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Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

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Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#131

Post by amelius »

phantasmish wrote: post #12
School-Cotton wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can simulate a human brain on pen and paper too.

The simulation isn't an operating brain. It's a description of one. What it "means" is imposed by us, what it actually is, is a shitload of graphite marks on paper or relays flipping around or rocks on sand or (pick your medium). An arbitrarily-perfect simulation of a burning candle will never, ever melt wax. An LLM is always a description. An LLM operating on a computer is identical to a description of it operating…

> An arbitrarily-perfect simulation of a burning candle will never, ever melt wax.

It might if the simulation includes humans observing the candle.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#132

Post by jayveeone »

School-Cotton wrote: post #45
Terr_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone asserts, almost religiously, that LLMs do and/or can "think." When asked how to falsify their assertion, perhaps by explaining what exactly is "thinking" in the human brain that can and/or will be possible to emulate...

Err, no, that’s not what’s happening. Nobody, at least in this thread (and most others like it I’ve seen), is confidently claiming LLMs can think. There are people confidently claiming they can’t and then other people expressing skepticism at their confidence and/or trying to get them to nail down what they mean.

This entire debate over the years is because so many confidently assert that AI can think, or that AI will soon be our God, or our ruler, etc.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#133

Post by josh-sematic »

_lyxd wrote: post #105
gowld wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain, because this interpetation of "Godel" is highly nonstandard.

you may consider reading I am a strange loop for that, which can do far better justification than myself if there's surely no algo to solve the halting problem, why would there be maths that describes consciousness?

Can you look at any arbitrary program and tell if it halts without running it indefinitely? If so, you should explain how and collect your Nobel. Telling everybody whether the Collatz conjecture is correct is a good warm up. If not, you can’t solve the halting program either. What does that have to do with consciousness though?

Having read “I Am a Strange Loop” I do not believe Hofstadter indicates that the existence of Gödel’s theorem precludes consciousness being realizable on a Turing machine. Rather if I recall correctly he points out that as a possible argument and then attempts to refute it.

On the other hand Penrose is a prominent believer that human’s ability to understand Gödel’s theorem indicates consciousness can’t be realized on a Turing machine but there’s far from universal agreement on that point.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#134

Post by IgorPartola »

dang wrote: post #190

[stub for offtopicness] (in this case, thinkiness)

I feel like these conversations really miss the mark: whether an LLM thinks or not is not a relevant question. It is a bit like asking “what color is an Xray?” or “what does the number 7 taste like?”

The reason I say this is because an LLM is not a complete self-contained thing if you want to compare it to a human being. It is a building block. Your brain thinks. Your prefrontal cortex however is not a complete system and if you somehow managed to extract it and wire it up to a serial terminal I suspect you’d be pretty disappointed in what it would be capable of on its own.

I want to be clear that I am not making an argument that once we hook up sensory inputs and motion outputs as well as motivations, fears, anxieties, desires, pain and pleasure centers, memory systems, sense of time, balance, fatigue, etc. to an LLM that we would get a thinking feeling conscious being. I suspect it would take something more sophisticated than an LLM. But my point is that even if an LLM was that building block, I don’t think the question of whether it is capable of thought is the right question.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#135

Post by terminalshort »

gowld wrote: post #98
terminalshort wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statements like "it is bound by the laws of physics" are not "verifiable" by your definition, and yet we safely assume it is true of everything. Everything except the human brain, that is, for which wild speculation that it may be supernatural is seemingly considered rational discussion so long as it satisfies people's needs to believe that they are somehow special in the universe.

> it satisfies people's needs to believe that they are somehow special in the universe. Is it only humans that have this need? That makes the need special, so humans are special in the universe.

It is bound by the same laws of physics as everything else, so no, not special.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#136

Post by CamperBob2 »

random9749832 wrote: post #20
jvanderbot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking is undefined so all statements about it are unverifiable.

Is reasoning undefined? That's what usually meant by "thinking".

The difference between thinking and reasoning is that I can "think" that Elvis is still alive, Jewish space lasers are responsible for California wildfires, and Trump was re-elected president in 2020, but I cannot "reason" myself into those positions.

It ties into another aspect of these perennial threads, where it is somehow OK for humans to engage in deluded or hallucinatory thought, but when an AI model does it, it proves they don't "think."

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#137

Post by cwmoore »

causal wrote: post #2
dang wrote: post #190

[stub for offtopicness] (in this case, thinkiness)

I love the idea of educating students on the math behind AI to demystify them. But I think it's a little weird to assert "AI is not magic and AI systems do not think. It’s just maths." Equivalent statements could be made about how human brains are not magic, just biology - yet I think we still think.

The human mind is not just biology in the same way that LLMs are just math.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#138

Post by frozenlettuce »

mcswell wrote: post #61
frozenlettuce wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can replicate all calculations done by LLMs with pen and paper. It would take ages to calculate anything, but it's possible. I don't think that pen and paper will ever "think", regardless of how complex the calculations involved are.

I don't see the relevance of that argument (which other responders to your post have pointed out as Searle's Chinese Room argument). The pen and paper are of course not doing any thinking, but then the pen isn't doing any writing on its own, either. It's the system of pen + paper + human that's doing the thinking.

The idea of my argument is that I notice that people project some "ethereal" properties over computations that happen in the... computer. Probably because electricity is involved, making things show up as "magic" from our point of view, making it easier to project consciousness or thinking onto the device. The cloud makes that even more abstract. But if you are aware that the transistors are just a medium that replicates what we already did for ages with knots, fingers, and paint, it gets easier to see them as plain objects. Even the resulting artifacts that the machine produces are only something meaningful from our point of view, because you need prior knowledge to read the output signals. So yeah, those devices end up being an extension of ourselves.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#139

Post by cwmoore »

jvanderbot wrote: post #69
terminalshort wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statements like "it is bound by the laws of physics" are not "verifiable" by your definition, and yet we safely assume it is true of everything. Everything except the human brain, that is, for which wild speculation that it may be supernatural is seemingly considered rational discussion so long as it satisfies people's needs to believe that they are somehow special in the universe.

True. You need to define "it" before you can verify physics bounds it. Unicorns are not bound by the laws of physics - because they do not exist.

They are, apparently, proscribed by the totality of the laws of physics. For now.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#140

Post by wizzwizz4 »

jvanderbot wrote: post #69
terminalshort wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statements like "it is bound by the laws of physics" are not "verifiable" by your definition, and yet we safely assume it is true of everything. Everything except the human brain, that is, for which wild speculation that it may be supernatural is seemingly considered rational discussion so long as it satisfies people's needs to believe that they are somehow special in the universe.

True. You need to define "it" before you can verify physics bounds it. Unicorns are not bound by the laws of physics - because they do not exist.

But every unicorn is bound by the laws of physics.
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