HN Reader

Herb Simon certainly was great, but it is weird that the site uses a picture of what is obviously (despite his face being cut off) Claude Shannon working on his robotic mouse Theseus.

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2018/08/23/shannons-mouse/

Is there an audio file of this interview? I'd prefer listening to the original (in the background).

Borges and Herbert Simons are two great minds, but their conversation is not deep since is mostly shared view about the meaning of human and machine intelligence. Today, with LLMs we have a tool to explore the relation between intelligence and language, between number of parameters, neural nets architectures and much more. So that conversation give us no new insight but is delightful to share time with such great people.

I really enjoyed and have recommended to others this very short paper, 'Borges and AI' [1], that was also discussed on HN a couple years back [2].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01425

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38693120

Considering Borges' stories (some written as if they're reports of actual events), I had to wonder for a long while if this is a "reporting" of a "what if" scenario. It would've been a great homage to him.

"On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe."

1. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/borgesaleph.pdf

Hofstadter should have written Gödel, Escher, Bach, Borges.

I wrote about the connection between Borges, AI, Wikipedia, Kafka (the messaging system, not the author), GPUs, and cryptography in the small print on page 7 of this:

https://lab6.com/4#page=7

> If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?

Hmm, what if you could recreate, word-for-word, the great works of an author like Borges (or, say, Cervantes) by so thoroughly understanding their life that the words themselves came out of you, not memorized and recapitulated, but naturally and unbidden? What an interesting idea for a story, maybe an LLM will be able to write that one day.

Borges is totally recommended, of course, but after reading him in the original language I think his English translations lack the poetry and music of his writings. For once I am happy Spanish is my first language.

If anyone here hasn't read Borges, I'd strongly recommend him. Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break. The common recommendation would be to try out Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and see if you like it. If so, it's part of Labyrinths, which is (in my opinion) his best collection of short stories. The best edition in English is probably Penguin's Collected Fictions.

Regarding the content of this interview:

>If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?

This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge would be necessary to create Borges out of a world without Borges.

In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead end for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism is accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of creating synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so with categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this be?)

I’m a huge fan of his short story Funes the Memorious. Link: https://ia801405.us.archive.org/10/items/HeliganSecretsOfThe...

Fascinating and very accessible read. While in jail I tried to get through Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (new translation) and some of the big concepts are echoed in this dialogue.

An LLM trained on Sartre would be amazing because the logical extensions of many of his positions and postulations would be uncomfortable in polite society. Even as a human being he quite frequently espoused concepts counter the grain of civility or notions of what ethics are or should be. An unrestrained, uncensored LLM in this vein could be scary and gut wrenching and yet a good reminder of our less-than-ideal state of refinement of thought and behavior as a species.