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▲ psychoslave 4 hours ago

It might be weirder, but part of human intercommunication issues lies in the fact that people live with very different representation, though they can be supposed to live in the same single encompassing one. They don't all experience all of the world and even when they share some common experience they went through, they didn't experiment them from the same ground and previous experiences do influence current and future interpretations.

▲ACCount39 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I expect an immense degree of representational similarity to exist between humans.

You're making a mistake there - focusing on the tip of the iceberg without considering what lies beneath it.

The bulk of what the human brain does isn't "decide whether skub is good or bad". The foundation that the human cognition is built upon is vast, and mostly invisible from the inside. You don't get to see the feature matching operators of your visual cortex, or the patterns that decide whether a sound is "soft" or "sharp". And a lot of those foundational features are assembled by biological development programs spun up all the way from DNA.

On that level, when it comes to the bulk of neural circuits and the processes implemented by them, the representations within a "Pro Skub" and an "Anti Skub" guy might easily be 90%+ compatible. The two people who had vastly different life experiences, worldviews and opinions would be more alike to two different LLMs fine tuned from the same base model than they would be to two different architectures trained on completely different datasets.

▲UltraSane 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think neural networks have the same ability of self deception as humans do. A huge reason human world models vary so much is due to them being tied to tribal membership. A huge fraction of all people will not come to a rational worldview derived from accurate data but will start with their tribe's worldview and filter data to match. I personally have never modified my worldview for social reasons and it is surprisingly isolating.

▲vmendi 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This. I believe most people don't act as if objective reality matters, hence their worldview can be arbitrarily aligned to the demands of their social context.

Suppose these two premises are true: 1. Objective reality exists. 2. There's a model and corpus of data that converges to approximate reality better than any other model.

Now, suppose we train different models with data sources restricted to different tribes/ ideologies/worldviews. Can we discover how their internal representations differ from each other, and from objective reality? What would we do with that knowledge?

▲schiffern an hour ago | parent [-]

  >There's a model and corpus of data that converges to approximate reality better than any other model.
How you define "better" exactly is where you smuggle in your messy human value judgements.

I say "better" models are ones which more efficiently convert the entire world to my particular brand of evangelical Christianity. And who are you to say otherwise??? :-/

"No no, I mean accurate not better." Sure. And your model inaccurately denies the existence of Yahweh...

▲throw8373930 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> have the same ability of self deception as humans do

There is universal objective truth, and different opinions or world views are just "tribal membership". If onlymother tribes understood that!

▲UltraSane 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Objective reality exists. Nobody has a car that doesn't need gas or electricity.

▲Lerc 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

Three things here, first of all, there are a few cars in existence that do not need gas or electricity. Compressed air for example. I hear that researchers are doing anazing things using combustible materials to utilise the phase change that water undergoes. It may soon lead to a wonderous age powered by heating water until it can be used as a high pressure gas.

Objective reality does not imply consistent measurement of that reality.

Objective reality may not actually exist. Once you start throwing around relativity and quantum effects things get weird, getting them to play nicely together might be even weirder,