It continues to astound me that no one has given LLMs the full Derrida treatment.
They’re made out of weights
241–250 of 739 posts
Re: They’re made out of weights
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you didn't mean to say that people who believe AI is conscious are delusional, then I don't understand how to read your comment. If you're interested in a good faith conversation, I'm very confused why, when I asked if anyone sincerely argued that toasters are conscious, you brought up people who were drunk or delusional.
It's a two way street. I might have failed to convey my point clearly, too. While I'm fluent, this is not my native language. Some edge cases in meaning still betrays me and I make mistakes I didn't intend doing.
Not sure what you want from me, if you want to explain yourself I'll listen, if you don't that's fine too.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#243"They're made out of neurons"
"Neurons?"
"Neurons. Cells that fire impulses. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but neurons."
"Neurons doing what? Where do the words come from?"
"The neurons make the words. Are you understanding me? We opened it up. There's no dictionary in there, no grammar rules, no little man. Just neurons. A whole cortex of neurons sending each other impulses."
...
People don't understand emergence.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#244[deleted]
Re: They’re made out of weights
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s reductio ad absurdum. No one cares about teapots in space either (Russel).
I agree that is the mode of argument; reductio ad absurdum is a brittle argument, because it only works if the analogy holds. I argued the analogy doesn't hold.
> But it would fall flat because the toaster is not a compelling subject in a discussion of consciousness.
Teapots are not compelling.
> You don't have to believe that LLMs or AI agents are conscious to acknowledge that the argument for their consciousness is far more compelling than any other technological artifact.
God is compelling t billions of people.
Is Russel’s Teapot a bad argument in the God debate?
Re: They’re made out of weights
#246Oh, this was a fun read and one that kids should have in school before they turn ten. Because we are not taking things seriously. If ClosedAI or DeepDisTrust or Posthropic come up with something that quacks like a sentient being, our built-in innate reaction is going to be to scorn it, dismiss it and end the conversation. The alternative, to even consider that we fungible creatures who live in apple-eating-sin that g…
While you write very dismissive and pseudo philosophical, enough people do not believe.
I'm a complex biological thing.
Existence is what i have to experience through.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
The weights are code, the prompt is code, the output is code. Is the meat code?
The data is the code. Training algorithm is the compiler. The weights are the byte code produced to run on the inference VM.
The data is the code is the data. Reality has no distinction between "data" and "code". These terms are categories we impose on systems we design, to make it easier for us to build and reason about them, but they're nothing but mere opinions, and depend less on the system structure, and more on the perspective of the person asking which is which.
This is related to, and possibly equivalent with, the core point of both this story and the original one: computation is independent from substrate.
You can build a computer out of anything, whether it's semiconductors or lasers or meat or magnetic fields or water flowing downhill or abstract thought, and that computer will happily perform the same computation as every other equivalent construct from whatever substrate. That's because computers are ultimately made of math, and we design "real ones" by finding ways to approximate the mathematical constraints with physical systems. But the choice of how to map the math to physical systems is completely arbitrary, and any such mappings are equivalent from POV of information processing ability.
(Of course substrate is not arbitrary from economic POV, which is why we build most of our computers out of silicon and plastic, and make it work with electric current and lasers.)
Re: They’re made out of weights
#248The weights start with a random manifold. The training takes data and shapes the manifold, weight by weight, in many cycles. Once the training is the done manifold is fixed. When a new inference has to be done the query(q) is projected in the manifold space. This projection is dropped on the manifold and the gravity of the manifold gives an answer of q+1 length. Which(qw+i) is dropped qw+n times to output a final res…
The weights are code, the prompt is code, the output is code. Is the meat code?
Yes. Is it data? Yes.
Is the distinction between "code" and "data" just someone's opinion? Yes. There is no such distinction in reality.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#249>>> Weights helped me draft and proof this story.
Nice touch !
Re: They’re made out of weights
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that is the mode of argument; reductio ad absurdum is a brittle argument, because it only works if the analogy holds. I argued the analogy doesn't hold.
> But it would fall flat because the toaster is not a compelling subject in a discussion of consciousness. Teapots are not compelling. > You don't have to believe that LLMs or AI agents are conscious to acknowledge that the argument for their consciousness is far more compelling than any other technological artifact. God is compelling t billions of people. Is Russel’s Teapot a bad argument in the God debate?
> Is Russel’s Teapot a bad argument in the God debate?
What's the relevance? If the argument made here are was a good argument, it wouldn't matter if Russell's argument was bad. We could construct a bad argument using reductio ad absurdum right here and now and it wouldn't matter to either argument.
Can you be straight with me? You know the salient difference between asserting the consciousness of a toaster and the consciousness of an AI, right? It isn't a mystery to you why we would find one line of inquiry interesting and the other not so much?
For instance, it's probably a real possibility in your mind that I am not a human and am an AI. But you probably aren't entertaining the hypothesis that I'm a toaster.