This reads like 2022 hype. It's like people stil do not understand that there's a correlation between exaggerating AI's alleged world-threatening capabilities and AI companies' market share value – and guess who's doing the hyping.
The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#22So happy to see Hofstadter referenced!
He's the GOAT in my opinion for "thinking about thinking".
My own thinking on this is that AI actually IS thinking - but its like the MVB of thinking (minimum viable brain)
I find thought experiments the best for this sort of thing:
- Imagine you had long term memory loss so couldn't remember back very long
You'd still be thinking right?
- Next, imagine you go to sleep and lose consciousness for long periods
You'd still be thinking right?
- Next, imagine that when you're awake, you're in a coma and can't move, but we can measure your brain waves still.
You'd still be thinking right?
- Next, imagine you can't hear or feel either.
You'd still be thinking right?
- Next, imagine you were a sociopath who had no emotion.
You'd still be thinking right?
We're just not used to consciousness without any of the other "baggage" involved.
There are many separate aspects of life and shades of grey when it comes to awareness and thinking, but when you take it down to its core, it becomes very hard to differentiate between what an LLM does and what we call "thinking". You need to do it by recognizing the depths and kinds of thoughts that occur. Is the thinking "rote", or is something "special" going on. This is the stuff that Hofstadter gets into(he makes a case for recursion and capability being the "secret" piece - something that LLMs certainly have plumbing in place for!)
BTW, I recommend "Surfaces and Essences" and "I am a strange loop" also by Hofstadter. Good reads!
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s crazy to me is the mechanism of pleasure or pain. I can understand that with enough complexity we can give rise to sentience but what does it take to achieve sensation?
A body
I’d say it’s possible to experience mental anguish/worry without the body participating. Solely a cognitive pain from consternation.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#24Many people who object to the idea that current-generation AI is thinking do so only because they believe AI is not "conscious"... but there is no known law in the universe requiring that intelligence and consciousness must always go together. With apologies to René Descartes[a], intelligence and consciousness are different.
Intelligence can be verified and quantified, for example, with tests of common sense and other knowledge.[b] Consciousness, on the other hand, is notoriously difficult if not impossible to verify, let alone quantify. I'd say AI is getting more intelligent, and more reliable, in fits and starts, but it's not necessarily becoming conscious.
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[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito%2C_ergo_sum
[b] For example, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18212
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#25Well, I think because we know how the code is written, in the sense that humans quite literally wrote the code for it - it's definitely not thinking, and it is literally doing what we asked, based on the data we gave it. It is specifically executing code we thought of. The output of course, we had no flying idea it would work this well. But it is not sentient. It has no idea of a self or anything like that. If it mak…
We do not write the code that makes it do what it does. We write the code that trains it to figure out how to do what it does. There's a big difference.
The code that builds the models and performance inference from it is code we have written. The data in the model is obviously the big trick. But what I'm saying is that if you run inference, that alone does not give it super-powers over your computer. You can write some agentic framework where it WOULD have power over your computer, but that's not what I'm referring to.
It's not a living thing inside the computer, it's just the inference building text token by token using probabilities based on the pre-computed model.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#26Many people who object to the idea that current-generation AI is thinking do so only because they believe AI is not "conscious"... but there is no known law in the universe requiring that intelligence and consciousness must always go together. With apologies to René Descartes[a], intelligence and consciousness are different. Intelligence can be verified and quantified, for example, with tests of common sense and othe…
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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s crazy to me is the mechanism of pleasure or pain. I can understand that with enough complexity we can give rise to sentience but what does it take to achieve sensation?
A body
How does a body know what's going on? Would you say it has any input devices?
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#28The definitions of all these words have been going back and forward and never reached any 100% consensus anyways, so what one person understands of "thinking", "conscious", "intelligence" and so on seems to be vastly different from another person.
I guess this is why any discussion around this ends up with huge conversations, everyone is talking from their own perspective and understanding, while others have different ones, and we're all talking past each other.
There is a whole field trying to just nail down what "knowledge" actually is/isn't, and those people haven't agreed with each other for the duration of hundreds of years, I'm not confident we'll suddenly get a lot better at this.
I guess ultimately, regardless of what the LLMs do, does it matter? Would we understand them better/worse depending on what the answer would be?
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#29Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#30Well, I think because we know how the code is written, in the sense that humans quite literally wrote the code for it - it's definitely not thinking, and it is literally doing what we asked, based on the data we gave it. It is specifically executing code we thought of. The output of course, we had no flying idea it would work this well. But it is not sentient. It has no idea of a self or anything like that. If it mak…
What’s crazy to me is the mechanism of pleasure or pain. I can understand that with enough complexity we can give rise to sentience but what does it take to achieve sensation?
Can you tell me how you understand that?
Because I sincerely do not. I have frankly no idea how sentience arises from non sentience. But it's a topic that really interests me.