There are many people who are unable to be clear even if they reflect on what they say. — Tom Storm

I guess there's a few general categories, right?

The people who actually try to be rigourously clear and are good at it (these people are usually willing to reword or work through anything unclear upon request)

The people who try to be clear and are bad at it.

The people who don't even try.

When people in the last two groups get pissy that their posts are being understood in ways they didn't intend... whew , frustrating times.

But how's this - I doubt most people deliberately aim for their points to be misunderstood. — Tom Storm

True, BUT in a philosophical setting it's fully possible that it's simultaneously true that most people don't put any significant effort into trying to be understood either. So even if they don't want to be misunderstood, they're not writing their posts with a mind to the question, "is there some way that what I'm saying now is going to not be understood the way I mean it?" They just write away and hope for the best.

It seems remarkably common.

I doubt anyone deliberately aims for their points to be misunderstood. — Tom Storm

Some people absolutely play games where they TRY to be as opaque as possible, and bait misunderstandings from people which they can pounce on - it gives them permission to attack and insult, they think.

In fact I recently spoke to someone who, in one thread, got upset people were trying to interpret her vague questions, "why are you trying to read my mind?", and then in the same goddamn thread, wrote half a paragraph and then tied it off with "yada yada yada you get what I mean".

So, she gets to belittle me for trying to interpret her vagueries, and then continues to produce more vagueries... I think the belittling is the point

If all is deterministic, then numbers and information, and consciousness and intent, are irrelevant. It can all be reduced to particle physics, just as thermodynamics can. I suppose it would know why brain states also feel like mental states to us. But if "feel like" is all there is, but they have no casual power, and are, themselves, determined by the physical events, then it doesn't matter. — Patterner

This is why pluralism and process philosophy are so important - you don't have to take this "nothing matters, nothing is real" view, EVEN IF you accept that everything is fundamentally caused by the lowest-level physical rules.

Just because all of the components of a clock are governed by physics doesn't mean "the cogs don't cause the clock to work" - no, to the contrary, the fact that the cogs are made of fundamental particles doing what fundamental particles do is what MAKES the cogs work, and in tandem what makes the clock as a whole work.

It's not one or the other, it's one because of the other.

The casualty of your mind can be similar. It's not "my mind is acausal because it's just physical stuff in my brain obeying the laws of physics", it's "my mind IS CASUAL and works how it works, and interacts with the things it interacts with, precisely because it's made of physical things following the laws of physics".

Your view kind of makes it seem like anything that's not fundamental isn't real - I understand that intuition, but I think that's why concepts like emergence are so important to understand. The fundamental is real, and the emergent things that emerge from the fundamental are also real.

What, in your opinion, are some reasonable inferences one can draw from these examples?

You are the one who is correcting me and highlighting my grammatical mistakes, mate… — javi2541997

Really? So it wasn't you who started the conversation about my use of "except"? I think it was.

On the other hand…

I pour milk for everyone in my house except for me. Who pours milk for me?
— flannel jesus

The premise is badly written. — javi2541997

You started the semantic conversation, and now you're crying victim.

Let's leave it there. Sure. You're the victim, let's all shed a tear for javi.

knowing that I am not a native speaker. — javi2541997

I didn't know that, and it's not meant to be an insult, but it is clear from all your language confusions in this thread. You're trying to correct me in ways you don't understand. If English really isn't your native language, then it would make sense for you to be a little more humble about your interpretations of these words, rather than latching on to some other persons confusions on stack exchange.

I never debated a paradox here, there isn't one.

The first means “plus”. So, is there a barber in Seville apart from the one who shaves the people and himself? It is cumulative. There could be the possibility that others could shave the barber. But who If he is the only one in Seville?
The second means “minus”. Is there a barber except for the one who shaves others and himself? It is excluding. There cannot be a paradox because we already take for granted that the barber is the only one in Seville. — javi2541997

I'm not getting the impression from these words that you're entirely comfortable in English.

I see your personal linguistic confusions, is that what you want me to see?

when I Google "define apart from" I get:

Merriam: Other than, Besides, except for

You're stretching really far for all this my man.

You haven't explained what is a paradox yet! :blush: — javi2541997

A paradox certainly ISN'T a simple story, ended with a simple question that has a simple answer.

I pour milk for everyone in my house except for me. Who pours milk for me?

someone from outside Seville, or someone who isn't a barber, or maybe there are more barbers in Seville but they aren't all called "the barber of Seville", and that title is reserved for him. All quite apparent solutions

Or maybe nobody shaves him, maybe he has a really long beard - or he doesn't grow a beard, because he's a trans man before the age of hrt

yeah I don't think you're making any interesting connections just yet

You don't have any clue about this linguistic paradox. — javi2541997

This isn't a paradox. The sentence of the op is clearly, plainly, easily possible. Nothing remotely challenging about imagining a man shaving all men in his village except himself.

the barber shaves all other than himself, Joe shaves the barber, but Who doesn't shave anybody. Russell gets shaved by the barber.

I'm not really sure how that connects to the theist stories Vera was talking about. I doubt very many of them feature cars.

No, Who doesn't shave anybody.

Joe

There seems to be a bit of a wave of this material about - an attempt at rebuilding a discourse on meaning from the wreckage of humanism/scientism/materialism towards transcendental matters. Is Vervaeke a Platonist? — Tom Storm

There was already some discussion on this previously, but I don't think anybody said this explicitly:

Regarding the mind, and the things the mind does, and why and how it does them, he's 100% a "it's all in the brain" type of guy. He's said as much explicitly at least once or twice in a podcast I listened to.

I think there's a lot of misconceptions about matierliasm - it's not the boogyman many of you seem to think it is, as Janus points out.

But isn't there something "behind" the stories that a person cannot wimp out on even if she tried? — Astrophel

Like what?

But eventually it has to get to a position that it hasn't seen in its training data, and then what? — noAxioms

And then it continues to make (usually) legal moves which are approximately as good as its general skill level predicts they should be.

https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2024/01/03/chess-world-models.html

I also checked if it was playing unique games not found in its training dataset. There are often allegations that LLMs just memorize such a wide swath of the internet that they appear to generalize. Because I had access to the training dataset, I could easily examine this question. In a random sample of 100 games, every game was unique and not found in the training dataset by the 10th turn (20 total moves). This should be unsurprising considering that there are more possible games of chess than atoms in the universe.

I have to read this next, it's the follow up article

https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2024/03/20/chess-gpt-interventions.html#:~:text=Chess%2DGPT%20is%20orders%20of,board%20state%20and%20player%20skill.

Also in passing I learned about linear probes, which I gather are simpler neural nets that can analyze the internals of other neural nets. So they are working on the "black box" problem, trying to understand the inner workings of neural nets. That's good to know. — fishfry

Yeah same, this was really intriguing to me too

And thanks so much for pointing me at that example. It's a revelation. — fishfry

Of course, I'm glad you think so. I've actually believed for quite some time that LLMs have internal models of stuff, but the strong evidence for that belief wasn't as available to me before - that's why that article is so big to me.

I'm really pleased that other people see how big of a deal that is too - you could have just read a few paragraphs and called me an idiot instead , that was what I assumed would happen. That's what normally happens in these circumstances. I applaud you for going further than that.

By doing nothing more than auto-completing these games as text strings, — fishfry

For full clarity, and I'm probably being unnecessarily pedantic here, it's not necessarily fair to say that's all they did. That's all their goal was, that's all they were asked to - BUT what all of this should tell you, in my opinion, is that when a neural net is asked to achieve a task, there's no telling HOW it's actually going to achieve that task.

In order to achieve the task of auto completing the chess text strings, it seemingly did something extra - it built an internal model of a board game which it (apparently) reverse engineered from the strings. (I actually think that's more interesting than its relatively high chess rating, the fact that it can reverse engineer the rules of chess seeing nothing but chess notation).

So we have to distinguish, I think, between the goals it was given, and how it accomplished those goals.

Apologies if I'm just repeating the obvious.

okay so I guess I'm confused why, after all that, you still said

No internal model of any aspect of the actual game

Would you consider yourself a compatibilist?

So it's still possible that the "future" you changed to was the future that it was guranteed to be all along, yeah?

but you haven't proven that it was possible for you to do other than what you've done, right?

To conclude, I have proven I can change the future indirectly by interrupting the flow of the present — Barkon

Have you? Change the future from what?

This one developed a higher level of understanding than it was programmed for, if you look at it that way. — fishfry

I do. In fact I think that's really what neural nets are kind of for and have always (or at least frequently) done. They are programmed to exceed their programming in emergent ways.

No internal model of any aspect of the actual game. — fishfry

I feel like you might have missed some important paragraphs in the article. Did you notice the heat map pictures? Did you read all the paragraphs around that? A huge part of the article is very much exploring the evidence that gpt really does model the game.

more akin to a form of explicit reasoning that relies on an ability to attend to internal representations? — Pierre-Normand

Did you read the article I posted that we're talking about?

I stand astonished. That's really amazing. — fishfry

I appreciate you taking the time to read it, and take it seriously.

Ever since chat gpt gained huge popularity a year or two ago with 3.5, there have been people saying LLMs are "just this" or "just that", and I think most of those takes miss the mark a little bit. "It's just statistics" it "it's just compression".

Perhaps learning itself has a lot in common with compression - and it apparently turns out the best way to "compress" the knowledge of how to calculate the next string of a chess game is too actually understand chess! And that kinda makes sense, doesn't it? To guess the next move, it's more efficient to actually understand chess than to just memorize strings.

And one important extra data point from that write up is the bits about unique games. Games become unique, on average, about 10 moves in, and even when a game is entirely unique and wasn't in chat gpts training set, it STILL calculates legal and reasonable moves. I think that speaks volumes.

Ownership laws are taking the place of the chieftain when it comes to people who stray from the ideals. — frank

Something like that, I suppose

Is it possible? Could it last if it happened? — frank

One of the interesting aspects of any society is how it deals with the parasites, the people who take but don't give, especially through violence or theft.

Game theory is a lot about this - about studying situations where people cooperate or compete, figuring out what strategies give the most gain.

A society with no property might give unreasonably high rewards to the sociopaths, psychopaths and parasites. You can take anything without giving anything. Have what you want, give back nothing at all. Such a society would be stripped of its resources by leeches faster than you can say "maybe this wasn't such a great idea after all".

An interesting parallel just occurred to me: the phrase "that doesn't concern you" compared with the phrase "that's none of your business"

why are you asking this like it's a homework problem? And why did you ask it on multiple forums? Don't you already have an answer?

I'll start demonstrating that by informing you of something you apparently do not know: the "Chinese room" isn't a test to pass

With the way you're answering I don't think you are capable of understanding what I'm talking about. It's like you don't even understand the basics of this. — Christoffer

Judging by the way you repeatedly talk about "passing the Chinese room", I don't think you understand the basics. Seems more buzzword-focused than anything

"inspired by" is such a wild goal post move. The reason anything that can walk can walk is because of the processes and structures in it - that's why a person who has the exact same evolutionary history as you and I, but whose legs were ripped off, can't walk - their evolutionary history isn't the thing giving them the ability to walk, their legs and their control of their legs are.

There's no justifiable reason to tie consciousness to evolution any more than there is to tie it to lactation. You're focussed too hard on the history of how we got consciousness rather than the proximate causes of consciousness.

No, the reason something can walk is because of evolutionary processes forming both the physical parts as well as the "operation" of those physical parts. — Christoffer

so robots can't walk?