Cristopher Moore: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. He's he's a great guy. And so so there's there's also this phylogenetic locking in, which I I I think is is good as a form of constraints, but it's also interesting from a flexibility point of view. But we're trying to explore this space, right, to forge a path. And the other thing is, I'm not sure whether you would call yourself a Platonist or not, but there's this kind of interesting juxtaposition between are we converging on the real thing, or are we constructing our own reality, and where does culture and all of these different things come into it? Because we are very much just kind of laying down the you you called it partial knowledge. We're laying down the stepping stones and we're trying to move forward. Right. I mean, guess when it's a puzzle, there is a ground truth. You've been promised there's a ground truth. In the Sudoku world, you've been promised that it's a unique solution. And when you found it, you know you found it. In real world problems, as you say, it's very hard to know when we've found the real thing and whether we've failed to see something else. And and I guess right. So I mean, if what these things know is what's on the Internet, well, that is a world. It is not the same as the physical world. And, you know, the so the grounding and meaning so my friend Henry Farrell, who is a historian, did a 1 of you know, he tried out 1 of these things where he wrote an essay, and and then his essay, he, you know, I can't actually remember what the topic was, but he made a kind of subtle point that was really a little bit sideways to the various points that various people had made. And then he asked, I forget which system, to summarize his essay. And it sort of blandified it. Right? It it kind of lowest common denominator did, and it did kind of what people at a cocktail party might do. If they're thinking pretty informally, maybe trying to impress each other a little bit. And it basically it saw it saw what he was writing about, and then it produced a summary based on the most common things that people say about that. And it totally missed the unique thing he was trying to say that was different from the common arguments on either side. And this is interesting. And I think, you know, for him, this this was an indication, again, that these systems are not grounded in meaning. They don't really catch the, oh, that's an interesting point. Now, you know, you could say, oh, well, given a more sophisticated use of the statistics of text, even if that's all they have, and then you can argue about whether, you know, compressing them forces them to build world models, etcetera, etcetera. Maybe a better summarizer would do you know, would catch the cool thing. Right? Just as maybe a better music maybe a better music or or book recommendation system would challenge you the way a friend challenges you in that wonderful kind of directed way that friends do. Like, I know you don't think science fiction is good literature, but you have to check out Gene Wolf because the prose is amazing and the characters are amazing. And and I think it will meet your literary needs. And, but I want to bring you over to science fiction, you know, that sort of thing that our friends do for us that I don't think any recommendation system really does for us. It's like, you like this music, here's some more music like that. Oh, you kind of like that. Here's some more like that. It's like, well, but give me something different. You know, challenge me. And I think 1 source of those challenges is the meaning of the real world. Like, look at this cool thing or, you know, this essay is actually about real things. Think about those real things. Don't just look at the text. of those challenges is the meaning of the real world. Like, look at this cool thing or, you know, this essay is actually about real things. Think about those real things. Don't just look at the text. And, you know, of course, these are again, like I I promised you that I I would say things that other people have said better. So Right. Yeah. But this this is the this seems like the debate. And on the other hand, I do think like I said, just just as I think that once these things, as they're already doing, cannot just write code but run it and see whether it works, and then debug the code if it doesn't work, or if it is a question about a three-dimensional object, they could fire up a three-dimensional workspace or a 7 dimensional workspace where they can doodle and then kind of perceive the way we perceive. Right? I am a bit of a Platonist because if you and I close our eyes and we each think of a cube admittedly, we live in a society with a lot of right angles, and we've seen wireframes rotating on screen, so we've had a lot of practice with this. But both of us can see in our minds a cube, and we can count the fact we can just by counting, just by perception, see that it has 8 corners and see that it has 12 edges. And if 1 of us thought it had 14 edges, the other would say, no, it's 12, and the other 1 would look again at the cube in their mind and say, oh, yeah. You're right. It's 12. Right? So we're really perceiving something there. And the fact that we can have that shared perception gives me and a lot of other mathematicians a sense that there is some reality to these things. These are not just subjective objects. And so I do think that once these systems can switch on the fly what kind of workspaces they have and what kind of reasoning they do, then I think that they'll I think they'll they'll be much closer to what we do. Right? Yeah. I mean, even even if you ask them to do proofs, of course, there are proof finding systems that are very formalized systems. If you ask an LLM to construct a proof, it will often construct some BS. It will be stylistically similar to proofs it's read. But so far, it doesn't seem to be able to do that reflection process and really check the steps in the proof and see if it works. But of course, that is also a very specific thing that humans don't do very often. Right? Specific humans in specific cultures do this and have tools for doing this. And we might whip out a sheet of paper and we might start writing things with formal symbols and formal logic to see if our informal proof written in English or whatever actually holds. But when we do that, we're firing up some special mental models, and we're using some external tools, paper, pencil, blackboards, computers, to help us with them. Because, actually, formal logic is not something that we're built to do.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.