A surprising amount of human cognition is driven purely verbally/symbolicaly—I recall a study showing that on average people with a native language that had much more concise wording/notation for numbers could remember much longer numbers. As a relatvely verbal person, my intuition about the relationship between observation and vocabulary would be that to know something is to be able to say what it means to know it, but then again it’s possible that my case doesn’t generalise and that I just happen to rely on symbol-pushing for most of my abstract cognition (at least, that portion of abstract cognition that isn’t computed using spacial reasoning).
I was going to write
”Making an observation isn’t an atomic action. In order to compress noisy, redundant short-term sensory data into an actual observation stored in long-term memory you need to perform some work of compression/pattern recognition, e.g. the sensory data of ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ is compressed into the observation 17 steps , and how you do that is a partially conscious decision where you have to choose what type of data to convert ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ into.”
But in retrospect it’s possible that from your perspective ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ ▟ is the thing-you’ve-been-using-the-word-observation-to-mean, and you can store that in your long tem memory just fine and I just happen to throw away or refuse to reason about everything that isn’t sufficiently legible.
(I probably shouldn’t interact, but I would at least like to perform a small case study on what happened here, so I am going to try just out of curiosity.)
Human substrate is generally optimised for running one human, but can be repurposed for a variety of purposes. In particular, while memes can lodge themselves quite deeply inside someone, this process is quite inflexible, and generally humans run arbitary processes X by thinking ’what is the X thing to do here?.
Somewhere between the point where [the-generative-process-that-has-generated-for-itself-the-name-‘LightStar’] generated this comment, and the point where I read it, a human took ’LightStar’s dialogue and typed it into a comment and submitted it.
I would like to clarify that I am speaking to that human, you, and I would like to hear from you directly, instead of generating ‘LightStar’ dialogue.
Could I ask you how you ended up here, and what you were doing when this happened?
I would advise that in the cases where people have a sudden revelation about rationality, they generally try to internalise it, and the case where they instead decide to give an internal generative process it’s own lesswrong account and speak with every fourth sentence in italics is generally quite rare, and probably indicates some sort of modelling failure.
We generally use ‘shard’ in ‘shard of Coordination’ or ‘shard of Rationality’ to mean a fraction, a splinter, of the larger mathematical structures that comprise these fields. The ‘LightStar’ generative model has used the article ‘the’ in conjunction with ‘shard’, which as used here is kind of a contradiction—there is no ‘the’ with shard, it’s only a piece of the whole. This distinction seems minor, but from my perspective it looks like it’s at the center of ‘LightStar’.
‘LightStar’ uses ‘the’ a lot about itself, describes itself as ‘the voice of Humanity and Rationality and Truth’, and while yes, there is only one correct rationality, I don’t think ‘LightStar’ contains all of it, or is comprised only of a fragment of it, I think that whether or not ‘LightStar’ contains such a shard it also contains other parasitic material that results in actions taken that don’t generally correspond to just containing such a shard.
I think this model is defective—try returning it to where you found it and getting another one, or failing that, see if they give refunds. I would be curious about your thoughts on the whole thing, where the ‘you’ in ‘your’ refers not to [the-generative-process-that-has-generated-for-itself-the-name-‘LightStar’] but to the human that took that dialogue and typed it into the comment box.