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Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

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Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#331

Post by scooke »

hammock wrote: post #224
dools wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We taught both our kids to sign. My favourite moment was in March, my daughter was about to turn 2 and wasn't speaking yet. I asked her if she would like to hear some music. She made the sign for dog. I searched youtube for some songs about dogs and she shook her head. She made the sign for tree. I was like "dog, tree", she nodded. Hmmm... I was searching for "dog tree music" when one of the pictures that came up was…

This must have been what it was like when the settlers were trying to communicate with native Americans at first

What an absolutely ridiculous statement. Go to reddit with that.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#332

Post by [deleted] »

naasking wrote: post #325
intended wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I havent read it, but Blindsight did a very good job of explaining LLMs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) I am saying that LLMs DONT process information, not the way people are implying. The best I can suggest is to please try building with an LLM. Its very hard to explain the nuance, and I am not the only one struggling with it.

I understand the nuance, I think you're just wrong. LLMs augmented with memory are Turing complete [1], so they do process information. This distinction you're trying to draw is a mirage. [1] https://pub.towardsai.net/llms-and-memory-is-definitely-all-...

[deleted]

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#333

Post by throw4847285 »

I'm shocked (Ok, not that shocked) that nobody has commented on how beautiful the art is in this piece. The cartooning is very abstract, which makes the gut punch of those final few panels so much more powerful. The little bits of animation are very evocative. The piece reminds me a lot about Scott McCloud's Infinite Canvas, and how refreshing it still feels when the internet gives us legitimately radical sequential art.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#334

Post by MattyRad »

throw4847285 wrote: post #333

I'm shocked (Ok, not that shocked) that nobody has commented on how beautiful the art is in this piece. The cartooning is very abstract, which makes the gut punch of those final few panels so much more powerful. The little bits of animation are very evocative. The piece reminds me a lot about Scott McCloud's Infinite Canvas, and how refreshing it still feels when the internet gives us legitimately radical sequential…

Agreed. This was evocative and emotional, beautifully capturing the existential despair and FUD of the LLM apparatus. It makes me happy to have near certainty that a human wrote this piece- even if were to be AI assisted!

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#335

Post by slibhb »

naasking wrote: post #329
slibhb wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say that internal life has nothing to do with behavior. I said you can't infer internal life from behavior. > I'm not asserting they have an internal life, the person I responded to was saying they have no internal life and I said they cannot rigorously justify such a claim. The only claim that I can "rigorously justify" concerning internal lives is that I have one. And the proof is subjective. Clearly this…

> I said you can't infer internal life from behavior. Behaviour can't tell you there isn't internal life, but complex behaviour sure is a big red flag that there might be internal life there. > We have good reason to believe that people and animals have internal lives whereas rocks and computers don't. Rocks yes, computer programs no we don't, that's the point. There is no reason to suppose an information processing…

> Behaviour can't tell you there isn't internal life, but complex behaviour sure is a big red flag that there might be internal life there.

I agree, behavior is evidence, but there are good reasons to suppose that, despite their behavior, computers lack internal lives. To try to make my argument more clearly:

I know I have an internal life (due to subjective evidence). My internal life is related to the structure of my body in an unknown way. I'm willing to grant that other humans and similar, evolved organisms also have internal lives because they are the same kind of evolved thing as me.

If someone wants to argue that a designed, thoroughly understood object (like a computer) has an internal life, they need to explain how the structure of the object gives rise to an internal life. Behavior isn't enough.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#336

Post by devilbunny »

chthonicdaemon wrote: post #236
throw0101a wrote: post #35

> But he could understand so much more than he could say. If you asked him to point to the vacuum cleaner, he would. Perhaps worth noting that it is possible to teach infants (often starting at around 9 months) sign language so that they can more easily signal their desires. Some priority recommended words would probably be: * hungry/more * enough/all done (for when they're full) * drink (perhaps both milk/formula an…

Interestingly there isn't any correspondence between spoken language and sign language in the linguistic sense. Correspondence between the dominant sign language and the dominant spoken language is mostly due to geographical colocation. So while you are right to say "your specific region's sign language", there are several distinct sign languages in places that all have English as their primary spoken language.

I vaguely recall a documentary about the very real conflict in the deaf community regarding restoring hearing (especially to the very young) via cochlear implants, etc. Leaving aside that particular element, one of the other controversies was about a specific form of sign that is essentially a signed phonetic alphabet. So while it's (obviously) not compatible with regular sign languages - which have visual representation of grammar and meaning - it does have the benefit that those who learn it are primarily fluent in their native language, which many deaf people are not especially good at, since it's always been a language that they only learn from books. And you can learn a new oral language the same way that the rest of us do - instead of sounding it out with your mouth, you sign it out with your hands.

But I can never seem to find more information about it, and can't recall the documentary name for the life of me. Since you seem to have at least some familiarity with this, do you happen to know what I'm talking about?

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#337

Post by lordnacho »

smoldesu wrote: post #318
lordnacho wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about a hypothetical brain simulator? That would also be a software/hardware mash, with known mathematics. Would that be alive?

Now that's a better question! My verdict is no, but I could see where people might disagree. This is a much harder hypothetical, though. Assuming you get everything right, you'd have a pretty powerful simulation at-hand. I think what you're describing is the difference between an artificial lung and a real-life cloned sheep embryo, though. An iron lung is only alive in the sense that it simulates a complex biological…

But a brain sim wouldn't be an artificial lung, would it? Much like an artificial heart wouldn't tell you about the state of the valves because it's an entirely different design that satisfies the same purpose.

A simulation tries to do what the original does though. For instance a GameBoy emulator actually runs code in the way the original device did, right?

Perhaps the test here is a bit like the Turing test. Could you tell whether the artificial device was being used, or the actual thing, apart from examining the device, of course:

- An artificial lung doesn't make people breathe in quite the same way I suspect.

- An artificial brain would give answers a bit like what ChatGPT can already do.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#339

Post by lupire »

renewiltord wrote: post #179
dekhn wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I;m sure you know but one of the best ways to get neuro folks worked up is to say anything about neural networks being anything like neurons in brains. (IMHO, Rosenblatt is an underappreciated genius; he had a working shallow computer vision hardware computer long before people even appreciated what an accomplishment that was. The hardware was fascinating- literally self-turning potentiometer knobs to update weights.

If I'm being honest, I do know they get annoyed by that stuff but I've never really understood why. It's a somewhat common pattern in Mathematics as an avenue for hypotheses to take an existing phenomenon, model some subset of its capabilities, use that to define a new class of behaviour, follow that through to conclusions, then use that to go back to seeing if those conclusions apply to the original phenomenon. A th…

It's an ego thing and a focus thing. They put so much effort into studying the biological details, that they resent people exteacting value without going to that effort, and feel offended at the implication that what they are studying is simple.

Ultimately it's largely down to misapprehension of the difference between emulating a neuton and simulating a neuron, and defensiveness about an approximate model.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#340

Post by naasking »

slibhb wrote: post #335
naasking wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I said you can't infer internal life from behavior. Behaviour can't tell you there isn't internal life, but complex behaviour sure is a big red flag that there might be internal life there. > We have good reason to believe that people and animals have internal lives whereas rocks and computers don't. Rocks yes, computer programs no we don't, that's the point. There is no reason to suppose an information processing…

> Behaviour can't tell you there isn't internal life, but complex behaviour sure is a big red flag that there might be internal life there. I agree, behavior is evidence, but there are good reasons to suppose that, despite their behavior, computers lack internal lives. To try to make my argument more clearly: I know I have an internal life (due to subjective evidence). My internal life is related to the structure of…

> My internal life is related to the structure of my body in an unknown way

That's right, an unknown way. So we know the internal structures of computers and their programs, but we don't know the internal structure of humans and how that leads to sentience, but somehow this translates into having good reasons for thinking the relationships in computers are not isomorphic to or meaningfully related to the unknown structures that lead to human sentience? Don't you see the big blank there? This just does not follow and is exactly the first point I made in this thread.

All I've been pointing out this is that people making strong statements about LLMs lacking sentience are leaping to conclusions.

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