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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#51

Post by doctoboggan »

slopinthebag wrote: post #30
eszed wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I currently suspect that consciousness is an emergent property. I read elsewhere (it's somewhere in my HN history, I'm sure) that the biggest compute we can currently muster is something like three or four magnitudes away from the number of neurons / connections (or their analog) that our brains have, so it may be a while until we can expect to see it in our machines. But, if the emergent phenomenon hypothesis…

This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a physical property in the brain, so what entity is actually experiencing that consciousness? Or, what does it even mean to experience consciousness? Or are these not even the right questions?

> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property.

I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own.

Consciousness itself doesn't have a well agreed upon definition, but I would posit that _most_ people would agree humans have it, and _most_ people would agree individual cells (neurons) do not have it. If you agree with those two statements, then consciousness is an emergent property by the definition I gave above

Re: They’re made out of weights

#52

Post by bulbar »

eszed wrote: post #15
kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

Yeah, I currently suspect that consciousness is an emergent property. I read elsewhere (it's somewhere in my HN history, I'm sure) that the biggest compute we can currently muster is something like three or four magnitudes away from the number of neurons / connections (or their analog) that our brains have, so it may be a while until we can expect to see it in our machines. But, if the emergent phenomenon hypothesis…

Just to be sure: The "neurons" in today's AI have nothing to do whatsoever with real neurons.

What we can do is simulate very simple brains by simulating relatively few neurons as they appear in worms. In this sense we are multiple magnitudes away where the increasing complexity implies exponential increasing difficulty.

I would think we are so far away that there will be unknown unknowns we encounter on the way.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#53

Post by NDlurker »

hippich wrote: post #24
kridsdale3 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time is entropy unfolding as things with nonzero temperature do what they do. Psychological time is your own weights being updated in response to stimuli and internal processing. When there isn't anything interesting happening, no updates are needed, and you don't perceive much time. That's why there's a logarithmic effect on the "density" of time as you age.

This is actually something I was always confused about. If nothing interesting happens as we get old, it should be boring and as result, slow slog. Yet it feels like time accelerates as I get older.

Novel experiences take up more processing power and are burned into memory so they're experienced at a slower rate. That's how I understand it anyway.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#54

Post by noosphr »

throw310822 wrote: post #9
noosphr wrote: post #4

It's not often I see something that's fractally wrong but here we are. There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer. There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 The point of the original sh…

> There are grammar rules And they're made out of weights.

As opposed to integers in normal programming.

The 'magic' in weights is that the rules are spread through the whole model and you can't point to one place which encodes them.

The grokking paper shows that this stops being the case with enough training data and enough compute.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#55

Post by bulbar »

doctoboggan wrote: post #51
slopinthebag wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a physical property in the brain, so what entity is actually experiencing that consciousness? Or, what does it even mean to experience consciousness? Or are these not even the right questions?

> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own. C…

I think the alternative is that our brain, somehow, is connected to some metaphysical aspect of reality which is what most religions believe.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#56

Post by anon84873628 »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #38
BobbyTables2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve wondered the same myself, without being a cunning linguist. I understand the math pretty well but still find it crazy that a bunch of matrices can converse in human languages without ever being “taught”. Imagine decoding an encyclopedia written in a foreign language where the characters, punctuation, and grammar are unknown — supplemented by a million other texts the same way. Feels like it should be utterly imp…

If time dilation is said to being a product of computation, why is it that anaesthetic drugs that are taken not to the point of actual unconsciousness cause it. Dont anaesthetics sort of shut everything down/inhibit all that kind of cognitive activity (compute?)

"Time dilation" in this case is referring to the physics phenomenon from Einstein's special relativity. Not human perception.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#57

Post by gostsamo »

kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

Read the original mentioned on top for full effect.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#58

Post by eszed »

slopinthebag wrote: post #30
eszed wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I currently suspect that consciousness is an emergent property. I read elsewhere (it's somewhere in my HN history, I'm sure) that the biggest compute we can currently muster is something like three or four magnitudes away from the number of neurons / connections (or their analog) that our brains have, so it may be a while until we can expect to see it in our machines. But, if the emergent phenomenon hypothesis…

This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a physical property in the brain, so what entity is actually experiencing that consciousness? Or, what does it even mean to experience consciousness? Or are these not even the right questions?

Not a gotcha at all, but I don't have a satisfying answer, nor am I confident there even is one. Best I can do is to say that I think consciousness and sense of self are at the very least closely related, and perhaps the very same phenomenon. "I" am the entity that realizes my own consciousness; consciousness is the qualia that makes "me" separable from all other entities.

Or something like that. This gets to the "dorm room bullshitting" level right quick.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#59

Post by bulbar »

pixl97 wrote: post #40
slopinthebag wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a physical property in the brain, so what entity is actually experiencing that consciousness? Or, what does it even mean to experience consciousness? Or are these not even the right questions?

Is a video game a physical property of a computer?

We have general purpose hardware and we have hardware that's hard wired for specific purposes like ASICs and we have everything in between.

And we are only doing it for a few decades. Evolution had million of years of "try and error".

Re: They’re made out of weights

#60

Post by eternauta3k »

doctoboggan wrote: post #51
slopinthebag wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I assume you don't believe consciousness is a physical property in the brain, so what entity is actually experiencing that consciousness? Or, what does it even mean to experience consciousness? Or are these not even the right questions?

> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own. C…

I don't know if most people would dismiss the sentence "all matter has a sort of proto-subjectivity very different from ours but which gives rise to ours". And it solves some problems (introducing others).
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