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Comment by glenstein | Hacker News Reader

Same here. I don't think it's surprising, but depending on where you say it, you'll find people insisting that this can't be possible.

I think a lot of our widely held cultural beliefs on this front have been informed by academic philosophy from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In particular, I would go do far as to say that Hubert Dreyfus, author of the book "What computers can't do" and frequent friendly adversary of Daniel Dennett, has a lot of responsibility here. He is famous for claiming computers would never become competitive at chess because chess required "insight", and always differentiated computer capabilities from complex behavior or human-like behavior, because the latter had something special that could only be represented with vague and underdefined terms. Even now I think Dreyfus is approvingly cited, while his core thesis is getting closer to being refuted every day if it hasn't been already.

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One thing that LLMs have made me realize is just how ungrounded a lot of mainstream academic philosophy was in the 70s and 80s. For example, so much of Derrida's work centered around the impossibility of truly communicating shared meaning between individuals through language. The fact that we can now communicate so effectively (with remarkably few contextual errors and razor-sharp conveyance of intent) with an entity/technology that is not even human pretty much destroys so much of Derrida's oeuvre as false and delusionally solipsistic, basically just a silly game. He had his critics who argued the same thing, especially analytical philosophers, but they never had as much purchase as he did in the academy.

I haven't read Derrida in decades, but your post inspired me to ask chatGPT about this. Version 3.5 would have none of it, and was adamant that Derrida's views were in no way threatened.I almost got the feeling it wanted to call me a bad user just for asking! GPT4 on the other hand, went into a long explanation about how its existence challenged some parts of it by providing analysis of concepts like différance, trace, and undecidability. GPT4 is great at discussing itself and how LLMs in general fit into various philosophical debates.

Version 4 is definitely better in discussing philosophy in general. 3.5 was able to summarize philosophical material, but once you started to engage with ideas critically, it would tend to get into largely nonsensical moralism about needing to make a good faith effort to understand individual philosophers' ideas. There's much less of that in 4.

>The fact that we can now communicate so effectively (with remarkably few contextual errors and razor-sharp conveyance of intent) with an entity/technology that is not even human pretty much destroys so much of Derrida's oeuvre as false and delusionally solipsistic

Isn't the LLM just good at giving us the illusion of such effective communication? How can we have true "shared meaning" with a device designed to simulate the experience of shared meaning? Isn't the fact that it's 'mind' is truly unknowable and unrelatable a demonstration of Derrida's point?

If you can tell it things in a way that it successfully acts on that information, then that seems like effective communication.

When I use GitHub Copilot, I'll often write a comment describing some code I want it to implement and then it spits out a suggestion. Occasionally it fails badly at this and I realize I worded my comment badly. When I reword the comment better and then find that Copilot's next suggestion nails it what I wanted, is that not the result of me effectively communicating with it through the comment? (If I did that with a human coworker instead, is that communication?)

This is a long running strain of criticism against continental philosophy. I don't mean to write this to refute you, just that many people do think that the continental philosophers are tilting at windmills and aren't really based around objective reality in the way a lot of earlier (pre-Hegel) Western philosophers were. There's also people who would claim that Derrida's linguistic relativism is in fact bolstered by LLMs.

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