Okay. It seems to me that, in analogy to humans having such a relationship with physical reality, machine learning systems have such a relationship with virtual reality — the environment in which they are trained and deployed.
> machine learning systems have such a relationship with virtual reality
No, they don't, because they can't take actions in that virtual reality and sense the consequences. They can't test hypotheses about how the reality works. They can't even frame hypotheses about how the reality works.
Right, but some neural networks are trained in virtual 3D physical simulations and are able to apply their knowledge acquired through statistical regression of a simulated world to perform tasks and even make predictions. It's logical that a network trained purely on language has no real understanding of physical reality, but it doesn't preclude that a sense of reality in the way we humans think we have can't be gained by the same statistical analysis of the real world.
