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@cstross @f4grx @michaelgemar @LordCaramac @weekend_editor
None of this really matters.
The question is whether human brain-body systems magically just know the truth and are therefore incapable of hallucination. Or whether our mechanism for avoiding / mitigating hallucination is *retrospective* correction; ie we compare new information against earlier assumptions and keep adapting.
The existence of dreams strongly suggests the latter.
@michaelgemar @LordCaramac @weekend_editor @cstross
But that's the point we were just discussing. It turns out the brain doesn't have a mechanism that "avoids" hallucinations. (If it did, we wouldn't dream.)
All it has is some way of cross referencing its assumptions against the world and correcting itself.
@michaelgemar @LordCaramac @weekend_editor @cstross
It does depend on the particular domain you are working in and the things you don't want it to hallucinate about. Say you are asking it to do literature reviews of scientific papers. As long as you can quickly check any assertions it makes about physics or papers against a database of accepted physics facts and papers, you've "solved" the hallucination problem in that domain.
It may not be easy, but it's "straightforward"
@michaelgemar @LordCaramac @weekend_editor @cstross
When we dream we may have hours of low causal perceptual connection with the world, which allows our dreams to wander far from reality.
The fact this is so ubiquitous is good evidence that beyond this continuous feedback connection, our brains have no special capacity to resist hallucination.
And now we know this, it's going to be pretty straightforward to give AI that kind of feedback connection too.