A Slip to the Tongue
2 min read
This five minute lecture touches on what I see as one of the most fundamental flaws in language: describing the world as if it were full of color, sound, beauty, ugliness, darkness, and light, when these exist not in the world, but in our experience.
"Look, here is a beautiful red rose". Such an innocent sentence, and it carries a fundamental falsehood. The rose is not objectively red. Red is an experience; red to me, while another animal may see it in different colors. The thing I can report with full confidence is not a red rose. It is an experience of seeing a red rose. This is the first slip of human language: it describes subjective experiences as objective realities. The subjective is precise and presumes nothing.
Once you notice the slip, it is everywhere. I started having gray hair. But that is not an accurate description of reality: I started having experiences of seeing gray hair when I look in the mirror. What bothers me is not the hair, it is the experiences. Still, describing life that way is practically impossible in daily talk, so I stick with the proxy. And here is the danger: we get hooked on the proxies and forget they don't represent reality. A thing exists only as far as it is experienced.
If we want AI to act differently from us, we should take a deep, hard look at the most powerful tool humans have ever created, reevaluate it, and possibly redesign it.
