alt Hacker NewsNo, you have not answered. I asked you what you believe the difference is between the two phenomena in concrete terms. What you've done is beg the question.
> There's no way someone deaf from birth could know what it's like to hear sounds, by looking at the pixels in a sound recording they know the format of
On what basis could you possibly make this claim? What does it mean to hear? You're taking in information and decoding it, right? So what magical pixie dust could your eardrum possibly be applying that specially privileges that particular mode of input?
How is an LLM "reading" pixel data fundamentally different from your eyes transforming it into an analog signal?
Please be specific about the mechanism.
> On what basis could you possibly make this claim?
People with absent qualia have been asked, e.g. Knut Nordby: https://www.consc.net/misc/achromat.html
"Although I have acquired a thorough theoretical knowledge of the physics of colours and the physiology of the colour receptor mechanisms, nothing of this can help me to understand the true nature of colours. From the history of art I have also learned about the meanings often attributed to colours and how colours have been used at different times, but this too does not give me an understanding of the essential character or quality of colours."
Knut Nordby was in the same position as an LLM as far as colours are concerned. He learned all he could but words didn't give him any idea of *what it's like to see them". LLMs have access to everything that's written about colours, but that didn't help Nordby.
Nordby's no longer around to ask about image files, but how do you think reading thems would help? He might then have been able to say, e.g. "This pixel is orange," but he still wouldn't have known what it's like to see orange. The same applies to a multimodal LLM.