Why do the language model and the vision model align?

[John Clark]

Why do the language model and the vision model align? Because they’re both shadows of the same world

The following quote is from the above: 

"More powerful AI models seem to have more similarities in their representations than weaker ones. Successful AI models are all alike, and every unsuccessful model is unsuccessful in its own particular way.[...] He would feed the pictures into the vision models and the captions into the language models, and then compare clusters of vectors in the two types. He observed a steady increase in representational similarity as models became more powerful. It was exactly what the Platonic representation hypothesis predicted."

In my opinion the above finding has profound philosophical implications. 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

qjq

[John Clark]

On Sat, Feb 7, 2026 at 12:14 PM Stefano Ticozzi <stefano...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Scientific thought has long since moved beyond Platonism,

Philosophical thought perhaps, but scientific thought never embraced Platonism because the most famous of the ancient Greeks were good philosophers but lousy scientists. Neither Socrates, Plato or Aristotle used the Scientific Method. Aristotle wrote that women had fewer teeth than men, it's known that he was married, twice in fact, yet he never thought of just looking into his wife's mouth and counting. Today thanks to AI, for the first time some very abstract philosophical ideas can actually be tested scientifically. 

> 1. Ideas do not exist independently of the human mind.  Rather, they are constructs we develop to optimize and structure our thinking.

True but irrelevant.  

 

> 2. Ideas are neither fixed, immutable, nor perfect; they evolve over time, as does the world in which we live—in a Darwinian sense. For instance, the concept of a sheep held by a human prior to the agricultural era would have differed significantly from that held by a modern individual.

The meanings of words and of groups of words evolve over the eons in fundamental ways, but camera pictures do not.  And yet minds educated by those two very different things become more similar as they become smarter. That is a surprising revelation that has, I think, interesting implications. 

> In my view, the convergence of AI “ideas” (i.e., language and visual models) is more plausibly explained by a process of continuous self-optimization, performed by systems that are trained on datasets and information which are, at least to a considerable extent, shared across models.

Do you claim that the very recent discovery that the behavior of minds that are trained exclusively by words and minds that are trained exclusively by pictures are similar and the discovery that the smarter those two minds become the greater the similarities, has no important philosophical ramifications? 

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

4x@

[John Clark]

On Sun, Feb 8, 2026 at 10:30 AM Stefano Ticozzi <stefano...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The article you linked here appeared to refer to a convergence toward a Platonic concept of the Idea; it therefore seemed relevant to recall that Platonic Ideas have been extensively demonstrated to be “false” by science.

No. You can't use a tape measure to prove that a poem is "false". Science deals with what you can see, hear, feel, taste and smell, Plato was dealing with the metaphysical, the underlying nature of being. However, far from disproving it, in the 20th century Quantum Mechanics actually gave some support to Plato's ideas. In Plato's Allegory of the Cave we can only see the "shadows" of the fundamental underlying reality, and in a similar way modern physics says we can only observe reality through a probability (not a certainty) obtained by the Quantum Wavefunction.  

> human language has grown and developed around images, driven almost exclusively by the need to emulate the sense of sight.

We may not be able to directly observe fundamental underlying reality but we are certainly affected by it, and over the eons human language has been optimized to maximize the probability that one's genes get into the next generation. So although words are not the fundamental reality they must be congruent with it. That has been known for a long time but very recently AI has taught us that the connection is much deeper and far more subtle than previously suspected. 

Just a few years ago many people (including me) were saying that words were not enough and that for a machine to be truly intelligent it would need a body, or at least sense organs that can interact with the real physical world. But we now know that is untrue. It is still not entirely clear, at least not to me, exactly how it is possible for words alone to do that, but it is an undeniable fact that somehow it is.

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

v53

   

 

Il dom 8 feb 2026, 13:13 John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> ha scritto:

On Sat, Feb 7, 2026 at 12:14 PM Stefano Ticozzi <stefano...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Scientific thought has long since moved beyond Platonism,

Philosophical thought perhaps, but scientific thought never embraced Platonism because the most famous of the ancient Greeks were good philosophers but lousy scientists. Neither Socrates, Plato or Aristotle used the Scientific Method. Aristotle wrote that women had fewer teeth than men, it's known that he was married, twice in fact, yet he never thought of just looking into his wife's mouth and counting. Today thanks to AI, for the first time some very abstract philosophical ideas can actually be tested scientifically. 

> 1. Ideas do not exist independently of the human mind.  Rather, they are constructs we develop to optimize and structure our thinking.

True but irrelevant.  

 

> 2. Ideas are neither fixed, immutable, nor perfect; they evolve over time, as does the world in which we live—in a Darwinian sense. For instance, the concept of a sheep held by a human prior to the agricultural era would have differed significantly from that held by a modern individual.

The meanings of words and of groups of words evolve over the eons in fundamental ways, but camera pictures do not.  And yet minds educated by those two very different things become more similar as they become smarter. That is a surprising revelation that has, I think, interesting implications. 

> In my view, the convergence of AI “ideas” (i.e., language and visual models) is more plausibly explained by a process of continuous self-optimization, performed by systems that are trained on datasets and information which are, at least to a considerable extent, shared across models.

Do you claim that the very recent discovery that the behavior of minds that are trained exclusively by words and minds that are trained exclusively by pictures are similar and the discovery that the smarter those two minds become the greater the similarities, has no important philosophical ramifications?