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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3298 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Isn’t the allegory of the cave kinda lame ? All you see are shadows, but I, the philosopher, see the true nature of things. You’re nothing but a groundhog to me, kid.

Not to mention how tortured it is. People have nothing better to do than to chain NPCs to a cave and give them an indonesian muppet show all day long? Can’t those shadows be made by real animals, walking along the road, or something?

Not really. Consider, for example, that it remains very relevant to this day in discussions around whether or not ChatGPT can 'know' things. Much like the prisoners of the cave, ChatGPT only derives knowledge from the training data it is provided. It has no direct experience of reality. And yet we would clearly consider a person trapped in such a cave to be sentient and intelligent, albeit ignorant.

To me, it's fascinating that a primitive living over two thousand years ago could have articulated such a scenario.

The story could be translated into english thus : I know the real meaning of events, you and chatgpt don't know the real meaning. ok, but why? Just because I say I saw the sun and the real things under it. That's hard to trust, could be shadows. To an objective third person, they might say I just derive knowledge from a different set of training data.

The point is not that the allegory of the cave is correct. I think most intellectuals, in our postmodern era, would disagree with Plato - there is no sun or objective knowledge, and we are limited in our ability to perceive the world directly - and we can just as much derive knowledge from the image of the horse as we can from the horse itself. But just because it is wrong does not mean it is not relevant or interesting.

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