Comment

Comment by gabbagool

Probably too late for this, but I have argued before that language is a fundamentally lossy encoding of the human experience. We do our best to describe what we're seeing and experiencing using language, which is fantastically expressive, but it has its limits. I think we see glimpses of this when we find ourselves saying things such as, "it's impossible to put it into words" or we overload certain words when we mean very different things, such as, "I love my children" or "I love apple pie". Clearly the word "love" here has a certain magnitude that is not being expressed, yet it is understood by the listener somehow.

So, I do sort of buy into this idea that Einstein was simulating the world and running experiments on those simulations in ways that were beyond what you could encode in natural language. Will AI be capable of doing this, if it is bounded by training data that is composed almost entirely on language? One might argue that if AI is training on a lossy encoding/representation of the human experience, how will it be able to simulate anything beyond that experience? Unless it does so in a way that we manage to do when we image objects beyond 3D. But now I'm just rambling.

parent gabbagool 2 months ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton