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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#291

Post by tuyiown »

codeflo wrote: post #259
f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and t…

> at requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence

Nobody talked about anything out of neurons. The question is still open.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#292

Post by lobofta »

paulluuk wrote: post #284
f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency So, I work in AI research (as a research engineer though, not a scientist). I've also studied philosophy and I'm a vegan. Yes yes, insert "they will tell you" joke here, but I promise it's actually relevant this time. First, while I studied philosophy one of the things that stuck with me the most, was the discussion…

Vegan ML engineer here. In total agreement with you. People are just moving the goal post to keep themselves protected from the obvious conclusion: there is nothing really all that special about us humans. Perhaps subjective experience is simply the internal state of a self supervised continuous learning algorithm and we don't like that conclusion very much.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#293

Post by Planktonne »

maxbond wrote: post #223
Planktonne wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could absolutely write a compelling story about a sentient toaster; it's been done before [1]. That is entirely separate to whether or not it would be a meaningful way to understand the world; a convincing story is not the same thing as one that is true. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Toaster

I never said you couldn't write any arbitrary compelling story about a toaster, I said that this specific hypothetical story, where you rewrite "They're made of meat!" to be about a toaster, would not be compelling. I am doing my best to communicate with you but to be honest you are not hearing me (across both responses), and I am out of words.

It would be equally compelling, because the compelling nature of the story comes from the language, the presentation, rather than the [specific thing being ascribed consciousness].

Re: They’re made out of weights

#294

Post by suddenlybananas »

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…

The structure of human language is is hardly weak!

Re: They’re made out of weights

#295

Post by layer8 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #153
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…

It seems obvious to me that language and consciousness have nothing to do with each other . My dog doesn't speak any language, but she's obviously aware of herself and the world around her. Plus there are the occasional cases of children that grow up without any language. Are they therefore not conscious?

Indeed. For some reason I can shut off my thinking instantly by holding my breath, and then I feel like a very conscious but unthinking animal.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#296

Post by lelanthran »

bulbar wrote: post #52
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…

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.

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

Yeah, but it's hard to explain this to people, especially AI-pro people. Too many are convinced that all we are doing is a cut-down version of the human brain, and it's hard to explain to them that, no actually, we aren't modeling the human brain to the level of granularity you think we are.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#298

Post by iainmerrick »

maxbond wrote: post #223
Planktonne wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could absolutely write a compelling story about a sentient toaster; it's been done before [1]. That is entirely separate to whether or not it would be a meaningful way to understand the world; a convincing story is not the same thing as one that is true. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Toaster

I never said you couldn't write any arbitrary compelling story about a toaster, I said that this specific hypothetical story, where you rewrite "They're made of meat!" to be about a toaster, would not be compelling. I am doing my best to communicate with you but to be honest you are not hearing me (across both responses), and I am out of words.

Just wanted to say, I appreciate your patience and good sense in this thread.

It's difficult to tell who's trolling -- probably best to go with the charitable assumption that everyone is honestly trying to convey their opinion, but mostly talking past each other. Unfortunately these discussions about the nature of consciousness never go anywhere useful.

I think I'm probably in the same boat as you, roughly: a) LLMs are doing something really interesting that resembles in many ways both intelligence and consciousness; b) I suspect they're not actually conscious but I don't know how you'd know for sure; c) it all just drives home that we still don't really know what consciousness actually is. But like (a), it's definitely something really interesting...

Re: They’re made out of weights

#299

Post by kristov »

codeflo wrote: post #259
f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and t…

I think the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. An LLM is not a human brain, and does not try to emulate one. It should not be a surprise that an LLM does not behave like a human brain. So we can not infer things either way. The best we can say is that an LLM appears to exhibit very similar behavior to a human brain, under certain constraints. So maybe we can infer that the human brain has something in it that operates in a similar way to an LLM (like the human "unconscious", or "intuition" maybe). It seems obvious to me that a human brain and an LLM are not comparable things, for many reasons. So we can not make inferrences one way or the other.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#300

Post by IanCal »

larodi wrote: post #289
f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago. The whole idea of sentience "on the other side of the wire" is wrong, as there is neither wire, nor other side. We think there is, but the DB just expounds the query and repurposes this information into views, that we give notion and meaning to. LLMs are the same, do not be mistaken. One other importa…

> If we agree weights producing text may emerge consciousness, given large enough, then DBs must've gained it long ago.

If we agree that silicon can perform calculations, then beaches must have been working out log tables long ago.

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