Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 91.
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[1] From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.87: repetition vs intelligence: on LLMs (46)
[2] From: Gabriel Egan <mail@gabrielegan.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.87: repetition vs intelligence: on LLMs (158)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-07-20 17:44:09+00:00
From: James Rovira <jamesrovira@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.87: repetition vs intelligence: on LLMs
I think Jerry meant that "Gabriel's" criticisms of Tim's opening passages
were true only in a very narrow frame of reference. And, I agree.
I think Gabriel's response to Tim may be an example of the fallacy of
accident: exceptions don't invalidate the rule. Rules don't apply to
exceptions, and that's ok. Yes, we would have to think differently about
language for people who never developed a sense of hearing or sight, but
that doesn't keep us from theorizing based on the rest of the human race,
which is the overwhelming majority of it. And even then, the existence of
people who never developed a sense of hearing, so do not link words to
sounds, doesn't support the idea that the human mind and computers are in
any way meaningfully comparable. A human mind with no sense of hearing from
birth is still very different at present from any computer.
That is indeed an interesting question: how does a person with zero sense
of hearing process language? I'm sure the scholarship is out there.
How would someone who never had any sense of hearing or any sense of sight
process language? Could they do it at all? Sight without hearing is one
thing, hearing without sight is another, but complete absence of both from
birth? Could these people ever learn language at all? Their mental
environments would consist only of touch, taste, and smells. I'm thinking
of the musical/movie Tommy now, but it's not clear that he was ever really
blind and deaf, just unresponsive, and it wasn't from birth. The person
would have to learn to "speak" using increasingly sophisticated,
differently shaped objects. If a person developed that kind of language,
could we know what it meant to that person?
But even in that situation, there's no reason to compare the way the human
mind processes sensory input to the way computers process data. Probably
even less reason in that case.
Jim R
On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 3:55 AM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: 2025-07-19 10:52:03+00:00
> From: Mcgann, Jerome (jjm2f) <jjm2f@virginia.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.84: repetition vs intelligence: on LLMs
>
> Jim's criticism of Tim's opening passages is correct only in a very narrow
> frame
> of reference. All the senses are developed and neurologically connected in
> utero, and smell taste touch and hearing develop very early.
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2025-07-20 14:15:39+00:00
From: Gabriel Egan <mail@gabrielegan.com>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 39.87: repetition vs intelligence: on LLMs
Dear Humanists
Tim Smithers made two substantive
claims about how human language
works: that it is primarily a matter
of sound and that typography and
layout strongly affect meaning.
I offered reasons for thinking that
both these claims are false. Instead
of responding to those reasons,
Smithers claims that I have entirely
misunderstood him.
I take that as what boxers call
'throwing in the towel'.
I've read the rest of Smithers long post
and I see recurrent misrepresentation
of what Large Language Models actually do.
But I think more Humanists will be
interested in what I think is a demonstrable
error of logic in Smithers's long post.
He insists that a representational system
needs to be nearly perfect in order to
count as a representational system. Thus
he writes:
> Representation requires satisfying
> the Representation Relationship,
> and this requires explicitly
> showing that, in all cases without
> exception ...
and
> ... [a particular tweak is] a hack
> to stop undesirable behaviour in
> our vector building system.
and
> In other words, more hacks. ...
> It's certainly no way to build
> a transparently working, reliable
> and robust, representation system.
and
> In any real representation system
> building we would have the verification,
> validation, and testing work done and
> presented which shows that the designed
> representations happen as designed,
> only as designed, and can only happen
> as designed, and always happen well
> enough in all the conditions and
> situations ...
and
> ... we need to see that a generous
> set of representative examples of
> vector algebra combinations of text
> token vectors all, without fail,
> result in sensible semantic outcomes
> ...
If we take this counsel of perfection
seriously, language itself and the
human mind that process it would fail
to qualify as a representational system.
We find that in fact every day our
language and our human cognition throw
up mistakes and miscommunications.
For instance, Garden Path sentences easily
trip up the mind's system for parsing,
including the famous case of:
"The horse raced past the barn fell."
It usually takes a few goes at parsing
before the reader understands that the
horse that was raced (say, by a jockey)
past the barn was the horse that fell.
(Some readers report never getting to
that meaning without being prompted.)
Our cognitive system for parsing can be
tripped up by something as simple as
the choice of where to put commas, as
in another famous case:
"This book is dedicated to my parents,
Ayn Rand and God."
(I'm getting these from Steven Pinker's
book 'The Sense of Style'.)
A whole genre of comedy relies for its
effects on the imperfections in our
cognitive systems' ability to make sense
of language. Being an evolved system for
solving the daily problems of survival,
the mind is imperfect and full of hacks,
just as the Large Language Models are.
Smithers overstates the consequences of
these imperfections and engineering
hacks for our sense of what LLMs do.
At root his objection is that, on
principle, a machine cannot wield
meanings, which is what humans do.
Behind all such insistence that
humans do something that machines
cannot do there lies, I suspect,
human hubris and fear of obsolescence.
In a much-viewed video on YouTube,
Richard Feynman is asked whether
machines might ever think like
human beings and be more intelligent
than human beings. Feynman points
out that:
<<
There are some things that people make
up that say that "While it's doing it
[whatever task] will it feel good?" or
"While it's doing it will it understand
what it's doing?" or some other abstraction.
I rather feel that these are things
like "While it's doing it, will it be
able to scratch the lice out of its
hair?" No, it hasn't any hair the lice
to scratch from. ... You've got to be
careful when you say what the human
does. If you add to the actual result
of his effort some other things that
you like [such as] the appreciation of
the aesthetic ... if we add things
that we think we are doing on top of
what we are actually doing, looking
at not just the result of what we
are doing but a lot of extra things,
then it gets harder and harder for
the computer to do it, because the
human beings have a tendency to try
to make sure that they can do
something that no machine can do.
>>
(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipRvjS7q1DI>
8m26s to 9m28s)
Regards
Gabriel Egan
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