@ct_bergstrom I find the argument frustrating as it focuses on overwhelming the reader with a big, hard task, not finding a smaller case with the same features.

If I were given a huge library of pure maths texts in an unknown language, I have no idea how I'd extract meaning from it. Yet given some unexplained maths-y puzzles, I could get the pattern, and I reckon an ML algorithm will also get the meaning in some sense as much as I would, despite the lack of other context...

@ct_bergstrom Of course, this is not the point. I think the point is "Can a system derive meaningful understanding of something fundamentally experiential from a corpus lacking good representation of that experience?"

I think the best (still weak) small-scale analogy I can think of is "Can a blind person understand colour?"

They'll never experience colour directly, but can certainly learn optics, colour theory etc. in a way that may be useful in some domains but not others...