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Comment by sobiolite | Hacker News Reader

The theory is that creative leaps in theoretical physics require a grounding in sensory experience, but the obvious counter-argument is that humans can make creative leaps in abstract fields without such sensory grounding. They do address this at the end, saying

"In abstract domains such as Mathematics or Computer Science, the Sense Experience (E) may be grounded in high-dimensional topology or have other goals such as generality or minimality."

But if such sense experience is possible in abstract domains via some high-dimensional topology, why could a sufficiently advanced LLM not develop an equivalent high-dimensional topology for domains like physics and use it to make creative leaps?

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If there is enough cross over between real world knowledge engrams and abstract knowledge engram, would this allow for the jump?

One interesting (albeit sad) area which might be related are humans who are never raised with a first language. They seem to never developer abstract reasoning and even seem to lose the ability to develop it later in life. This might indicate there is some 'real world senses' -> 'direct language' -> 'indirect language' -> 'abstract abduction' hierarchy that develops, perhaps related to more real world abductions as a necessary side chain to developing abstract ones.

One of the obvious problems with this is just how difficult we find it to study intelligence purely in humans. We are measure a LLMs by a yardstick that is already known broken, but maybe this is still the right path.

The paper also fails to show that their central example, Einstein, relied on sensory experience for his intuition leaps rather than general reasoning. They just kind of claim that thought experiments require sensory experience. But you can easily ask an LLM to perform a thought experiment and simulate an outcome, and the SOTA LLMs generally seem to do about as well as a human. An LLM would certainly know that freefall feels the same as zero gravity, even if they haven't felt the sensation, which was the key intuition the paper talks about for Einstein's General Relativity. The paper's author would probably say any examples of this don't count, but without clear criteria for what would count, their claim is unfalsifiable.

That's an interesting analogy. My gut sense is that theoretical mathematics requires a high level of intelligence versus more grounded domains. That may imply that deficiency in grounding can be made up for with intelligence and basically reverse engineering the gaps in grounding from first principles/limited grounding. The ultimate question would then be what is the tradeoffs between grounding and raw intelligence for the same outcome.

Isnt the sensory grounding even in abstract cases some (limited) intuition that simulates in a mental world model?

> ...but the obvious counter-argument is that humans can make creative leaps in abstract fields without such sensory grounding...

But we have no idea at how good humans are at that. Given the appalling failures of humans to handle even basic statistical situations like identifying that the same thing happens over and over, it might be that they are hilariously bad at creative leaps in abstract fields, it is just we have had nothing better available to measure against. We've spent about as long as decision theory existed trying to convince people to use it instead of flailing. Limited success, usually in exceptional cases.

And the paper seems a bit dodgy, we have models created with sensory data available. No reason a LLM can't be trained on more sensory data than a human can accumulate in one lifetime. There is a lot of visual data on YouTube.

Most humans are probably bad at it. Some humans are very good at it. I'd even argue most science does not demand these kinds of leaps and is mostly concerned with incremental improvements, or proving or disproving other people's abductions

The case study they chose is literally Albert Einstein coming up with General Relativity, something most scientists of his time were not able to do

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