Ch. 11 What Equals the Universe? (4/13-4/19)
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Brief Exercise
Meditate on the difference between the following two sentences, and note how coding (typographical convention) helps us distinguish the two meanings:
- Water is not a word.
- "Water" is a word.
Got it? No, you probably haven't. Not yet. You only think you've got it . . .
Exercises
- Let everybody in the class pinch their upper arms.
- Let everybody then speak the word "pinch" out loud.
- Let everybody write the word "pinch" on a piece of paper.
- Let everybody again pinch their upper arms.
- Discuss the differences among Exercises 1 to 4.
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H Hannah pinned this topic
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After doing the exercise, I feel strange! I really got the sense of the limitations of our language. "Pinch" is only a symbol to vaguely describe the many details surrounding the experience of "pinching" like the sensations of pain, the location and matter being squeezed, the psychological effects, the physics, and so on. But we mistake the word for reality unconsciously... I want to know where RAW is going with this... what do we do with the awareness of our language's limitations?
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System unpinned this topic
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@Because0 that is the question! Words are the idea of the reality but what is the reality if describing it in words inherently limits that reality into constrained details? How do we experience reality without words?
It's not unlike LLMs. I'm no expert on AI, but it strings together combinations of words that seem statistically likely to produce the intended meaning. Meanwhile, AI does not have a sensory apparatus to interact with material existence. So when AI says water... what is it talking about?
I mean, sure, we can infer that it is talking about that substance that chemists designate as H2O, but it cannot actually experience what we mean by that word, "water."
I'm sure y'all have experienced the word salad of AI slop, so this might seem somewhat obvious haha but it's perhaps a more extreme tangent to what RAW is getting at.
It's crazy to think about how much of the world operates (without even considering AI) on people who talk about things they have never experienced. I mean, I encounter so many people who talk with certainty about knowing things they admit to have never met face to face, yet they make all kinds of decisions as if they were trained in such encounters. It's a bit of a miracle anything gets done at all
