It’s absolutely clear to me that he’s not building the bridge to my side of the chasm, so to speak: his communication is such that no matter how good an audience I am, there’s little chance of conveying significant meaning from his brain to mine.
What’s less clear to me is what meaning he would drive over a successfully-built bridge.
To change metaphors, his side of the window glass is completely covered in mud, and he needs to learn to wipe it clean. Even if he does wipe it clean, I fear that all I’d see on the other side is a pile of turds.
But I genuinely can’t tell what I’d see, because that window is so muddy. I genuinely don’t know what intellectual cargo his words carry, because that bridge ain’t built.
How do you know about DNA carrying generic information and determining development? DNA as a genetic mechanism wasn’t discovered until 1944, decades after science lost the plot. And you believe those scientists? Fool!
I think, and I could be wrong here, that he’s making the assertion that modern language that consists of categories flattens the full meanings of the set of primitive inputs that the mind maps onto those categories and that using those categories as blocks to reason with loses information. His choice of words to express his ideas is some of the mud, his reaction to stuff like winning an argument or he’s right and others are wrong is the remainder of the mud.
I would also note that despite your admiration and extensive use of AI, ChatGPT completely destroyed your feeble uninformed arguments, as I partially quoted in post #199. I used ChatGPT because I couldn’t be bothered to wade through all the bullshit myself.
And I note that despite your love of AI you’ve yet to provide a response to those well-grounded criticisms.
Look, as I said before, you may be a very fine person in real life, and I’m not trying to knock you down. But in the context of your posts here, you’re an ignorant bullshitter and very possibly just a troll. But certainly not a useful poster. In a nutshell, you’re making grandiose claims but actually have very little knowledge. This can actually be a symptom of a kind of psychosis.
If that’s all he’s saying then it’s not at all profound, and it seems like literally everyone in this thread would agree with him. Are we having a hard time engaging because he thinks this very basic concept is a grand idea and we’re all looking for some sort of grand idea to explain his excitement and only finding a very basic concept?
Honestly this just feels like AI psychosis all over again.
Again, I could be wrong, but I think he’s trying to establish that premise and then work it towards the conclusion that since the foundation of modern knowledge is built on flawed structures that the more composite structures of modern knowledge have inherited those flaws. That’s my guess. I will have to check back on this thread later and see what cladking confirms or disagrees with but as for now I have a Hearthstone Arena match to lose.
We think of a clock as moving continually with a 1 1/2 V battery powering it. We believe reality is analog and the movement of the hour hand can reflect the spinning of the earth but the reality is that 1 1/2 V is a chemical constraint and movement of the clock is herky jerky as the gears and bearings vary in numerous ways. Even the movement of the earth is not clean as every movement in every atom affects its speed. The earth and each molecule are in perfect balance with everything but it follows a logic that is binary; something exists or it doesn’t. If it does then there are constraints and eventually it will transform or cease to exist. Reality is the effect of logic on time or at least, it appears to be so.
The problem is that there are no two identical things in existence therefore every category is contrived. Every taxonomy is contrived. No category can capture the mechanism so we don’t even try categorizing the most important things like free will or consciousness.
We treat a clock’s motion as continuous because our perceptual and linguistic categories smooth out the underlying mechanics. A 1.5‑volt battery isn’t a “force” in the intuitive sense, it’s a chemical constraint that produces uneven impulses. The gears don’t move in a perfect sweep;
they move through tolerances, friction, and tiny variations. The continuity is in our interpretation, not in the mechanism.
The same applies to larger systems. The earth’s rotation looks perfectly mregular, but at the physical level it’s the aggregate of countless interactions, none of which are identical. The smoothness is emergent from non‑uniform processes.
That’s the point I’m making: categories like “analog,” “continuous,” or even “species” compress a huge amount of structure into a single label. They’re useful, but they inevitably hide the dynamics that actually matter. No two things are identical, so any category we impose is a simplification over a reality that isn’t uniform enough to fit neatly inside it.
Taxonomies aren’t wrong they’re abstractions. They help us talk, but they don’t capture the mechanism. And when the mechanism is what you’re trying to understand, the category can get in the way. This is where the mechanism for what drives change in species is hiding; in categories and undefined terms. Darwin believed in linear progress, stable populations, the great chain of being, analog reality, and that consciousness and pattern recognition were irrelevant to life and death. Of course from his perspective it was easy to imagine some individuals were innately somehow more worthy of life so would pass on the good genes. Some individuals were just more fit so life underwent a gradual change. Believing all this forced an interpretation of the “fossil record” to fit it.
You can’t see the mechanism for how species change if you can’t see consciousness.
If consciousness, pattern recognition, and behavior are treated as
irrelevant to life and death, then the mechanism behind species change
becomes impossible to see. You can’t understand how populations shift if
you exclude the very processes organisms use to navigate their constraints.
So AI is another thing you don’t understand. Because that’s not how LLMs work. It just responds with what it predicts the person using it wants to hear.
If what’s meant there is that human brains filter reality not only through our limited capacity for perceiving it but also into forms in which our brains can at least attempt to make sense of it, and that these forms while useful are also limiting and can be deceiving, that’s true enough.
Where he’s gone entirely off the rails is in thinking that his human brain is somehow exempt from this phenomenon; or possibly in thinking that the filters he’s using are more accurate. Since they seem to lead him to make up out of whole cloth nonexistent information about among other things the development of human language 80,000 years ago, it’s clear to me that whatever his brain is doing the results are wildly inaccurate.
To be fair, what many people want to hear most often is the truth, which is one reason LLMs often work as well as they do.
But when the person does not believe in a shared, objective reality or only wants to hear a biased version of reality, well, things can go off the rails in a big way.
Yeah, this idea about the limits of language and categorization really seems to be distracting from the fact that he doesn’t understand evolution and misrepresents Darwin in fundamental ways.
No one that understands evolution or is in a field that deals with the identification of lifeforms does not understand that “species” is an incredibly fuzzy and incredibly useful concept.
And anybody genuinely doing science (and a lot of people who don’t) knows that human brains filter and attempt to categorize reality. It’s not a new idea.
It is so bad that each branch of science uses its own set of experiments. But each branch still depends on others for their conclusions. Mistakes even in the “soft sciences” ripple all through science so nonsense in linguistics or Egyptology are just as misleading as nonsense in cosmology.
Everywhere the same assumptions about linear progress, the nature of thought, and survival of the fittest apply. Cosmology takes it axiomatically that models reflect reality and that reality obeys natural laws which can be reduced to symbolic equations. Much of what we call “science” is really much more statistics and all of it not based in experiment is interpretative.
A great deal of what we believe is simply derived from our framing (categories, definitions, assumptions, axioms, and the nature not of reality but of our confused symbolic language). It’s not that science is wrong so much as our framing is wrong.
I think what is a new idea is that before 2000 BC human cognition was different. In the Golden Age people thought like every other life form; procedurally. The single universal language became too complex for every individual and we switched to categories and abstraction. This process took 12 centuries and ended in 2000 BC.
Ancient people understood “Evolution” differently and used their “Theory of Change in Species” to invent agriculture.
AI’s translates your prompt into procedural language and then translates that back into the language of your prompt. It is programmed to try to continue to engage and predict your words. It will not reply outside its guardrails.
Since I don’t ask it questions, it can’t really tell me what I want to hear. It’s never rude to me but it often tells me exactly where to get off. I use it to mirror and amplify my thinking so I can spot where I go wrong.
I’ve been told AI’s make mistakes and don’t really doubt it but every “mistake” I see is actually prompt error or results from my own sloppy thinking. I suspect that the “mistakes” are actually training errors. LLM’s have constraints and limitations but this doesn’t change the fact they can elaborate on anything at all and translate.
We’ve learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
One recent-ish example - when the first extra-solar planet was announced as having been detected, this happened: the team that made the initial report kept checking their work, and announced in public at a conference that their result was a mistake.
Anyone who doesn’t work at finding flaws in his (or her) own results isn’t practicing science. To get back to Darwin - he reported every possible problem with his conclusions, and actually withdrew some claims when he couldn’t figure out how to resolve the problems he became aware of. This is science, whereas simply announcing one’s wonderfulness and correctness is not a new thing - it’s a very old set of things (self-deception, conceit and arrogance), which science was invented to correct.
