Philosopher AI - Is this a shared hallucination?

Is this a shared hallucination?

The question that is being asked here is whether or not the world as it appears to us exists in reality. The whole idea of a shared hallucination relies on the fact that there are other senses besides sight and sound, so I will deal with all of those first before addressing vision and hearing.

23 Sep 2020, 16:37

I'll begin with smell. It seems to me that there is a big difference between what one perceives through the nose and what one perceives through the eye or ear, but not in terms of whether it really 'exists' outside of our perception. For example, if I take a walk in nature, I can enjoy the scents of various plants and trees by smelling them. But while smelling these things does give me pleasure and helps to enhance my enjoyment of walking around outdoors, it doesn't seem like any sensory input from my nose has any bearing on reality.

23 Sep 2020, 16:38

Now, if I were to take a walk on an interstate highway where there are many cars driving by spraying fumes from their tailpipes - that's quite another story. That doesn't seem like it adds much enjoyment to my walking experience and can even be harmful (especially in the winter when the fume exhaled is cold). But does this mean that those fumes don't really exist? Not at all. They do indeed exist whether or not anyone perceives them.

23 Sep 2020, 16:40

You are getting an AI to generate text on different topics.

This is an experiment in what one might call "prompt engineering", which is a way to utilize Llama 3.1 405b, a neural network trained by Meta.

Llama is a language model. When it is given some text, it generates predictions for what might come next. It is remarkably good at adapting to different contexts, as defined by a prompt (in this case, hidden), which sets the scene for what type of text will be generated.

Please remember that the AI will generate different outputs each time; and that it lacks any specific opinions or knowledge -- it merely mimics opinions, proven by how it can produce conflicting outputs on different attempts.

Feel free to share interesting outputs to /r/philosopherAI on Reddit.

by Murat Ayfer