Repost with comment
By athan
Description
This reflection explores how the digital world, built entirely on layers of symbolic abstraction, from binary code to graphical interfaces, has reshaped human perception and communication. By confining ourselves to symbolic interaction with machines and each other, we risk drifting further from direct experience and the authentic reality that exists beyond our self-created virtual constructs.
Content
Data, binary data, are symbols. Processing in digital computers operates through a hierarchy of abstraction layers, starting from the lowest level of 0s and 1s and extending upward to images, sounds, text and GUIs. But everything is a symbol that represents a real thing, that signifies a concept.
As humans, we have become enclosed within a virtual reality of our own creation, where we are limited to communicating with machines and even with one another only through symbols. This mode of interaction, entirely mediated by representation and simulation, is profoundly unnatural to our original way of perceiving and experiencing the real world.
Post
By Maarten van der HeijdenMaarten van der Heijden
LLMs thrive on an assumption many people make. That data is a representation of something in the real world.
IT is mechanization of communication. We register data to be able to communicate about (what we observe in) the real world. Once you understand the difference, data is never the same anymore and LLMs are not about the real world anymore.
LLMs seen without that distinction, risk to carry us into a new era of miscommunication and problems regarding data as much as miscommunication and problems regarding reality.
Magritte understood.
