alt Hacker NewsIf anyone here hasn't read Borges, I'd strongly recommend him. Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break. The common recommendation would be to try out Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and see if you like it. If so, it's part of Labyrinths, which is (in my opinion) his best collection of short stories. The best edition in English is probably Penguin's Collected Fictions.
Regarding the content of this interview:
>If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?
This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge would be necessary to create Borges out of a world without Borges.
In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead end for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism is accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of creating synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so with categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this be?)
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> Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break.
Yes, his writings are short, but man they are dense!
To anyone who cares, do this exercise: read short story by Borges, probably the shorter the better. Then go ahead say, next day, and try to write it down again in your own words. I tried a couple of times, and I ended with at least twice the number of pages. Amazing.
Tlön is one of my favorite short stories. Weirdly (and perhaps appropriately) that's despite being unable to remember basically anything about it once I've finished reading.
I first encountered Borges in high school, reading “The House of Asterion” as an assignment. Probably not one of his most well known short stories, but I would still recommend it.
>but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge.
Do you think that a LLM has the ability to identify a new a priori knowledge?
It seems like it would be a lower threshold to meet but If you combine that with a stochastic process then it seems inevitable that it would be able to ruminate until it came up with new a priori knowledge.
Reading Borges is anything but easy. It requires a certain state of mind. I myself would pick Cortazar over Borges any day, buy I have appreciated some of his writings.
Highly recommend his Fictions too. Grabbed a worn copy for 1€ on the street months ago, and I still think about Uqbar from time to time.
Somewhat relevant to this overall conversation is "pierre menard author of the quixote". Which takes the concept of death of the author in an amusing direction.