On 2/9/2026 3:36 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Feb 8, 2026 at 10:30 AM Stefano Ticozzi
<[email protected]> wrote:
/> The article you linked here appeared to refer to a convergence
toward a Platonic concept of the Idea; it therefore seemed
relevant to recall that Platonic Ideas have been extensively
demonstrated to be “false” by science./
*No. You can't use a tape measure to prove that a poem is "false".
Science deals with what you can see, hear, feel, taste and smell,
Plato was dealing with the metaphysical, the underlying nature of
being. However, far from disproving it, in the 20th century Quantum
Mechanics actually gave some support to Plato's ideas. In Plato's
Allegory of the Cave we can only see the "shadows" of the fundamental
underlying reality, and in a similar way modern physics says we can
only observe reality through a probability (not a certainty) obtained
by the Quantum Wavefunction. *
*
*
/> human language has grown and developed around images, driven
almost exclusively by the need to emulate the sense of sight./
*We may not be able to directlyobserve fundamental underlying
realitybut we are certainly affected by it, and over the eons human
language has been optimizedto maximize the probability that one's
genes get into the next generation. So although words are not the
fundamental reality they must be congruent with it. That has been
known for a long time but very recently AI has taught us that the
connection is much deeper and far more subtle than previously suspected. *
*Just a few years ago many people (including me) were saying that
words were not enough and that for a machine to be truly intelligent
it would need a body, or at least sense organs that can interact with
the real physical world. But we now know that is untrue. It is still
not entirely clear, at least not to me, exactly how it is possible for
words alone to do that, but it is an undeniable fact that somehow it is.*
*Isn't it just a matter of bandwidth. An image contains a lot more
information than a paragraph taking up the same space on a page. So in
theory it provides a lot more bandwidth. But a lot of that is not
available to us because we don't process to the finest degree of our
vision (hence the possibility of "hidden" messages in pictures). So I
don't think it's because words convey more information than we thought;
it's because images convey less, and part of the reason they convey less
is we don't see everything in an image, also we don't necessarily have
the connections with other concepts that would help us remember details
of an image, except when we have words or a name for the detail
Brent*
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