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Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

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Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#211

Post by Kim_Bruning »

circuit10 wrote: post #153
gus_massa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official name is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room The opinions are exactly the same than about LLM.

I don’t understand why people say the Chinese Room thing would prove LLMs don’t think, to me it’s obvious that the person doesn’t understand Chinese but the process does, similarly the CPU itself doesn’t understand the concepts an LLM can work with but the LLM itself does, or a neuron doesn’t understand concepts but the entire structure of your brain does The concept of understanding emerges on a higher level from th…

If 100 top-notch philosophers disagree with you, that means you get 100 citations from top-notch philosophers. :-P

Check out eg Dennett.... or ... his opionions about Searle; Have fun with eg... this:

"By Searle’s own count, there are over a hundred published attacks on it. He can count them, but I guess he can’t read them, for in all those years he has never to my knowledge responded in detail to the dozens of devastating criticisms they contain;"

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/12/21/the-mystery-of-c...

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#212

Post by snickerbockers »

observationist wrote: post #71
snickerbockers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Equivalent statements could be made about how human brains are not magic, just biology - yet I think we still think. They're not equivalent at all because the AI is by no means biological. "It's just maths" could maybe be applied to humans but this is backed entirely by supposition and would ultimately just be an assumption of its own conclusion - that human brains work on the same underlying principles as AI becaus…

Unless you're supposing something mystical or supernatural about how brains work, then yes, it is "just" math, there is nothing else it could be. All of the evidence we have shows it's an electrochemical network of neurons processing information. There's no evidence that suggests anything different, or even the need for anything different. There's no missing piece or deep mystery to it. It's on those who want alterna…

>it doesn't really matter - to quote one of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's best turns of phrase: "the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you"

Right back at you, brochacho. I'm not the one making a positive claim here. You're the one who insists that it must work in a specific way because you can't conceive of any alternatives. I have never seen ANY evidence or study linking any existent AI or computer system to human cognition.

>There's no need or benefit for searching for unnecessarily complicated alternative interpretations.

Thanks, if it's alright with you I might borrow this argument next time somebody tries to tell me the world isn't flat.

>It simply doesn't look

That's one of those phrases you use when you're REALLY confident that you know what you're talking about.

> like we need anything more, in principle, to fully explain the nature of biological intelligence, and consciousness, and how brains work.

Please fully explain the nature of intelligence, consciousness, and how brains work.

>Mind as interdimensional radios, mystical souls and spirits, quantum tubules, none of that stuff has any basis in a ruthlessly rational and scientific review of the science of cognition.

well i definitely never said anything even remotely similar to that. If i didn't know any better i might call this argument a "hallucination".

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#213

Post by ablob »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #162
ablob wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually it is the work of the one claiming something to prove it. So if you believe that AI does "think" you are expected to show me that it really does. Claiming it "thinks - prove otherwise" is just bad form and also opens the discussion up for moving the goalposts just as you did with your brain emulation statement. Or you could just not accept any argument made or circumvent it by stating the one trying to dispro…

So if you believe that AI does "think" you are expected to show me that it really does. A lot of people seemingly haven't updated their priors after some of the more interesting results published lately, such as the performance of Google's and OpenAI's models at the 2025 Math Olympiad. Would you say that includes yourself? If so, what do the models still have to do in order to establish that they are capable of all m…

It definietly includes myself, I don't have the interest to stay updated here.

For that matter I have no opinion on if AI does think or not, I simply don't care. Therefore I also really can't answer your question in what more a model has to do to establish that they are thinking (does being able to use all major forms of reasoning constitute the capability of thought to you?). I can say however, that any such proof would have to be on a case-by-case basis given my current understanding on AI is designed.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#214

Post by DoctorOetker »

kipchak wrote: post #83
terminalshort wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can make a claim much stronger than "you could probably" The counterclaim here is that the brain may not obey physical laws that can be described by mathematics. This is a "5G causes covid" level claim. The overwhelming burden of proof is on you.

Consider for example Orch OR theory. If it or something like it were to be accurate, the brain would not "obey physical laws that can be described by mathematics".

the transition probability matrices don't obey the laws of statistics?

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#215

Post by BobbyJo »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #151
BobbyJo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you put a droplet of water in a warm bowl every 12 hours, the bowl will remain empty as the water will evaporate. That does not mean that if you put a trillion droplets in every twelve hours it will still remain empty.

It will also not be empty if I put the bowl in the sea, which is a remark about the nature of thoughthat that proves exactly as much as your comment.

The point I was trying to make was that the time you use to perform the calculation may change whether there is an "experience" on behalf of the calculation. Without specifying the basis if subjectivity, you can't rule anything out as far as what matters and what doesn't. Maybe the speed or locality with which the calculations happen matters. Like the water drops: given the same amount of time, eventually all the water will evaporate in either case leading to the same end state, but the the intermediate states are very different.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#216

Post by simulator5g »

josefritzishere wrote: post #92

I think we all intuitively knew this but it's pretty cool.

I think there's a huge divide between the type of people on HN and everyone else, in whether you might know this intuitively or not. Intuition is based on the sum of your experiences.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#217

Post by ablob »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #186
ablob wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well first of all I never claimed that I was capable of thinking (smirk). We also haven't agreed on a definition of "thinking" yet, so as you can read in my previous comment, there is no meaningful conversation to be had. I also don't understand how your oddly aggresive phrasing adds to the conversation, but if it helps you: my rights and protections do not depend on whether I'm able to prove to you that I am thinkin…

If I say I'm innocent, you don't say I have to prove it. Some facts are presumed to be true without burden of evidence because otherwise it could cause great harm. So we don't require, say, minorities or animals to prove they have souls, we just inherently assume they do and make laws around protecting them.

Thank you for the clarification. If you expect me to justify an action depending on you being innocent, then I actually do need you to prove it. I wouldn't let you sleep in my room assuming you're innocent - or in your words: because of the consequences of otherwise. It feels like you're moving the goalposts here: I don't want to justify an action based on something, i just want to know if something has a specific property.

With regards to the topic: Does AI think? I don't know, but I also don't want to act upon knowing if it does (or doesn't for that matter). In other words, I don't care. The answer could go either way, but I'd rather say that I don't know (especially since "thinking" is not defined). That means that I can assume both and consider the consequences using some heuristic to decide which assumption is better given the action I want to justify doing or not doing. If you want me to believe an AI thinks, you have to prove it, if you want to justify an action you may assume whatever you deem most likely. And if you want to know if an AI thinks, then you literally can't assume it does; simple as that.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#218

Post by CamperBob2 »

pegasus wrote: post #204
CamperBob2 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, the fact that they can't learn from few examples For one thing, yes, they can, obviously [1] -- when's the last time you checked? -- and for another, there are plenty of humans who seemingly cannot. The only real difference is that with an LLM, when the context is lost, so is the learning. That will obviously need to be addressed at some point. that they can't perform simple mathematical operations witho…

> For one thing, yes, they can That's post-training. The complaint I'm referring to is to the huge amounts of data (end energy) required during training - which is also a form of learning, after all. Sure, there are counter-arguments, for example pointing to the huge amount of non-textual data a child ingests, but these counter-arguments are not waterproof themselves (for example, one can point out that we are discus…

That's post-training

No, it is not. Read the paper. They are discussing an emergent property of the context itself: "For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model."

I'm talking about tasks like multiplying two 4-digit numbers (let's say 8-digit, just to be safe, for reasoning models), which 5th or 6th graders in the US are expected to be able to do with no problem - without using a calculator.

So am I. See, for example, Karpathy's discussion of native computation: https://youtu.be/7xTGNNLPyMI?si=Gckcmp2Sby4SlKje&t=6416 (starts at 1:46:56). The first few tokens in the context actually serve as some sort of substrate for general computation. I don't pretend to understand that, and it may still be something of an open research topic, but it's one more unexpected emergent property of transformers.

You'd be crazy to trust that property at this stage -- at the time Karpathy was making the video, he needed to explicitly tell the model to "Use code" if he didn't want it to just make up solutions to more complex problems -- but you'd also be crazy to trust answers from a 5th-grader who just learned long division last week.

Feeling quite comfortable being classed in the same camp with the greatest living physicist, honestly.

Not a great time for you to rest on your intellectual laurels. Same goes for Penrose.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#219

Post by BobbyJo »

hnfong wrote: post #63
gnull wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes the simulation we live in special compared to the simulation of a burning candle that you or I might be running? That simulated candle is perfectly melting wax in its own simulation. Duh, it won't melt any in ours, because our arbitrary notions of "real" wax are disconnected between the two simulatons.

They do have a valid subtle point though. If we don't think the candle in a simulated universe is a "real candle", why do we consider the intelligence in a simulated universe possibly "real intelligence"? Being a functionalist ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_(philosophy_of_m... ) myself, I don't know the answer on the top of my head.

> If we don't think the candle in a simulated universe is a "real candle", why do we consider the intelligence in a simulated universe possibly "real intelligence"?

A candle in Canada can't melt wax in Mexico, and a real candle can't melt simulated wax. If you want to differentiate two things along one axis, you can't just point out differences that may or may not have any effect on that axis. You have to establish a causal link before the differences have any meaning. To my knowledge, intelligence/consciousness/experience doesn't have a causal link with anything.

We know our brains cause consciousness the way we knew in 1500 that being on a boat for too long causes scurvy. Maybe the boat and the ocean matter, or maybe they don't.

Re: Using secondary school maths to demystify AI

#220

Post by sublinear »

terminalshort wrote: post #183
sublinear wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what many are saying is that of all the things we know best, it's going to be the machines we build and their underlying principles. We don't fully understand how brains work, but we know brains don't function like a computer. Why would a computer be assumed to function like a brain in any way, even in part, without evidence and just hopes based on marketing? And I don't just mean consumer marketing, but mark…

What has it got to do with anything whether brains function like computers? This is only relevant if you define thinking as something only the brain can do, and then nothing that doesn't work like a brain can think. This would be like defining flight as "what birds do" and then saying airplanes can't fly because they don't work like birds. And then what do you even mean by "a computer?" This falls into the same trap…

To use your own example, it's relevant because the definition of "flight" that we apply to planes is not as versatile as the one we apply to birds.

To put this in terms of "results", because that's what your way of thinking insists upon, a plane does not take off and land the way a bird does. This limits a plane's practicality to such an extent that a plane is useless for transportation without all the infrastructure you're probably ignoring with your argument. You might also be ignoring all the side effects planes bring with them.

Would you not agree that if we only ever wanted "flight" for a specific use case that apparently only birds can do after evaluating what a plane cannot do, then planes are not capable of "flight"?

This is the very same problem with "thought" in terms of AI. We're finding it's inadequate for what we want the machine to do. Not only is it inadequate for our current use cases, and not only is it inadequate now, but it will continue to be inadequate until we further pin down what "thought" is and determine what lies beyond the Church-Turing thesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis#P...

Relevant quote: "B. Jack Copeland states that it is an open empirical question whether there are actual deterministic physical processes that, in the long run, elude simulation by a Turing machine; furthermore, he states that it is an open empirical question whether any such processes are involved in the working of the human brain"

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