Knowledge

Knowledge is mental structure that is isomorphic to reality.

We can never know things as they truly are. We are fed light particles that reflect off surfaces and our brains use this to build an incredibly rich model of our experience. Isn’t it incredible that we can have dreams that are practically indistinguishable from our waking lives? But these models are only models of our experience. The thing producing them is an approximation of reality, simulated inside our brain, optimised to be useful. Reality is far too complex to hold in a brain. So it is a simplification, an abstraction we interact with.

This mental structure is only useful insofar as it can predict future experience. It can do this because it shares structural properties with the structure of reality. Knowledge is structure that mirrors the structure of reality. This enables it to make predictions and understand the world mechanistically, without ever being able to directly interact with it.

If anyone claims that language models don’t ‘truly’ understand the world because they are not embodied and therefore their concepts are not grounded in the world, I think the same equally applies to humans.

Step 1: Do it manually. Enough time that you get a familiarity with the task. Learn the shape of it, pay attention to the edge cases, look for patterns. Record as much data as possible.

Step 2: Once you’ve noticed a pattern, build a system to replicate the manual steps.

Step 3: If the system is capable of operating by itself you’re done, else go back to step 1 but faster.

• An I’m bored app to replace instagram/youtube and redirect my attention to things that i endorse more (while still replenishing my mental energy)
• a recommender system for everything
• a dashboard i can use to keep track of tasks/priorities and an ai watcher that can help me avoid getting distracted
• an llm clone of myself trained on my dms
• a couchsurfing app for staying with friends across the world (and friends of friends)
• ai native object oriented note taking done right
• an app to make it easy for me to have a good morning routine