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I think it's might be possible that "neural networks could form completely incompatible representations of the same reality" except that it's humans who get to decide if a representation is good (i.e. compatible with the human perception of reality) or bad and NNs that differ are dismissed as erroneous.
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Isn’t big-endian vs little-endian a trivial example of how you can represent the same mathematical object (integers) in mutually-incompatible ways?

Maybe I’m missing the detail on how complex the mapping function can be before we say the representations are incompatible.

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Yes, the mapping function is the thing you're missing.

When it comes to representational similarity analysis, we're trying to isolate the representations from the "coordinate systems" they sit in. If you take an image, and make a second image by rotating it 90 degrees and mirroring it, then, for the purposes of platonic representation hypothesis, they're the same image. Once you get past the "coordinate transform", the similarity between the first representation space and the 90-deg+mirror replica of it is total.

A mapping function between LE and BE can be constructed easily, and it's going to be lossless both ways. Which means that those two representations are fully compatible.

Now, INT16 and FP16? Those are far less compatible representations. There will be an overlap subspace where lossless conversion between the two is trivial, but this compatibility window will be relatively narrow.

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Big vs little endian are equivalent up to rotation, which includes permutations.

But it's actually much weaker condition than it looks, because, for example, lot of representations of boolean circuits are equivalent up to linear transformations over Z_2^n.

Anyway, if they truly proven such a theorem you won't find "incompatible" representations of the same thing.

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It might be weirder, but part of human intercommunication issues lies in the fact that people live with very different representation, though they can be supposed to live in the same single encompassing one. They don't all experience all of the world and even when they share some common experience they went through, they didn't experiment them from the same ground and previous experiences do influence current and future interpretations.
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I expect an immense degree of representational similarity to exist between humans.

You're making a mistake there - focusing on the tip of the iceberg without considering what lies beneath it.

The bulk of what the human brain does isn't "decide whether skub is good or bad". The foundation that the human cognition is built upon is vast, and mostly invisible from the inside. You don't get to see the feature matching operators of your visual cortex, or the patterns that decide whether a sound is "soft" or "sharp". And a lot of those foundational features are assembled by biological development programs spun up all the way from DNA.

On that level, when it comes to the bulk of neural circuits and the processes implemented by them, the representations within a "Pro Skub" and an "Anti Skub" guy might easily be 90%+ compatible. The two people who had vastly different life experiences, worldviews and opinions would be more alike to two different LLMs fine tuned from the same base model than they would be to two different architectures trained on completely different datasets.

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I don't think neural networks have the same ability of self deception as humans do. A huge reason human world models vary so much is due to them being tied to tribal membership. A huge fraction of all people will not come to a rational worldview derived from accurate data but will start with their tribe's worldview and filter data to match. I personally have never modified my worldview for social reasons and it is surprisingly isolating.
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This. I believe most people don't act as if objective reality matters, hence their worldview can be arbitrarily aligned to the demands of their social context.

Suppose these two premises are true: 1. Objective reality exists. 2. There's a model and corpus of data that converges to approximate reality better than any other model.

Now, suppose we train different models with data sources restricted to different tribes/ ideologies/worldviews. Can we discover how their internal representations differ from each other, and from objective reality? What would we do with that knowledge?

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  >There's a model and corpus of data that converges to approximate reality better than any other model.
How you define "better" exactly is where you smuggle in your messy human value judgements.

I say "better" models are ones which more efficiently convert the entire world to my particular brand of evangelical Christianity. And who are you to say otherwise??? :-/

"No no, I mean accurate not better." Sure. And your model inaccurately denies the existence of Yahweh...

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Better means smaller gap with reality. Science works because it is basically a negative feedback control loop to minimize this gap.
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Thesaurus whack-a-mole, lol.

Who decides what "reality" is, and how big the gap is? Will Exxon permit you to decide reality on climate change? Will the Catholic Church let you decide reality about abortion?

Humanity can't even agree on the existence or non-existence of various Gods, so we're far from a universally agreed "objective reality" to compare with. Inevitably the most powerful forces will get their way (Exxon etc), regardless of any idealistic notions of truth-seeking.

This is what happens when we defund (and worse, devalue) soft sciences like Philosophy class: a bunch of people making the same 300 year old mistakes all over again! :-\

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"Who decides what "reality" is,"

Repeatable scientific experiments. Trying to argue objective reality doesn't exist is logically incoherent.

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And to Account39's point, or my representation of it at least: all these tribes with wildly different worldviews still agree trees have roots, fire is hot, shelter is helpful, if you jump off something you will fall, etc etc. The parts there are disagreements on are built on a mountain of shared representations of reality, and gods or politics are just tiny pieces of this world model. We tend to focus on them and fight about them, so they are important, but nonetheless they are a tiny minority of how we all understand and represent reality.
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> have the same ability of self deception as humans do

There is universal objective truth, and different opinions or world views are just "tribal membership". If onlymother tribes understood that!

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Objective reality exists. Nobody has a car that doesn't need gas or electricity.
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Three things here, first of all, there are a few cars in existence that do not need gas or electricity. Compressed air for example. I hear that researchers are doing anazing things using combustible materials to utilise the phase change that water undergoes. It may soon lead to a wonderous age powered by heating water until it can be used as a high pressure gas.

Objective reality does not imply consistent measurement of that reality.

Objective reality may not actually exist. Once you start throwing around relativity and quantum effects things get weird, getting them to play nicely together might be even weirder,

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Nobody has a working car that doesn't need energy. I almost changed it to energy but figured nobody would not get the point.

"Objective reality does not imply consistent measurement of that reality."

Yet global science converges on a consistent world view. Everybody's telescopes all see the same things.

Modern technology only works because there is a objective reality.

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Several working cars do not need gas or electricity (or other source of energy).

Museum piece for example. Or super sports car that was bought as an investment and just sits in garage. Or junk car that is used as a source of spare parts. Or crash test vehicle (it is propelled with catapult). Or toy car. Or bus used for living...

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I find this fascinating because many philosophers in the wake of Wittgenstein and Kripke's work on rule following still believe the contrary. I've always thought they're wrong if you take into account constraints of economy (and shared perception, pace Quine), and that e.g. Solomonoff Induction already shows that but I seem to belong to a minority in that respect. It's interesting to see similar ideas of convergence to a unified representation show up in machine learning by neural networks.
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