[SuchAnonMuchWow]

> But on the philosophical side, if an understanding can’t be communicated, does it exist?

There are deep mathematical results about our limits to understand things simply because we communicate through finite series of symbols from finite dictionaries. Basically what we can express and prove is infinite but discrete, but there is much larger infinities than that that will be beyond our grasps forever. Things like theorems that are true but can not be proven to be true, or properties on individuals real numbers that exist but can not be expressed.

And there is no reason to believe the universe doesn't have the same kind of thing: it remains to be shown whether or not you can describe or understand the universe with a finite set of symbols.

[talldayo]

Yep. Expanding on that; before AI everyone I knew would postulate on the fictional Library of Babel. The idea was a thought experiment, where you assume there exists a library with every possible combination of words and letters written down in one of it's books. There would be millions of issues that are filled with garbled and meaningless text; only a few would be legible, and fewer yet understandable.

It begs the question, if sifting through noise is a meaningful way to look for scientific progress. And of course, what if it's wrong? Both the Library of Babel and AI are fully capable of leading us down untested and nonsense rabbit-holes. The difference between Alice and Wonderland and Jabberwocky is unknown to us; we wouldn't know which books are worth reading and which are not.

On the one hand, you have people excited by this idea. Some people really do think that the world's answers are up on a bookshelf in the Library of Babel, somewhere. The philosophical angle runs deeper yet, though; what kind of cargo-cult society would we build relying on a useful AI? Are we guaranteed meaningful progress because an AI model can keep pressing the "randomize" button? Do we eventually hit a point where fiction and reality are indistinguishable? It's all hard to say.

[ben_w]

Peter Principal but with AI: it will keep being used for increasingly demanding talks, until being promoted one step beyond its competence.