alt Hacker NewsDo you exist in reality? Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals? Do you have access to the Ding an sich any more than a (multimodal) LLM?
Replies
Come on, now. That's irrelevant.
Reality is by definition our physical reality, which is about an infinite number of levels more detailed than the, you know, _virtual_ digital world computers exist in.
Whatever world we construct for LLMs, no matter how detailed we make it, will always be a blocky projection of the real domain onto a virtual one.
It follows then that any insight gained in the virtual world is at best a rough approximation which can be quite useful at times but also utterly faulty on occasion.
How often it is useful vs. wrong is (partially) a function of how complete the real-to-virtual approximation for a given domain.
Certain domains, given their limited degrees of freedom, can be quite accurately modeled, such as a subway map.
But many domains cannot, and it's important to be aware of that inherent limitation in digital models including but not limited to LLM """reasoning"""
> Do you exist in reality?
Yes.
> Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals?
No, definitely reality. Things affect my thought whether I sense them or not.