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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#81

Post by aeve890 »

tantalor wrote: post #34
adverbly wrote: post #22

So 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…

> you're in a coma Coma -> unconscious -> not thinking That's like saying you're thinking while asleep. Are you really?

>That's like saying you're thinking while asleep. Are you really?

yes? when dreaming you're still thinking. you're still running cognitive processes and memories while in the dream.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#82

Post by kbelder »

djoldman wrote: post #60

TFA is a part of what seems like a never-ending series about concepts that lack a useful definition. "Thinking" and "intelligence" have no testable definition or specification, therefore it's a complete waste of time to suppose that AI is thinking or intelligent.

Why can't you make the same claim about any other group of humans?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#83

Post by embedding-shape »

vidarh wrote: post #46
embedding-shape wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what definition of "sentience"? Wikipedia claims "Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations" as an opening statement, which I think would be trivial depending again on your definition of "experience" and "sensations". Can a LLM hooked up to sensor events be considered to "experience sensations"? I could see arguments both ways for that.

I have no way of measuring whether or not you experience feelings and sensations, or are just regurgitating statements to convince me of that. The only basis I have for assuming you are sentient according to that definition is trust in your self-reports.

I'm fairly sure we can measure human "sensation" as in detect physiological activity in the body in someone who is under anesthesia yet the body reacts in different ways to touch or pain.

The "feelings" part is probably harder though.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#84

Post by plufz »

educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

Have needs and feelings? (I mean we can’t KNOW that they don’t and we know of this case of an LLM in experiment that try to avoid being shutdown, but I think the evidence of feeling seems weak so far)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#85

Post by FloorEgg »

ivraatiems wrote: post #18

The author searches for a midpoint between "AIs are useless and do not actually think" and "AIs think like humans," but to me it seems almost trivially true that both are possible. What I mean by that is that I think there is a good chance that LLMs are similar to a subsystem of human thinking. They are great at pattern recognition and prediction, which is a huge part of cognition. What they are not is conscious, or…

I think LLMs are conscious just in a very limited way. I think consciousness is tightly coupled to intelligence.

If I had to guess, the current leading LLMs consciousness is most comparable to a small fish, with a conscious lifespan of a few seconds to a few minutes. Instead of perceiving water, nutrient gradients, light, heat, etc. it's perceiving tokens. It's conscious, but it's consciousness is so foreign to us it doesn't seem like consciousness. In the same way to an amoeba is conscious or a blade of grass is conscious but very different kind than we experience. I suspect LLMs are a new type of consciousness that's probably more different from ours than most if not all known forms of life.

I suspect the biggest change that would bring LLM consciousness closer to us would be some for of continuous learning/model updating.

Until then, even with RAG, and other clever teghniques I consider these models as having this really foreign slices of consciousness where they "feel" tokens and "act" out tokens, and they have perception, but their perception of the tokens is nothing like ours.

If one looks closely at simple organisms with simple sensory organs and nervous systems its hard not to see some parallels. It's just that the shape of consciousness is extremely different than any life form. (perception bandwidth, ability to act, temporality, etc)

Karl friston free energy principle gives a really interesting perspective on this I think.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#86

Post by Chabsff »

deadbabe wrote: post #70
educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

Form ideas without the use of language. For example: imagining how you would organize a cluttered room.

Ok, but how do you go about measuring whether a black-box is doing that or not?

We don't apply that criteria when evaluating animal intelligence. We sort of take it for granted that humans at large do that, but not via any test that would satisfy an alien.

Why should we be imposing white-box constraints to machine intelligence when we can't do so for any other?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#87

Post by jstanley »

plufz wrote: post #84
educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

Have needs and feelings? (I mean we can’t KNOW that they don’t and we know of this case of an LLM in experiment that try to avoid being shutdown, but I think the evidence of feeling seems weak so far)

But you can have needs and feelings even without doing thinking. It's separate.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#89

Post by deadbabe »

Chabsff wrote: post #86
deadbabe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Form ideas without the use of language. For example: imagining how you would organize a cluttered room.

Ok, but how do you go about measuring whether a black-box is doing that or not? We don't apply that criteria when evaluating animal intelligence. We sort of take it for granted that humans at large do that, but not via any test that would satisfy an alien. Why should we be imposing white-box constraints to machine intelligence when we can't do so for any other?

There is truly no such thing as a “black box” when it comes to software, there is only a limit to how much patience a human will have in understanding the entire system in all its massive complexity. It’s not like an organic brain.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#90

Post by nprateem »

vidarh wrote: post #43
ivraatiems wrote: post #18

The author searches for a midpoint between "AIs are useless and do not actually think" and "AIs think like humans," but to me it seems almost trivially true that both are possible. What I mean by that is that I think there is a good chance that LLMs are similar to a subsystem of human thinking. They are great at pattern recognition and prediction, which is a huge part of cognition. What they are not is conscious, or…

> or possessed of subjective experience in any measurable way We don't know how to measure subjective experience in other people, even, other than via self-reporting, so this is a meaningless statement. Of course we don't know whether they are, and of course we can't measure it. I also don't know for sure whether or not you are "possessed of subjective experience" as I can't measure it. > What they are not is conscio…

Anyone who believes an algorithm could be conscious needs to take mushrooms.
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