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Comment by canjobear | Hacker News Reader

What is understanding?

The ability to model an object in awareness and its causality that corresponds to its space-time reality

Circular definitions, circular definitions, circular definitions everywhere.

It's almost as if the only two modes of self consistent reasoning are either circular or predicated on assumptions taken in blind pragmatic faith.

What does it mean to model an object in awareness? Does Dall-E model an object in awareness when it is generating an image containing an object? How can you tell if it is or isn't?

All ml/dl systems have no awareness - they just output based on input training - like a calculator outputs an answer. So what it means to model in awareness is what you are doing right now in reading this sentence. You take these words as input, model conceptually what they mean mentally, connect that model to your experience of space time, and then decide what to do next with that understanding.

> All ml/dl systems have no awareness - they just output based on input training

Between the input and the output there is a function approximator. How can you be so sure what is and isn't going on in there?

> So what it means to model in awareness is what you are doing right now in reading this sentence.

I don't have any idea a priori of what is going on in my mind as I am reading a sentence. There are serious theories of neuroscience where the function of the brain is prediction. That would suggest that what I'm doing when I'm reading is trying to predict the next timeslice of my experience, quite similar to deep ML systems.

does doing awareness entail something non-mechanical?

To define() a Virtual Expectation of how a phenomenon ought to behave and then watch it play out in reality, confirming expectations most of the time but noticing when it deviates (meaningfully) from the expected output and refining that Virtual Expectation definition to include additional rules / special cases so that future reality-checks play out as expected

Dall-E doesn't observe the real world and compare it to its "objects in awareness", so at best it only checks one out of two boxes in GP's definition

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