Mazviita Chirimuuta

I think language is bound up with sensory motor engagement.

And likewise, how we perceive the world is shaped by linguistic concept formation and everything like that.

So the idea that you could just sort of detach off a language faculty, have it replicated in an LLM that doesn't have the other bits of our cognition and it doesn't have embodiment, doesn't have the capacity to engage with the world, and that it could have understanding in the same way that we do, I find that implausible.

Yeah, I mean, that's getting more along the lines of the kind of thing that could have understanding.

I think there's also more relevant stuff in the background of what it is to be a biological thing in that

Some things are inherently meaningful to you and relevant to you because they're connected with the demands that the challenges of your environment place to you.

Like I was saying before, being alive is a way of being always in a situation that is problematic to you.

So saliency and meaning, I think, are connected to that.

It's not to say that you couldn't have robots with more and more precarious lifelike situations.

And maybe, I don't know, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that then you start seeing understanding in ways that are more like that as well.

So one of the things that Heidegger said, and in many ways he's a grandiose and unpleasant person, but his grandiosity kind of manifested in how he read the importance of philosophy to things about the modern world today.

So one of the things he said was that technology and cybernetics for him, we could say AI for us today, was the culmination of a metaphysical tradition.

So it's because the history of philosophy set out on the certain path that it did that we are here today now with these technologies which seem to be having such a transformative role in our lives and to the point that we feel like not in control of these technologies.

I'm not a philosophical determinist like that.

I don't think just because some philosophers in ancient Greeks said certain things that this is why we have AI today.

But I think there are some features of the contrast he draws with the philosophical tradition.

in his own account of what it is to be a human person that give us an interesting perspective on what is being assumed in that path towards AI.

So one of the things he really insists on is human finitude.

We are inherently finite bounded knowers as communities and we're communities of knowers, but that the philosophical tradition has encouraged a kind of leap forward

that encourage the idea that something about us as knowers kind of crosses beyond the boundaries of finitude into like a universal, boundless realm of knowledge.