On Sat, Feb 7, 2026 at 12:14 PM Stefano Ticozzi <[email protected]> wrote:
*> Scientific thought has long since moved beyond Platonism,* > *Philosophical thought perhaps, but scientific thought never embraced Platonism because the most famous of the ancient Greeks were good philosophers but lousy scientists. Neither Socrates, Plato or Aristotle used the Scientific Method. Aristotle wrote that women had fewer teeth than men, it's known that he was married, twice in fact, yet he never thought of just looking into his wife's mouth and counting. Today thanks to AI, for the first time some very abstract philosophical ideas can actually be tested scientifically. * *> 1. Ideas do not exist independently of the human mind. Rather, they are > constructs we develop to optimize and structure our thinking.* > *True but irrelevant. * > *> 2. Ideas are neither fixed, immutable, nor perfect; they evolve over > time, as does the world in which we live—in a Darwinian sense. For > instance, the concept of a sheep held by a human prior to the agricultural > era would have differed significantly from that held by a modern > individual.* > *The meanings of words and of groups of words evolve over the eons in fundamental ways, but camera pictures do not. And yet minds educated by those two very different things become more similar as they become smarter. That is a surprising revelation that has, I think, interesting implications. * *> In my view, the convergence of AI “ideas” (i.e., language and visual > models) is more plausibly explained by a process of continuous > self-optimization, performed by systems that are trained on datasets and > information which are, at least to a considerable extent, shared across > models.* > *Do you claim that the very recent discovery that the behavior of minds that are trained exclusively by words and minds that are trained exclusively by pictures are similar and the discovery that the smarter those two minds become the greater the similarities, has no important philosophical ramifications? * *John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* 4x@ > > Il sab 7 feb 2026, 12:57 John Clark via extropy-chat < > [email protected]> ha scritto: > >> *Why do the language model and the vision model align? Because they’re >> both shadows of the same world* >> <https://www.quantamagazine.org/distinct-ai-models-seem-to-converge-on-how-they-encode-reality-20260107/?mc_cid=b288d90ab2&mc_eid=1b0caa9e8c> >> >> *The following quote is from the above: * >> >> *"More powerful AI models seem to have more similarities in their >> representations than weaker ones. Successful AI models are all alike, and >> every unsuccessful model is unsuccessful in its own particular way.[...] He >> would feed the pictures into the vision models and the captions into the >> language models, and then compare clusters of vectors in the two types. He >> observed a steady increase in representational similarity as models became >> more powerful. It was exactly what the Platonic representation hypothesis >> predicted."* >> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv2i3-oDJ0QqWdJ2W%3Ds2n%2Bjxq8Q2SRUOhLbXfORf7CrLsg%40mail.gmail.com.
