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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#111

Post by wry_discontent »

FloorEgg wrote: post #85
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…

What makes you think consciousness is tightly coupled to intelligence?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#112

Post by gf000 »

prmph wrote: post #64
gf000 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, unless you believe in some spiritual, non-physical aspect of consciousness, we could probably agree that human intelligence is Turing-complete (with a slightly sloppy use of terms). So any other Turing-complete model can emulate it, including a computer. We can even randomly generate Turing machines, as they are just data. Now imagine we are extremely lucky and happen to end up with a super-intelligent program…

There are many aspects to this that people like yourself miss, but I think we need satisfactory answers to them (or at least rigorous explorations of them) before we can make headway in these sorts of discussion. Imagine we assume that A.I. could be conscious. What would be the identity/scope of that consciousness. To understand what I'm driving at, let's make an analogy to humans. Our consciousness is scoped to our…

> Imagine we assume that A.I. could be conscious. What would be the identity/scope of that consciousness

Well, first I would ask whether this question makes sense in the first place. Does consciousness have a scope? Does consciousness even exist? Or is that more of a name attributed to some pattern we recognize in our own way of thinking (but may not be universal)?

Also, would a person missing an arm, but having a robot arm they can control have their consciousness' "scope" extended to it? Given that people have phantom pains, does a physical body even needed to consider it your part?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#113

Post by myrmidon »

prmph wrote: post #67
myrmidon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you consider it sentient? Absolutely. If you simulated a human brain by the atom, would you think the resulting construct would NOT be? What would be missing? I think consciousness is simply an emergent property of our nervous system, but in order to express itself "language" is obviously needed and thus requires lots of complexity (more than what we typically see in animals or computer systems until recently…

> If you simulated a human brain by the atom, That is what we don't know is possible. You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered. And from what we even know currently, atoms are too coarse to form the basis of such "cloning" And, my viewpoint is that, even if this were possible, just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If it is the arrangement…

> You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered

You would not need the simulation to be perfect; there is ample evidence that our brains a quite robust against disturbances.

> just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness.

If you don't want that to be true, you need some kind of magic, that makes the simulation behave differently from reality.

How would a simulation of your brain react to an question that you would answer "consciously"? If it gives the same responds to the same inputs, how could you argue it isnt't conscious?

> If it is the arrangement of matter that gives rise to consciousness, then would that new consciousness be the same person or not?

The simulated consciousness would be a different one from the original; both could exist at the same time and would be expected to diverge. But their reactions/internal state/thoughts could be matched at least for an instant, and be very similar for potentially much longer.

I think this is just Occams razor applied to our minds: There is no evidence whatsoever that our thinking is linked to anything outside of our brains, or outside the realm of physics.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#114

Post by iammjm »

paxys wrote: post #110
awestroke wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you claiming humans do anything unprompted? Our biology prompts us to act

Yet we can ignore our biology, or act in ways that are the opposite of what our biology tells us. Can someone map all internal and external stimuli that a person encounters into a set of deterministic actions? Simply put, we have not the faintest idea how our brains actually work, and so saying saying "LLMs think the same way as humans" is laughable.

Good luck ignoring your biology’s impulse to breathe

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#115

Post by aaroninsf »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #97
jjcm wrote: post #92

So much of the debate of whether AI can think or not reminds me of this scene from The Next Generation: https://youtu.be/ol2WP0hc0NY LLMs hit two out of the three criteria already - self awareness and intelligence, but we're in a similar state where defining consciousness is such a blurry metric. I feel like it wont be a binary thing, it'll be a group decision by humanity. I think it will happen in the next decade or…

Self-awareness is a bold claim, as opposed to the illusion of it. LLMs are very good at responding in a way that suggests there's a self, but I am skeptical that proves much about whether they actually have interior states analogous to what we recognize in humans as selfhood...

_Interior states_ gets into some very murky philosophy of mind very quickly of course.

If you're a non-dualist (like me) concerns about qualia start to shade into the religious/metaphysical thereby becoming not so interesting except to e.g. moral philosophy.

Personally I have a long bet that when natively-multimodal models on the scale of contemporary LLM are widely deployed, their "computation phenomenology" will move the goalposts so far the cultural debate will shift from "they are just parrots?" to the moral crisis of abusing parrots, meaning, these systems will increasingly be understood as having a selfhood with moral value. Non-vegetarians may be no more concerned about the quality of "life" and conditions of such systems than they are about factory farming, but, the question at least will circulate.

Prediction: by the time my kids finish college, assuming it is still a thing, it will be as common to see enthusiastic groups flyering and doing sit-ins etc on behalf of AIs as it is today to see animal rights groups.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#116

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #110
awestroke wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you claiming humans do anything unprompted? Our biology prompts us to act

Yet we can ignore our biology, or act in ways that are the opposite of what our biology tells us. Can someone map all internal and external stimuli that a person encounters into a set of deterministic actions? Simply put, we have not the faintest idea how our brains actually work, and so saying saying "LLMs think the same way as humans" is laughable.

[deleted]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#117

Post by [deleted] »

iammjm wrote: post #114
paxys wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet we can ignore our biology, or act in ways that are the opposite of what our biology tells us. Can someone map all internal and external stimuli that a person encounters into a set of deterministic actions? Simply put, we have not the faintest idea how our brains actually work, and so saying saying "LLMs think the same way as humans" is laughable.

Good luck ignoring your biology’s impulse to breathe

[deleted]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#118

Post by simonw »

amarant wrote: post #93
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…

solve simple maths problems, for example the kind found in the game 4=10 [1] Doesn't necessarily have to reliably solve them, some of them are quite difficult, but llms are just comically bad at this kind of thing. Any kind of novel-ish(can't just find the answers in the training-data) logic puzzle like this is, in my opinion, a fairly good benchmark for "thinking". Until a llm can compete with a 10 year old child in…

> solve simple maths problems, for example the kind found in the game 4=10

I'm pretty sure that's been solved for almost 12 months now - the current generation "reasoning" models are really good at those kinds of problems.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#119

Post by heyjamesknight »

embedding-shape wrote: post #76
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.

> Form ideas without the use of language. Don't LLMs already do that? "Language" is just something we've added as a later step in order to understand what they're "saying" and "communicate" with them, otherwise they're just dealing with floats with different values, in different layers, essentially (and grossly over-simplified of course).

But language is the input and the vector space within which their knowledge is encoded and stored. The don't have a concept of a duck beyond what others have described the duck as.

Humans got by for millions of years with our current biological hardware before we developed language. Your brain stores a model of your experience, not just the words other experiencers have shared with yiu.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#120

Post by handfuloflight »

Symmetry wrote: post #71
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…

"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

What an oversimplification. Thinking computers can create more swimming submarines, but the inverse is not possible. Swimming is a closed solution; thinking is a meta-solution.
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