I would like to push back on the idea that humans can provide definitive knowledge that is not a result of combining previous information.

Pretty much every single idea in science can be traced back to some combination of earlier ideas, and as they get earlier / simpler, they can be related back to some combination of direct observations.

It's not clear to me at all that our entire body of scientific knowledge can't be simply recreated by "combining results of observations + previous information". And LLMs can perform observations in addition to combine previous information, which in my estimate is genuinely sufficient for them to plausibly be able to rebuild all of science.

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viccis 9 days ago | parent [-]

How can you say for sure that every effect must have a cause? How can you be any more sure about that there can't be an effect without a cause than the old believe that black swans couldn't exist that was so universally believed that it became a cliche ("rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno")?

If every piece of knowledge is created by combining previous ones, then no true grounded knowledge is possible. Every bit of knowledge is grounded by another bit of knowledge which is itself grounded on, ..., etc, etc.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/

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Taek 9 days ago | parent [-]

Your comment is conflating a few things here, the philosophical problem of induction is one I am very familiar with, and it's also unrelated to what we are talking about.

"If every piece of knowledge is created by combining previous ones, then no true grounded knowledge is possible" - this is not true, and has a very simple solution. What you are calling "grounded" knowledge comes simply from observation.

When the very first human saw that an apple falls of a tree, they have acquired what you call "grounded" knowledge. They can then combine that knowledge with the grounded knowledge that other things fall from trees to start reasoning about why things might fall from trees.

The problem of induction is different. It says, we know that things fall from trees because things have always fallen from trees, but how can be certain that what we call the laws of physics will not arbitrarily change on us?

And of course, it's a famous problem because it doesn't have a satisfying answer. The answer is basically "well everything we know is wrong if induction is wrong, so we will pretend induction is not wrong and hope for the best". And at least so far, that approach has seemed to work (heh heh heh).

	▲	viccis 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		Both of those are the same. Because the same shortcoming you mentioned (how can we be certain they won't arbitrarily change on us) can be overcome by making a compelling argument for synthetic a priori knowledge. Something (imo) put to bed pretty well a few centuries ago and only revisited because of the, uh, tedious nature of analytics, whose tradition evolved out of fancylad British boys who were all empiricism pervents.