[malloryerik]

Humans have a direct connection to our world through sensation and valence, pleasure, pain, then fear, hope, desire, up to love. Our consciousness is animal and as much or more pre-linguistic as linguistic. This grounds our symbolic language and is what attaches it to real life. We can feel instantly that we know or don't know. Yes we make errors and hallucinate, but I'm not going to make up an API out of the blue; I'll know by feeling that what I'm doing is mistaken.

[arolihas]

It's insane that this has to be explained to a fellow living person. There must be some mass psychosis going on if even seemingly coherent and rational people can make this mistake.

[malloryerik]

I mean, I've certainly made that mistake, comparing machines and people too closely, and then somehow had at least some of the errors pointed out.

[justcallmejm]

Perception and understanding are different things. Just because you have wiring in your body to perceive certain vibrations in spacetime in certain ways, does not mean that you fully grasp reality - you have some data about reality, but that data comprises an incomplete, human-biased world model.

[malloryerik]

Yeah we'll end up on a "yes and no" level of accord here. Yes I agree that understanding and perception aren't always the same, or maybe I'd put it that understanding can go beyond perception, which I think is what you mean when you say "incomplete." But I'd say, "Sorry but no, I respectfully disagree" in that at least from my point of view, we can't equate human experience with "data" and doing so, or viewing people as machines, cosmos as machine, everything as merely material in a dead way out of which somehow springs this perhaps even illusion of "life" that turns out to be a machine after all, this kind of view risks extremely deep and dangerous -- eventually even perilous -- error. As we debated this, assuming I'm not mischaracterizing your position but it does seem to lead in that direction, I'd shore up my arguments with support from phenomenologists, I'd try to use recent physics of various flavors though I'm very very much out of my depth here but at least enough to puncture the scientific materialism bias, Wittgenstein, from the likes of McGilchrist and neuro and psychological sources, even Searle's "Seeing Things as They Are" which argues that perception is not made of data. I'd be against someone like a Daniel Dennett (though I'm sure he was a swell fellow) or Richard Dawkins. Would I prevail in the discussion? Of course I'm not sure, and realize now that I might, in LLM style, sound like I know more than I actually do!