> Wait, what's wrong with this view? Wasn't exactly refuted in any way, despite proclamations by the more "embodied cognition" folks, whose beliefs are to me just a religion trying to retroactively fit to modern science to counter diminishing role of human soul at the center of it.
It's unfalsifiable, that's what's wrong with it. Sure, you could be a brain in a jar experiencing a simulated world, but there's nothing useful about that worldview. If the world feels real, you might as well treat it like it is.
> My point is to highlight that, for most of what we call today knowledge, which isn't tied to directly experiencing a phenomena in question, we're not learning in ways fundamentally different to what LLMs are doing
I get what you're trying to say -- nobody can derive everything from first principles, which is true -- but your conclusion is absolutely not true. Humans don't credulously accept what we're given in a true/false binary and spit out derived facts.
All knowledge is an approximation. There is very little absolute truth. And we're good at dealing with that.
Humans learn by building up mental models of how systems work, understanding when those models apply and when they don't, understanding how much they can trust the model and understanding how to test conclusions if they aren't sure.
It's unfalsifiable, that's what's wrong with it. Sure, you could be a brain in a jar experiencing a simulated world, but there's nothing useful about that worldview. If the world feels real, you might as well treat it like it is.
> My point is to highlight that, for most of what we call today knowledge, which isn't tied to directly experiencing a phenomena in question, we're not learning in ways fundamentally different to what LLMs are doing
I get what you're trying to say -- nobody can derive everything from first principles, which is true -- but your conclusion is absolutely not true. Humans don't credulously accept what we're given in a true/false binary and spit out derived facts.
All knowledge is an approximation. There is very little absolute truth. And we're good at dealing with that.
Humans learn by building up mental models of how systems work, understanding when those models apply and when they don't, understanding how much they can trust the model and understanding how to test conclusions if they aren't sure.
LLMs can't do any of that.