{"id":14538,"date":"2026-10-16T12:17:45","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T19:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/?p=14538"},"modified":"2026-10-16T12:17:45","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T19:17:45","slug":"a-response-to-my-post-on-semantic-engines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2026\/10\/16\/a-response-to-my-post-on-semantic-engines\/","title":{"rendered":"A Response to my Post on Semantic Engines"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here is long-time reader TB’s e-mail response to what I said yesterday<\/a>.\u00a0 (TB works in AI and\/or adjacent fields; I didn’t press him on his employment details.) I told TB that I need a better understanding of what goes on ‘under the hood’ of these amazing engines to be sure that I am not ‘blowing smoke’ when I assert that they are not truly intelligent but merely simulate<\/em> human intelligence. I have bolded a couple of key sentences and made some minor edits. It is wonderfully clear and — as far as I can judge — accurate.<\/p>\n

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You are 100% correct in your post<\/a> in my view. I read Nagel’s most recent defence of the reality of first person consciousness a few years ago. He could have made his argument in about half the words, but he is right. Dennett and friends claim that consciousness is an illusion; there is a theory that the mind plays this trick whereby all stimulus from without gets converted to a sort of realtime stream of imagery \/ impressions that we mistake for consciousness. This ‘illusion’ argument seems to forget what ‘illusion’ means – first person experience. Each person’s illusion is his own. And then we realise that calling it an ‘illusion’ is meant to make us dismiss it as not real. So I think your closing comments are exactly right – the deniers want to argue that the first person experience we really are having is a) really there (something has to be there, since something is fooling us into thinking there is something there), but it’s an illusion, so ‘not real’, while simultaneously telling us b) that it (i.e. conscious experience) is not really there at all.<\/p>\n

A few things on AI. You have undoubtedly understood that there is something called a Large Language Model (LLM). LLMs are trained on the whole internet, and in addition vast numbers of (generally illegally obtained) PDFs of physical books that the AI companies obtain, destroy the spine, and scan. All of this is the ‘training base’. Each sentence of every document, web page etc, is ‘tokenised’ and each each token is ’embedded’ in a high dimension vector space, such that concepts that frequently co-occur or appear to be used as near synonyms in similar documents, end up as vectors that are close, i.e. whose normalised mathematical projection (cosine) is close to 1.0.<\/p>\n

Tools like ChatGPT work as follows: they take your prompt, prepend a bunch of other info, including things it has learned about you from prior use (name=vallicella; professional philosopher; tradition = analytic \/ anglo \/ German; location = Phoenix AZ, . . . etc, plus a summarised version of prior queries), and it returns text that it scores highest as being an appropriate response (i.e. ‘prediction’ of what is likely to come next in this kind of exchange). There is other functionality wrapped around the core, that will prevent it getting into profanity, discussions of the kind that KKK or Hamas types might enjoy, and also pro-woke censorship.<\/p>\n

If you ask it a question like ‘how many biological sexes are there in mammals’ it prevaricates, with hedged language, and very quickly gets into subjective woke BS like ‘However it is important to realise that there are many sexual experiences in reality, beyond merely male and female…’ etc – I can send you the result of having done this last year.<\/div>\n
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Nevertheless, if one stays away from radioactive subjects like trans \/ race +IQ \/ Islam etc, tools like ChatGPT are surprisingly good.<\/div>\n
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Recently, I asked it the following (see below [omitted- BV]). It produced a lot more text than I have reproduced below. But you can see that it went straight to the right place: Russell, Frege, modern set theory, etc. I followed up with more Qs, and it was able to produce very coherent output.<\/div>\n
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All of this is happening not only with no built-in reasoner, but no internal ontology of conceptual relations. What appears to be reasoning is mainly achieved by more text prediction.<\/strong> Remember, it has been trained on the entire visible textual output of humanity, including all the debates found in comments below articles in the NYT or somewhere on Facebook. Plus 100 books on formal logic, so it knows what (say) modus tollens<\/em> and modus ponens<\/em> are. You can ask it about syllogisms, subsumption, or go into Husserl, or (if you’ve been smoking something), into Derrida – anything you like. You can ask it what’s a good washing machine to buy in Brazil, to fit in a certain sized space. It can find such contemporary data using something called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)<\/strong> – – what it means is that it is going to the web and tearing through online shopping sites for you, looking for data sheets for washing machines that are a depth of less than 62 cm. It has to do this extra ‘retrieval’ because its training set (from say 1y ago) doesn’t have up to date info on washing machines that you can buy in Brazil.<\/div>\n
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There’s no subjective first-person experience going on with any of this – an LLM has no body, no identity, no mind-embedded-in-a-body, no way of experiencing qualia; simply no experiential dimension at all. But it makes it look like it’s doing all of this – just by communicating in ways that another human might – except the other human has the whole of human knowledge (including tons of noise, i.e. garbage from Facebook or whatever) in its head.<\/div>\n

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Here is long-time reader TB’s e-mail response to what I said yesterday.\u00a0 (TB works in AI and\/or adjacent fields; I didn’t press him on his employment details.) I told TB that I need a better understanding of what goes on ‘under the hood’ of these amazing engines to be sure that I am not ‘blowing … Continue reading “A Response to my Post on Semantic Engines”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,366,54,225],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-dennett","category-mind","category-nagel-thomas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14538"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14539,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14538\/revisions\/14539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}