AI, Knowledge & Truth

Deep within the recesses of our mind sits the knowledge schema we would have built over the years, atop a language schema, which we develop over our years of reading and learning - no matter how healthy or underdeveloped it is for our age - which together forms for us our system of knowledge together with a system of meaning. Whether this is stunted or well-developed would define much of our intellectual capacity (and influence emotional intelligence, i mean strictly intelligence, not maturity), whether it is founded upon truth and thereafter built upon certainty versus theory and thereafter founded upon confidence. Truth has its own charm, needing no charisma involved unlike theory - not that charisma itself becomes inherently bad for anything at all - and it builds for us a core which allows us to either hold knowledge and meaning embodied in our being or distorted into opinions or conjectures instead of true perspective and insight created from combining both introspection and extrospection.

As creatures of logic, and emotion, feeling and thinking are two separate distinct realms of cognition where if one tries to function without the other, we either become defective-or-dysfunctional as whole human beings, or myopic-or-blind. The path towards knowledge takes us from the known, into the unknown, and it expands the horizons of thought with creativity and imagination tempered by facts and truths. I mean to say, knowledge is both a feminine and masculine endeavour; being able to hold both, with fact and truth sometimes holding seemingly contradictory meanings and realities, is something of a perpetual struggle for human beings. The times we falter, fight against ourselves or others, without being able to balance between holding two (or more) seemingly opposing facts or truths, is a hallmark of the (philosophical) struggle in knowing (knowledge) and understanding (meaning). I almost want to use the word "knowledge" as if it were a verb instead of a noun, to borrow modes of thinking, from across tongues, which do not prevail very much in modern secular western thinking in pure English.

Some of this struggle arises from the ego, some of this stems from the heart, and some of this is informed from the soul. Let's assert that, if our weakness in knowledge stems from the limits of our mastery of a language, we often come across as opinionated; if our weakness in language stems from the limits of our knowledge, we often come across as judgemental. This is where nuance and rhetoric is critically applied with distinction. What is meant by this comparison is, how quickly we flee to mental shortcuts and how safely we apply those, well, heuristics, is informed by our respective biases, whether it be availability heuristics, or confirmation bias, and the likes of those. Some knowledge cannot be discussed without the proper language (i mean, the words used, etymologically, epistemologically), and some language (not in the typologically linguistic sense but in terms of jargonistic or colloquialism, whether formal or informal) will not suffice when discussing higher levels of abstract or complex knowledge. The unfortunate shortcomings in either knowledge of language of an individual tend to create distortions or deformities in thought or expression, as each inclination would be formed from specific sources of bias. Through these biases we can often create or become our own echo chambers, where our reading of facts, or seeing of reality, becomes either twisted or distorted through imbalance of feeling and thought, influenced by our capacity to comprehend, or ability to feel (or parts lack thereof).

There are multiple libraries worth of journals archived where the fields of study in science have been all but forced to change and update itself as it discovers things that change their fundamental worldview of reality and outside of the English realm of linguistics that could not be translated or transposed well enough outside of its limited cognition of the world.  Some of these revisions come from revelations found in religion, or well, scriptures from faith.  Mistranslations of even German, or Latin itself have caused gross misinterpretations and thereafter increasingly aberrant or divergent extrapolations. One simple example:

"The Whole is greater than the sum of its parts" - a mistranslation of Aristotle that has been corrected before since even 1908 (W. D. Ross), but then Kurt Koffka also said something similar: "The Whole is other (something else) than the sum of its parts".

Why the misquote persisted

• Gestalt Psychology Influence: In the early 20th century, Kurt Koffka used the phrase "the whole is other than the sum of its parts". Over time, popular culture and some students mistranslated "other" (qualitative difference) into "greater" (quantitative superiority), and this catchy version was retrospectively attributed to Aristotle.

• Paraphrasing for Clarity: Modern secondary sources often use the "greater than" wording as a pithy summary of Aristotle’s concept of synergy or top-down causation—the idea that a whole has unique properties not found in its individual components.

• Euclidean Principles: A related but different concept exists in Euclid's Elements, where a "Common Notion" states that "the whole is greater than the part". This mathematical axiom may have blended with Aristotle's metaphysical ideas in the popular imagination.

(I got lazy to type and refer once again from many years ago of reading, so the above in grey was summarised by Gemini from my very specific prompt.) 

The above is just a cherry-picked example from the sidewalk that I can quickly and easily recall out of convenient memory. Quotes from bodies of text, like essays or journals get mistranslated, and created varying degrees of divergent thoughts and theories, each iteration of interpretation decaying further away from the original intent and truth of the matter being discussed.

Thus illustrated that from the limits of human language and interpretations, rises the varying levels of inability or ineffectiveness or our modes of enquiry to gain clarity. To put it simply, sometime we ask the wrong questions, or the facts or meaning of the subject matter escapes the types of questions we ask, owing to the fact that it arises from the shackles of emotion, not logic.

From a person's limits of thinking, rises the varying degrees of incapacity or inefficacy of our creativity or imagination to reach certainty. To put it simply, sometimes we misunderstand answers, or the truth or reality of the subject in question shies away from the types of answers that stare us in the face, owing to the fact that it comes through the chains of logic, not emotion.

- "Ask stupid questions, get stupid answers" - The Internet

- "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes" - again, The Internet

The choice of words applied here is precise, and it escapes many a mind which has not dived into methodology and epistemology,  to whatever depth, the method and approach, that is attitude, towards knowledge, arriving through the sensory towards meaning. In a nutshell, what can be concluded is this; nobody could irrevocably truly say they have developed and trained in knowledge extensively well enough after we consider how that knowledge may be founded upon confidence (we're talking about scientific, measurable confidence like with statistical significance and hierarchical structure here) or certainty (we're talking about both subjective and objective observations, in a wholistic sense, organically, systematically, be it by cultural anecdotes ( i mean, an-ekdota, the things unpublished) or traditions.

This is not a moral matter, yet. Right-or-wrong has not even been discussed. Only Being and embodiment. The more we learn, the more we realise how much we actually do not truly know. And that places us in a state where humility is our only station with regards towards knowledge. Seemingly knowing more is merely a reflection of our awareness of how much more we do not truly know.  Without this awareness that there is something called the "unknown" that must be addressed together with what is "known", we fall into the traps of pride and ego, be it in states of ignorance, or stupidity.

Any LLM is trained upon a collective of data of words, grammar and vocabulary that with an probabilistic methodology which is well fair and acceptable so long as only data and information is concerned. But when our matters reach into the realm of knowledge and meaning, something strange happens. We have to come to a realisation that eventually no matter what, the human-language text generator is just some exalted, glorified search engine that is programmed to string words together, and meaning is sometimes not carried over well or translated well, which we can notice once we deconstruct certain issues with the answers or results we receive from the AI models, especially generative AI (for images, graphics), where the order of priority in our words become misunderstood. But other times when we give more precise clarity and order to our questions, or sometimes the AI models become better seemingly better at guessing after a few tries, the result we want to see becomes more forthcoming.

Now there have been a plethora of reports pertaining to issues that the AI has with giving what we want, or, by extension what we need, depending on how it is prompted, essentially how we ask questions, especially pertaining to issues concerning politics or other sensitive fault lines of the modern world running on the rapidly deteriorating and malfunctioning engine of capitalism, dysfunctional and collapsing, propped up by ever so perpetual extraction and exploitation (read: oppression) that eventually cracks open into international and civil wars, which we may not necessarily be aware or conscious of their truth and reality.