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Comment by natch | Hacker News Reader

He is one of these people who think that humans have a direct experience of reality not mediated by as Alan Kay put it three pounds of oatmeal. So he thinks a language model can not be a world model. Despite our own contact with reality being mediated through a myriad of filters and fun house mirror distortions. Our vision transposes left and right and delivers images to our nerves upside down, for gawd’s sake. He imagines none of that is the case and that if only he can build computers more like us then they will be in direct contact with the world and then he can (he thinks) make a model that is better at understanding the world

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Isn't this idea demonstrably false due to the existence of various sensory disorders too?

I have a disorder characterised by the brain failing to filter own its own sensory noise, my vision is full of analogue TV-like distortion and other artefacts. Sometimes when it's bad I can see my brain constructing an image in real time rather than this perception happening instantaneously, particularly when I'm out walking. A deer becomes a bundle of sticks becomes a muddy pile of rocks (what it actually is) for example over the space of seconds. This to me is pretty strong evidence we do not experience reality directly, and instead construct our perceptions predictively from whatever is to hand.

Pleased to meet someone else who suffers from "visual snow". I'm fortunate in that like my tinnitus, I'm only acutely aware of it when I'm reminded of it, or, less frequently, when it's more pronounced.

You're quite correct that our "reality" is in part constructed. The Flashed Face Distortion Effect [0][1] (wherein faces in the peripheral vision appear distorted due the the brain filling in the missing information with what was there previously) is just one example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashed_face_distortion_effect [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37991-9

Ah that's interesting, mine is omnipresent and occasionally bad enough I have to take days off work as I can't read my own code; it's like there's a baseline of it that occasionally flares up at random. Were you born with visual snow or did you acquire it later in life? I developed it as a teenager, and it was worsened significantly after a fever when I was a fresher.

Also do you get comorbid headaches with yours out of interest?

I developed it later in life. The tinnitus came earlier (and isn't as a result of excessive sound exposure as far as I know), but in my (unscientific) opinion they are different manifestations (symptoms) of the same underlying issue – a missing or faulty noise filter on sensory inputs to the brain.

Thankfully I don't get comorbid headaches – in fact I seldom get headaches at all. And even on the odd occasion that I do, they're mild and short-lived (like minutes). I don't recall ever having a headache that was severe, or that lasted any length of time.

Yours does sound much more extreme than mine, in that mine is in no way debilitating. It's more just frustrating that it exists at all, and that it isn't more widely recognised and researched. I have yet to meet an optician that seems entirely convinced that it's even a real phenomenon.

Interesting, definitely agree it likely shares an underlying cause with tinnitus. It's also linked to migraine and was sometimes conflated with unusual forms of migraine in the past, although it's since been found to be a distinct disorder. There's been a few studies done on visual snow patients, including a 2023 fMRI study which implicated regions rich in glutamate and 5HT2A receptors.

I actually suspected 5HT2A might be involved before that study came out, since my visual distortions sometimes resemble those caused by psychedelics. It's also known that both psychedelics and anecdotally from patient's groups SSRIs too can cause a similar symptoms to visual snow syndrome, I had a bad experience with SSRIs for example but serotonin antagonists actually fixed my vision temporarily - albeit with intolerable side-effects so I had to stop.

It's definitely a bit of a faff that people have never heard of it, I had to see a neuro-ophthalmologist and a migraine specialist to get a diagnosis. On the other hand being relatively unknown does mean doctors can be willing to experiment. My headaches at least are controlled well these days.

scoot, you may find the current mini-series by the podcast Unexplainable to be interesting. It's on sound, and one episode is about tinnitus and research into it.

https://www.vox.com/podcasts/467048/unexplainable-hearing-au...

Thanks!

Only tangentially related but maybe interesting to someone here so linking anyways: Brian Kohberger is a visual snow sufferer. Reading about his background was my first exposure to this relatively underpublicized phenomenon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_University_of_Idaho_murde...

The default philosophical position for human biology and psychology is known as Representational Realism. That is, reality as we know it is mediated by changes and transformations made to sensory (and other) input data in a complex process, and is changed sufficiently to be something "different enough" from what we know to be actually real.

Direct Realism is the idea that reality is directly available to us and any intermediate transformations made by our brains is not enough to change the dial.

Direct Realism has long been refuted. There are a number of examples, e.g. the hot and cold bucket; the straw in a glass; rainbows and other epiphenomena, etc.

the fact that a not-so-direct experience of reality produces "good enough results" (eg. human intelligence) doesn't mean that a more-direct experience of reality won't produce much better results, and it clearly doesn't mean it can't produce these better results in AI

your whole reasoning is neither here not there, and attacking a straw man - YLC for sure knows that human experience of reality is heavily modified and distorted

but he also knows, and I'd bet he's very right on this, that we don't "sip reality through a narrow straw of tokens/words", and that we don't learn "just from our/approved written down notes", and only under very specific and expensive circumstances (training runs)

anything closer to more-direct-world-models (as LLMs are ofc at a very indirect level world models) has very high likelihood of yielding lots of benefits

But he seems to like pretending that we can’t reconfigure that straw of tokens into 4096 straws or a couple billion straws for that matter. LLMs are just barely getting started. That’s not to say there’s no other or better way, but yucking our yum he fails to acknowledge there’s a lot more that can be done with this stuff.

The world model of a language model is a ... language model. Imagine the mind of a blind limbless person, locked in a cell their whole life, never having experienced anything different, who just listens all day to a piped in feed of randomized snippets of WikiPedia, 4chan and math olypiad problems.

The mental model this person has of this feed of words is what an LLM at best has (but human model likely much richer since they have a brain, not just a transformer). No real-world experience or grounding, therefore no real-world model. The only model they have is of the world they have experience with - a world of words.

That way he may get a very good lizard. Getting Einstein though takes layers of abstraction.

My thinking is that such world models should be integrated with LLM like the lower levels of perception are integrated with higher brain function.

Whatever idea yann has of JEPA and its supposed superiority compared to LLMs, he doesn't seem to have done a good job of "selling it" without resorting to strawmanning LLMs. From what little I gathered (which may be wrong), his objection to LLMs is something like the "predict next token" inductive bias is too weak for models to be able to meaningfully learn models of things like physics, sufficient to properly predict motion and do well on physical reasoning tasks.

And LLMs are trained on the humans trying to describe all of this through text. The point is not if humans have a true experience of reality, it’s that human writings are a poor descriptor of reality anyway, and so LLMs cannot be a stepping stone.

> humans have a direct experience of reality not mediated by as Alan Kay put it three pounds of oatmeal

Is he advocating for philosophical idealism of the mind or does he has an alternate physicalist theory?

I don't think he actually understands direct realism, idealism, or representational realism as distinctions whatsoever.

Great strawman.

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