more amazing is how many people are continually ready to mistake language for thought. Are they all P-zombies or just obedience-conditioned into emulating ones?!?!?
Practically, what we lack is not the right architecture for "big knowing machine", but better tools for ad-hoc conceptual modeling of local situations. And, just like poetry that rhymes, this is exactly what nobody has a smidgen of interest to serve to consumers, thus someone will just build it in their basement in the hope of turning the tables on everyone. Probably with the help of LLMs as search engines and code generators. Yall better hurry. They're almost done.