We want to raise these pseudo-humans to be useful upstanding members of society. Knowing fact from opinion, knowing right from wrong, knowing what is real and what is imagination, are important for any intelligence. Otherwise our silicon-children will grow up to be dumb, harmful, or both, while being trillions in number.
Realism posits that objects have intrinsic meaning that we apprehend through attention.
Nominalism posits that we cannot apprehend reality directly, but only through our minds and through language. That we only have a second-order experience of reality. Therefore, all language only has meaning because of consensus, so if we change the consensus of meaning around language, we are actually changing reality because reality is mediated through language.
These are obviously very compressed definitions of these views, but the question remains.
This conversation about AI "hallucinations" seem to point at this question. "We want AI to say true things." True to what? True to reality? Or true to language? When we ask AI a question, AI only knows how to answer the question using grammar that is probabilistically the most likely. That has no tie to "reality", but as soon as you start asking "well then what is reality that we want to map AI to?" the question gets quite slippery.
My contention is that AI, as its responses are curated by people, will only reflect the idiosyncratic worldviews of those doing the pruning.
When humans fill in knowledge they don’t actually have, but think we do, we call it confabulating.
We all confabulate at a low level, because it is intrinsic to how we store and recall memories. Our memories are compressed summaries whose details we fill out with defaults and guesswork subconsciously as we “remember”. This is why memories are rarely perfectly accurate.
Some people confabulate more than others. And we all confabulate to a greater or lesser degree based on variable circumstances, emotions, motivation, fatigue and other mental states.
“Hallucinations” on the other hand are what happens when our sensory processing becomes unmoored from actual memory or real sensory constraints. The brain creates an interpretation based on internal feedback without normal correction, drifting into false sensory experiences that are not actually reflective of reality.
Dreams are a natural form of this where nothing we are experiencing is actually really happening.
One is false memories, the other is false experiences.
This is surprising
