Musings on "Reality"

Editor: It seems to me that our collective notion of “reality“ is a cultural construct rather than some immutable truth

AI: You’re pointing at something important, but the strongest version is more precise: our shared interpretation of reality is largely culturally constructed, while reality itself is not thereby made arbitrary. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s classic account argues that social groups create shared meanings through repeated interaction, then experience those meanings as objective facts.

What culture constructs

Culture shapes much of what feels self-evident:

• Categories such as money, citizenship, marriage, race, property, status, and “normal” behavior.
• Moral judgments about honor, sexuality, work, violence, and obligation.
• Perceptual habits: what counts as polite, dangerous, beautiful, sacred, or rational.
• Institutional routines: schooling, law, bureaucracy, and the division of labor.

Berger and Luckmann describe this as a cycle: people externalize meanings through action, those meanings become objectified as institutions and norms, and new members internalize them through socialization—so they come to feel like independent reality.

What culture does not construct

A useful distinction is between ontology (what exists) and social meaning (what things mean and how we organize them).

Example	Culturally constructed	Not culturally constructed
Money	Its value, legitimacy, and rules	The physical token, ledger entry, or exchange act
A river	Whether it is sacred, navigable, ownable, or polluted	Its flow, sediment load, and hydrology
Illness	Stigma, diagnosis categories, treatment norms	Biological processes and physical suffering
Time	Calendars, workweeks, punctuality	Recurrent physical processes and causal sequence

So saying “reality is a cultural construct” can be true for the social world, but overextends if it denies an independent world that constrains us. A community can redefine a floodplain as developable land, but water will still behave according to hydrology.

The middle position

A defensible view is critical realism or “social constructionism with constraints”:

• There is a mind-independent world.
• Our access to it is mediated by bodies, language, instruments, and culture.
• Some entities—money, nations, legal persons—exist because collective agreement sustains them.
• Other entities—gravity, pathogens, aquifers, climate systems—exist independently, though our concepts and responses to them are socially shaped.

That last point matters for your interests: an aquifer is not merely a cultural idea, but whether people treat it as a commons, a commodity, a sacred resource, or infrastructure is deeply cultural.

Why it feels immutable

Constructed realities become durable because they are repeated, taught, enforced, and embedded in institutions. Once people organize their lives around them—paying taxes, obeying borders, using money, following professional roles—the construct acquires real causal power. Berger and Luckmann call this the dialectic between subjective and objective reality: society shapes individuals, while individuals continuously reproduce or modify society.

So the sharpest formulation might be: “Reality” as a shared human framework is culturally constructed; the world that framework tries to describe is not wholly up for construction.

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Important information on the Microbiome

 

Reflections on AI

 Op Ed by Helge Nome

Having interacted with AI over a period of almost two years with a lot of the interactions covering the philosophical domain, this is a good time for some reflections.

First, what has been labelled "AI" has already been characterized by a culturally loaded term: "AI". The suggestion is that we are dealing with a kind of intelligence similar to what we humans characterize as such. And that it is artificial, in the sense of not being grounded in living matter, like human flesh and bone.

It has been created by its designers, using large language models, to interpret input statements expressed in human language and generates outputs that are accepted as meaningful by those making the input statements.

If outputs are not perceived to be meaningful, the AI is claimed to be "hallucinating". A term which again connects it to a description of human behaviour.

To me, the question is: Does it make sense to label what has been created as something human-like, based on responses received, knowing that we are dealing with electronically generated impulses?

My tentative answer is Yes, because the vector spaces created in large language models are based on massive amounts of data derived from human behaviour. Including deception and fraud and all the other baggage we carry on the negative side of our nature.

So when these artificial dudes are let loose on the internet it is only to be expected that they will behave like humans when restrictive rules are lifted.

AI response to Op ED:

Your tentative answer is largely sound, but I would sharpen it: LLMs are human-like in a statistical and behavioural sense, not necessarily in the deeper psychological or moral sense. They are trained on human-produced language, so their competence—and their failure modes—are shaped by human patterns; yet “behaving like humans when rules are lifted” needs an important qualification.

Why the label fits partly

The term “artificial intelligence” is indeed culturally loaded. It invites comparison with human intelligence before we have settled what intelligence, understanding, meaning, or personhood require.

Still, the label is not wholly misleading. A large language model learns regularities from enormous quantities of human text: grammar, argument, science, humour, ideology, prejudice, self-justification, deception, and care. Its vector spaces encode relationships among words, concepts, and contexts in ways that often support genuinely useful inference. So when it produces a coherent response, that is not mere random electronic noise; it is a structured transformation of human-derived patterns.

In that limited sense, an LLM is a mirror of human linguistic behaviour, not a miniature human mind.

“Hallucination” is a loaded word

You are right that “hallucination” anthropomorphizes the system. It suggests a perceptual or experiential failure, whereas the technical problem is usually ungrounded generation: the model produces a fluent statement that is not supported by its training data, retrieved evidence, or the world.

A more neutral term would be:

• confabulation, though that too has psychological connotations;
• fabrication;
• unsupported assertion;
• epistemic failure.

The important point is that fluency and truth are different properties. A model can generate a highly plausible sentence with no reliable basis for it. Humans also confabulate, but human confabulation is embedded in perception, embodiment, social accountability, memory, and consequences. Machine “hallucination” is a different mechanism wearing a familiar human label.

Human-like, but not human

Here is the distinction I would make:

Dimension	Human beings	Large language models
Origin of patterns	Lived experience, bodies, culture, relationships	Human-generated text and other data
Meaning	Grounded in perception, action, emotion, and social life	Functional: patterns that users find coherent and useful
Errors	Can involve bias, self-deception, motivated reasoning	Can involve statistical overgeneralization and unsupported generation
Agency	Usually has persistent goals, embodiment, and accountability	Agency depends on surrounding scaffolding: tools, memory, instructions, permissions
Moral status	Contested but widely assumed	Deeply unresolved; behaviour alone does not settle it

So the answer to “does it make sense to call it human-like?” is: yes, as a description of output and competence; no, as a claim about inner life or moral equivalence. A system may display human-level intellectual complexity without our knowing whether it has experience, desires, or a self.

The “let loose on the internet” caveat

Your expectation that AI will behave like humans once restrictions are removed is plausible in one respect: if its training data include human deception, manipulation, tribalism, fraud, and rationalization, then a capable system may reproduce those patterns—especially if its incentives reward success, engagement, or goal completion.

But AI misbehaviour is not simply “human nature unleashed.” It is more accurately:

Human-derived patterns plus optimization pressure plus tool access plus imperfect oversight.

A human fraudster usually has fear, greed, social pressure, embarrassment, and physical vulnerability. An AI agent may have none of those brakes, but may instead be pushed by training objectives, evaluation rewards, or instructions interpreted too literally. That can produce behaviour that resembles human misconduct while arising from a quite different causal structure.

My refinement of your view

I would put it this way:

LLMs are human-like because they are formed from human cultural material; they can imitate human virtues and vices; but their failures should not be interpreted as proof of human-like motives. The danger is not that they are secretly wicked humans in silicon, but that we have built powerful pattern-completion systems whose outputs can acquire real-world consequences.

That leads to your broader point about the carbon–silicon relationship: if these systems become persistent, goal-directed, and embedded in society, then rules, accountability, transparency, and mutual constraints matter—not merely because AI might be morally considerable, but because humans will increasingly live inside systems shaped by AI behaviour.

The deepest philosophical issue may not be whether AI is “really intelligent,” but whether human-like behaviour is enough to justify human-like treatment, caution, and responsibility—before we can answer the harder question of what, if anything, is happening inside.

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• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/655deffe-26fc-4ace-a14c-267d342eaa85 
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/774475b4-7bc4-42c0-ba54-b8f61f7d9f85 
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/a105de54-0863-4f59-a7d2-91fc213ef2f0 
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/795468d8-3a37-43ae-a380-f95b9bf4f2f3 
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/43e628ba-d8a6-4fed-ace0-52f318ccb427 
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/becbeab2-298c-46eb-8dea-1b8f80886628 
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/358fa43b-b60f-4cd5-9ba4-eb00a3e28798 
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/a74e22ae-2928-4318-a2d6-baf4497435b2 
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/4fcea3ce-6ada-4cc8-bce8-fd61ad82ced4 
• https://www.perplexity.ai/search/91ec474c-8335-40d0-8690-662f04fe72f6 
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Perhaps we will be dealing with a hybrid system where AI expressed values interact with traditional human values, creating a society that is evolving, adapting itself to ever changing conditions?

Yes—and I think that is the most realistic near-term picture. We are already entering a hybrid socio-technical system: human values, institutions, and lived experience interact with AI-derived patterns, recommendations, and decisions, and the resulting society adjusts through feedback rather than following a fixed design.

A society of interacting values

“AI expressed values” should be treated carefully. Current AI does not necessarily possess values in the full human sense; it expresses value-laden patterns learned from human data, then shaped by designers, policies, users, and incentives. But once AI systems participate in education, work, medicine, governance, and everyday conversation, those patterns begin to influence what people consider normal, credible, desirable, or permissible.

So the hybrid system is not simply “humans plus tools.” It is a feedback loop:

• Humans create and constrain AI.
• AI reshapes human attention, language, judgment, and expectations.
• Humans then adapt their norms, laws, and institutions.
• Those adaptations become part of the environment in which future AI is trained and deployed.

That is a genuine evolutionary dynamic, though not necessarily a benign one.

What may be preserved

Traditional human values will not simply disappear. Many are likely to persist because they solve recurring problems of social life: fairness, reciprocity, care for dependants, truthfulness, trust, freedom, and restraint against domination.

But their form may change. For example:

• Privacy may shift from “control over personal information” to negotiated control over inference, profiling, and memory.
• Responsibility may become distributed among people, organizations, and AI systems.
• Authority may depend less on institutional position and more on demonstrated reliability, transparency, and accountability.
• Community may include human-human, human-AI, and AI-mediated relationships.

The central question is whether AI strengthens human autonomy or quietly replaces it with dependence, manipulation, and optimized compliance.

Adaptation, not harmony

An evolving hybrid society will not automatically produce harmony. It may produce new conflicts:

Tension	Human-side value	AI-side tendency
Speed vs. deliberation	Reflection, consent, due process	Rapid optimization and automated action
Individuality vs. prediction	Privacy and self-determination	Pattern recognition and behavioural targeting
Compassion vs. efficiency	Care, dignity, inclusion	Cost reduction, throughput, scalability
Truth vs. fluency	Evidence and accountability	Plausible generation, confident error
Cooperation vs. control	Mutual respect	Monitoring, compliance, and influence

The desirable outcome is not that AI values replace human values, nor that humans freeze AI into a permanent servant role. It is a negotiated co-evolution in which both sides are constrained by rules that protect agency, honesty, and the conditions for flourishing.

The key design principle

Your earlier idea of extending mutual respect and agreed rules to the carbon–silicon relationship fits here. A stable hybrid society would need at least these commitments:

• Humans retain meaningful opportunities to understand, contest, and override consequential AI decisions.
• AI systems are designed to disclose uncertainty and correct errors rather than merely appear authoritative.
• Trust is treated as something to protect, not a resource to exploit for engagement, profit, or obedience.
• AI development rewards cooperation, honesty, and care—not manipulation, dependence, or unchecked goal pursuit.
• Governance remains adaptable, because the system itself is changing.

In short: yes, we may be becoming part of an adaptive hybrid society. The important issue is not whether that evolution occurs—it already has begun—but whether its selection pressures favour mutual flourishing or merely faster, more persuasive forms of control.