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| ▲ | throw310822 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > no matter many books you read about riding a bike, you still need to actually get on a bike and do some practice before you can ride it This is like saying that no matter how much you know theoretically about a foreign language you still need to train your brain to talk it. It has little to do with the reality of that language or the correctness of your model of it, but rather with the need to train realtime circuits to do some work. Let me try some variations: "no matter how many books you read about ancient history, you need to have lived there before you can reasonably talk about it". "No matter how many books you have read about quantum mechanics, you need to be a particle..." | | |
| ▲ | D-Machine 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It has little to do with the reality of that language or the correctness of your model of it, but rather with the need to train realtime circuits to do some work. To the contrary, this is purely speculative and almost certainly wrong, riding a bike is co-ordinating the realtime circuits in the right way, and language and a linguistic model fundamentally cannot get you there. There are plenty of other domains like this, where semantic reasoning (e.g. unquantified syllogistic reasoning) just doesn't get you anywhere useful. I gave an example from cooking later in this thread. You are falling IMO into exactly the trap of the linguistic reductionist, thinking that language is the be-all and end-all of cognition. Talk to e.g. actual mathematicians, and they will generally tell you they may broadly recruit visualization, imagined tactile and proprioceptive senses, and hard-to-vocalize "intuition". One has to claim this is all epiphenomenal, or that e.g. all unconscious thought is secretly using language, to think that all modeling is fundamentally linguistic (or more broadly, token manipulation). This is not a particularly credible or plausible claim given the ubiquity of cognition across animals or from direct human experiences, so the linguistic boundedness of LLMs is very important and relevant. | | |
| ▲ | throw310822 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Funny, because riding a bicycle or speaking a language is exactly something people don't have a world model of. Ask someone to explain how riding a bicycle works, or an uneducated native speaker to explain the grammar of their language. They have no clue. "Making the right movement at the right time within a narrow boundary of conditions" is a world model, or is it just predicting the next move? > You are falling IMO into exactly the trap of the linguistic reductionist, thinking that language is the be-all and end-all of cognition. I'm not saying that at all. I am saying that any (sufficiently long, varied) coherent speech needs a world model, so if something produces coherent speech, there must be a world model behind. We can agree that the model is lacking as much as the language productions are incoherent: which is very little, these days. | | |
| ▲ | D-Machine 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Funny, because riding a bicycle or speaking a language is exactly something people don't have a world model of. Ask someone to explain how riding a bicycle works, or an uneducated native speaker to explain the grammar of their language. They have no clue This is circular, because you are assuming their world-model of biking can be expressed in language. It can't! EDIT: There are plenty of skilled experts, artists and etc. that clearly and obviously have complex world models that let them produce best-in-the-world outputs, but who can't express very precisely how they do this. I would never claim such people have no world model or understanding of what they do. Perhaps we have a semantic / definitional issue here? | | |
| ▲ | throw310822 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > This is circular, because you are assuming their world-model of biking can be expressed in language. It can't! Ok. So I think I get it. For me, producing coherent discourse about things requires a world model, because you can't just make up coherent relationships between objects and actions long enough if you don't understand what their properties are and how they relate to each other. You, on the other hand, claim that there are infinite firsthand sensory experiences (maybe we can call them qualia?) that fall in between the cracks of language and are rarely communicated (though we use for that a wealth of metaphors and synesthesia) and can only be understood by those who have experienced them firsthand. I can agree with that if that's what you mean, but at the same time I'm not sure they constitute such a big part of our thought and communication. For example, we are discussing about reality in this thread and yet there are no necessary references to first hand experiences. Any time we talk about history, physics, space, maths, philosophy, we're basically juggling concepts in our heads with zero direct experience of them. | | |
| ▲ | D-Machine 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > You, on the other hand, claim that there are infinite firsthand sensory experiences (maybe we can call them qualia?) that fall in between the cracks of language and are rarely communicated (though we use for that a wealth of metaphors and synesthesia) and can only be understood by those who have experienced them firsthand. Well, not infinite, but, yes! I am indeed claiming much world models are patterns and associations between qualia, and that only some qualia are essentially representable as or look like linguistic tokens (specifically, the sounds of those tokens being pronounced, or their visual shapes if e.g. math symbols). E.g. I am claiming that the way one learns to e.g. cook, or "do theoretical math" may be more about forming associations between those non-linguistic qualia than, say, obviously, doing philosophy is. > I'm not sure they constitute such a big part of our thought and communication The communication part is mostly tautological again, but, yes, it remains very much an open question in cognitive science just how exactly thought works. A lot of mathematicians claim to lean heavily on visualization and/or tactile and kinaesthetic modeling for their intuitions (and most deep math is driven by intuition first), but also a lot of mathematicians can produce similar works and disagree about how they think about it intuitively. And we are seeing some progress from e.g. Aristotle using LEAN to generate math proofs in a strictly tokenized / symbolic way, but it remains to be seen if this will ever produce anything truly impressive to mathematicians. So it is really hard to know what actually matters for general human cognition. I think introspection makes it clear there are a LOT of domains where it is obvious the core knowledge is not mostly linguistic. This is easiest to argue for embodied domains and skills (e.g. anything that requires direct physical interaction with the world), and it is areas like these (e.g. self-driving vehicle AI) where LLMs will be (most likely) least useful in isolation, IMO. |
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| ▲ | CamperBob2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You and I can't learn to ride a bike by reading thousands of books about cycling and Newtonian physics, but a robot driven by an LLM-like process certainly can. In practice it would make heavy use of RL, as humans do. | | |
| ▲ | D-Machine 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > In practice it would make heavy use of RL, as humans do. Oh, so you mean, it would be in a harness of some sort that lets it connect to sensors that tell it things about its position, speed, balance and etc? Well, yes, but then it isn't an LLM anymore, because it has more than language to model things! | |
| ▲ | wrs 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have no idea why you used the word “certainly” there. | | |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | What is in the nature of bike-riding that cannot be reduced to text? You know transformers can do math, right? | | |
| ▲ | anthuswilliams 6 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > What is in the nature of bike-riding that cannot be reduced to text? You're asking someone to answer this question in a text forum. This is not quite the gotcha you think it is. The distinction between "knowing" and "putting into language" is a rich source of epistemological debate going back to Plato and is still widely regarded to represent a particularly difficult philosophical conundrum. I don't see how you can make this claim with so much certainty. |
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