[FRIAM] "I hope I'm wrong. But that text reads like it was generated by an LLM"

[Santafe]

Yes, sorry...

> On Jan 27, 2025, at 7:14 PM, Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jan 27, 2025 at 1:08 PM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
> But to suppose they _already_ contain everything there is to be understood is not a position I would take w.r.t. anything else we have anywhere in science.  They contain or represent whatever they do.  I don’t know how much that is, and what more it leaves to be found.  I would be amazed if it were “everything”, since nothing else in science ever has been before.
> 
> I'm trying to follow the thread.  Was there a previous post you are addressing with "But to suppose they _already_ contain everything there is to be understood"

Thread has got kind of broomy.  I was storing information holographically and responding to a few things among many.

Main trigger was Nick’s post You guys freak me out… and somewhere later saying that the AI interlocutor “already is” human (or something to that effect; and why don’t you guys recognize it), to which Frank said Typical behaviorist and Nick said No Frank monist.

I attached to that string with Searle’s argument against the position that the computational formalism “contains” whatever-all the common-language referents want attached to “consciousness”.

Marcus replied that something about the way I said it could also be said of QM.

And I replied to that, that this is a question of what one wants from the idea of a scientific law (of whatever kind).

To which Marcus, playing tennis simultaneously on a couple of courts I think, only one of which was the one I was on, tried to ward off Cartesian dualism, to which my “_already_ contain…” reply was a protestation not from a dualist position but from a fallibilist one, and an argument against circular containment relations (that this is a case where I don’t bet it will work out that the big universe, containing as a tiny subset of it the small formalism, will find itself contained within the formalism as a faithful mapping).


There was an interference of the above thread with Nick’s two threads on having GPT teach him thermodynamics (which would be a truly heroic accomplishment on Nick’s part, given the number of things it says that are either not-interpretable-as-sense, or that accommodate semantically ill-formed sentence constructions without calling them out and correcting them), and of the to-be-guessed writer F reducing everything to metaphor, seemingly choosing to not understand that the metaphor is a finger pointing at the moon.  That was the old argument against this particular monism.

Roughly, 

Eric