Probably that I miss the deepness of this quote, but lions or whales are mammals like us and they must be chatting about their basic needs which we should be able to relate to.
For Wittgenstein words don't so much express things in themselves, but are deeply integrated in nonspoken contexts and impressions. It's hard enough to really /get/ somebody from a different cultural context, whereas a lion lives in a massively different lifeworld, with a very different body.
What does a word like "hungry" mean to you, when your diet is gorging yourself on freshly killed meat every couple of weeks? What does feeling "tired" mean, when you're the size of a bus and sleeping is done in increments of 10 minutes because you must constantly wake and resurface to breathe through a hole in your back? You can use language to gesture at these experiences, but that's different from really knowing what we are talking about.
Not that I understand Wittgenstein very well at all, even though it seems like it should be easier than understanding whales and lions ;)
> It's hard enough to really /get/ somebody from a different cultural context
This is such an eye roll statement. The world “really” is the one which does all the work in it. One would say “nah, communication is actually amazing, and through listening to people / reading their words and being attentive one can understand many different cultural contexts”. And whoever wrote the original sentence can always come back and ask “but did you really really understand them”?
> What does a word like "hungry" mean to you, when your diet is gorging yourself on freshly killed meat every couple of weeks?
I don’t understand the problem here. “Hunger” is the feeling which make you seek out food. If your normal is to gorge yourself full and don’t eat anything for weeks then you are not hungry for most of those weeks and then when you start feeling hungry that is when you start preparing for a new hunt, chasing a herd and so on.
We already and in our everyday life understand such differe ces. We know for example that newborns need feeding a lot more frequently than adults, so when they become fussy we ask “is he hungry maybe?” Despite the fact that our own hunger works on a different schedule. We also undestand that when a holocaust survivor describes the deep hunger they suffered from in the camp that is a different feeling than the one you feel 2 hours after lunch when you start thinking about opening a pack of chips. Somehow we “get it”. But do we “realy” get it? Yeah i mean we know that the baby will become more and more fussy the longer it is not fed, and will die eventually. We know that the lion on the hunt will eat us if we look easy enough prey. We understand that people in the camps turned to eat things they would have considered inedible before, and the experience left lasting psychological scars on many of them. And we understand that the person thinking about opening a pack of chips will stop thinking about it if something distracts him/her for a minute. “But do we really really really understand them?” Idk. You tell me what you consider “really really really” understanding anything. Because one can play this game forever.
> What does feeling "tired" mean, when you're the size of a bus and sleeping is done in increments of 10 minutes because you must constantly wake and resurface to breathe through a hole in your back?
If that is normal for that being then they wouldn’t describe that state of being as tired. It is just their normal. But if something (illness, activity, noises) disturbs their normal which make them seek out more sleep they would call that being tired.
>And whoever wrote the original sentence can always come back and ask “but did you really really understand them”?
Asking questions that are very difficult to answer precisely and well, and then trying to do so, is kind of the whole deal with philosophy. How /do/ you know the things that you think you know? You can roll your eyes at it and choose not to investigate further, or you can try to get super granular about sussing out an answer. Philosophers generally try to do the latter.
If your answer to "what does it mean to know things" or "how do we actually use words to navigate meaning" or "how well can we understand other living things" is "I don't care, that's nerd shit" then I highly recommend that you don't read Wittgenstein, because you're gonna get real bored real fast.
> highly recommend that you don't read Wittgenstein,
I did read Wittgenstein. I still hold contempt in my heart to those aping his thoughts mindlessly.
> Asking questions that are very difficult to answer precisely and well, and then trying to do so, is kind of the whole deal with philosophy.
Yes. And declaring that things are impossible is not that. "If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it." is a feel. It's not the conclusion of a reasoned argument. (I'm talking about the sentence in the context it is found in the Philosophical Investigations of Wittgenstein)
> If your answer to "what does it mean to know things" or "how do we actually use words to navigate meaning" or "how well can we understand other living things" is "I don't care, that's nerd shit"
No. Those are all very interesting questions. But if you start with "understanding is impossible" then I hope you get a hug from a loved one. That stuff is hurt speaking. It is not a usefull starting point to answer any of those questions.
I don't think anybody here is upholding Wittgenstein as an exemplar of an emotionally well-adjusted person. I'm not proselytizing for him, just explaining his take to the best of my ability.
I don't disagree with this criticism of his position either, for what it's worth - Personally I think Wittgenstein ignores empathy as a transfer of embodied nonspoken knowledge, for one.
It'd be one thing if his example were of something very radically different (IE space aliens), but social mammals like lions and whales and humans all learn to navigate the world through the presence of others first and foremost. Long before you have any awareness of language, even long before birth, you will have an awareness of closeness. You will primarily learn to navigate the world by way of your relationships to others. That goes whether you're a lion cub or a human baby.
Reminds me of the Chinese room [1] argument: Does a computer really understand Chinese language if it can respond to Chinese inputs with Chinese outputs?
> Searle's thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking human being.
> The question Searle wants to answer is this: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese? Searle calls the first position "strong AI" and the latter "weak AI".
(Emphasis added)
If we were to make an analogy to contemporary machine learning, we're talking about the difference between an LLM (with context) and a Markov Chain. 'Understanding' requires novel reuse of recollections. Recollections require memory (i.e. context), and the novel reuse of those recollections require a world model with which to inference.
> The question Searle wants to answer is this: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese? Searle calls the first position "strong AI" and the latter "weak AI".
I don't know why anybody thinks this is a profound question worth spending time thinking about. All it boils down to is whether or not we reserve the word "understand" for beings with souls or whether we allow it to describe machines too.. and BTW there's no empirical test for souls (not even for people!) so it's really just asking if "understand" is some sort of holy word reserved for people who have faith and believe in souls.
The question isn't about machines and their empirical capabilities at all, it's just about how humans feel about that particular word.
I am personally in favor of the use of the word 'understanding' with LLMs, but it should be noted that many people strongly disagree with that use of the term.
You're saying that LLMs meet the stronger definition of "understanding?" I disagree: You're confusing necessary with sufficient. [0]
Take the original analogy of a person with an if-then opaque phrase table, and make it a slightly fancier two-step process where they must also compute a score based on recent phrases or words to determine the proper output.
So now the system has "memory" and gives better output... But was that sufficient to create understanding? Nope.
[0] And perhaps not even necessary, if we consider an operator who does understand Chinese but their short-term memory has been damaged by an injury.
I think the confusion comes here in believing that humans have some exceptional mechanic for understanding. Ultimately human intelligence is the product of neural networks. The only thing that's separates us from ML is both scale (in terms of compute and memory) and agency, the latter giving us the ability to train ourselves. We take inputs, we output behaviors (including language). The idea that we are, in all actuality, deterministic computers is really at the heart of the existential panic around AI.
In a weird way "hype" undersells how history repeats itself: Rene Descartes promoted the idea of the brain as a pump for the spirit, then in Freud's era it was the steam engine, etc.
> if you say brains aren’t made of neural networks.
Except biological brains are not made like hyped-up artificial neural networks. The latter are from a simplified hypothesis then massively twisted and cut-down to fit practical electrical engineering constraints.
> The only thing that's separates us from [machine learning] is both scale [...] and agency
... And the teensy tiny fact you keep refusing to face which is that they don't work the same.
Declaring that the problem is basically solved is just an updated version of a perennial conceit, one which in the past would have involved the electrical current flow or gears.
There's no hypothesizing at this point. Neurons have been studied in the lab since – checks notes – 1873. Modern neural nets have largely taken Occam's Razor rather than precise biomimicry, mostly due to 'The Bitter Lesson' that basic neural networks show more generalizable emergent behaviors when scaled vs being clever about it. e.g., dendrites themselves have been shown to behave something like a multilayer perceptron on their own. So it's really perceptrons all the way down when it comes to brain circuitry.
Perceptrons were built to be mathematical models of neurons. When gears or 'electricity' were first created/harnessed, there was no intention to build a model of the mind or to mimic neurons whatsoever. There really is no weight to this argument.
> Declaring that the problem is basically solved
I'm not making that declaration for whatever you might be terming 'the problem' here. I'm just stating that 'understanding' is still (incorrectly) rooted in our belief that our means of computation is exceptional. As far as anyone can tell, 'understanding' isn't substrate dependent, and as far as we know, our 'understanding' comes from neuronal computation.
You do realize that artificial neural networks are based on the organic ones? Unless you have some dualist interpretation of intelligence that involves some ethereal intangible soul that somehow eludes all detection, nor holds any explanatory power for intelligence?
If you were obliterate your own neural network, by, I dunno, shooting yourself in the head, might that have some affect on your intelligence? Head trauma? Brain cancer? Alzheimer's? Senescence? Do I really need a citation that your brain is where intelligence comes from? *scratches head*
Isn't a large company more handy model than a "Chinese room"?
Hordes of these in practice own our species. They come up with the decisions on carbon footprint, on whether to colonize Mars, on where to shift collective attention.
Although these entities are only one of achievements of our culture, for now they dominate on global level.
Big achievement. "Consciousness" not strictly needed. Whatever the definition of "consciousness", a big company is driven by a glorified stack of excels and definitely couldn't write Chinese (assuming none of employees does, after Searle).
So, running a planet and overriding any individual human is not enough, let's focus on entertaining an individual human with an interesting conversation in Chinese? What do you even seek with that model? /s
Good point on the difference between decoding and understanding. The paper "What is it like to be a bat?" [1] comes to mind. We can certainly try to decode the behaviors and language of whales, but understanding their mindset is an entirely different matter.
Wittgenstein's quote on lions is still relevant.