Daoism's "Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao" and Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" converge on the idea that language cannot capture ultimate truth. If this is true, how far can large language models capture and understand reality?
Thoughts
Tao Te Ching opens with the famous: "Tao (The Way) that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao". Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ends somewhat similarly: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Words are useful, but they cannot grasp ultimate reality. We use language to think, and we cannot think through those we cannot express in language. But if this is true, how far can large language models alone capture and understand reality?
This similarity between Western and Eastern thinkers is what I recently realized while rereading The Timeless Way of Building, specifically regarding the concept of 'The Quality Cannot be Named'.