Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Ingvariuss OP t1_iy9hgqy wrote

Reply to comment by idrajitsc in [P] Speaking with Plato - A Deep Learning Approach to Philosophy by Ingvariuss

Thanks for sharing this paper! I'll give it a read in the coming days. As for making you think about nonsense, who's to say that it is nonsense?

Especially if it manages to give you a worthwhile idea to ponder and be productive about. Even if it's helping some to just "seed" their own ideas, the seed can sprout into something useful and/or thought-provoking. It's psycho-technology in some way. For example, we might say that alchemists and astrologists dealt with "nonsense" but they still managed to lay the foundations for chemistry and astrophysics with the projection of their own inner world to the world of matter.

There must be some reason why human evolution is expanding us toward the world of ideas and imagination as our next frontier that will, based on my humble opinion, certainly expand our understanding of the world and science overall.

Aside from that, the field of AI will just get better over time and who knows what we might be capable of (be it good or bad).

1

idrajitsc t1_iy9o98b wrote

That paper addresses your first question directly, and better than I can. But in brief, it's nonsense because how could it not be? If there is real, interesting information content to what it's saying, how was it generated? How would you expect your network to have an understanding of anything, use that understanding to synthesize new ideas, and then accurately convey those ideas to you? All it has been trained to do is probabilistically produce coherent text--the training process has no interaction with the information content of the training texts, much less anything that would allow it to generate novel meaning.

As for the rest of your reasoning, you could use the same argument for anything at all that causes you to think about things. In line with that paper, would you want to spend serious intellectual effort on deriving deeper meaning from a parrot's chatter? Maybe the network accidentally outputs something that sends you along a path to productive thoughts. Or maybe you waste all your time trying to turn lead into gold. Like, of course you're free to experiment with it, but it's irresponsible to pretend it's outputting anything profound if you're going to be sharing it with other people.

1

Ingvariuss OP t1_iyagl8c wrote

Regarding your first paragraph. It evades what I wrote about it being more of a tool for inspiration and/or being used as a psychotechnology. In other words, it is indeed still up to the human to separate the wheat from the chaff and plant those "seeds" you mentioned earlier.

Regarding the second paragraph, I do believe that comparing it to a parrot is a strawman. Especially for bigger and more advanced language models than the one I used as a proof of concept. As for the probability of it being (un)productive, isn't that the case for many things in life? This is especially true for scientists that have thousands of failed experiments where only one that is successful advances us further. Nonetheless, I would prefer us speaking with each other and bouncing ideas rather than texting with a bot on any day.

As for being (i)responsible, nowhere did I say that it outputs profound things nor would it be intellectually honest to deny it as we are dealing with probabilities that aren't apparent to us. That also informs me that you probably didn't read the full article linked in my post.

1

idrajitsc t1_iyaq0ha wrote

I mean, just throwing up your hands and saying "sure it's probably nothing, but most things are nothing" is a cop-out: why are you posting it here then?

You're contradicting yourself. If it's nothing more than a random text generator with Plato's mannerisms, why's it interesting and why are you saying it's a tool for approaching philosophical problems? If it has something more profound to say--no it doesn't--and if you insist it does it's incumbent on you to justify it with something more than "it's really big and complex so maybe it's doing something inexplicable."

1