alt Hacker NewsIt's not about the necessity of specific sensory inputs, but rather about the difference in type of model that will be built when the goal is passive, and auto-regressive, as opposed to when the goal is interactive.
In the passive/auto-regressive case you just need to model predictive contexts.
In the interactive case you need to model dynamical behaviors.
I don’t know that I see the difference - but I suppose we’re getting into Brains In Vats territory. In my view (well, Baudrillard’s view, but who’s counting?) a perfect description of a thing is as good as the thing itself, and we in fact interact with our semantic description of reality, rather than with raw reality itself - the latter, when it manifests in humans, results in vast cognitive dysfunction - Sachs wrote somewhat in the topic of unfiltered sensorium and the impact on the ability to operate in the world.
So yeah. I think what these models do and what we do is more similar than we might realise.