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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#301

Post by iainmerrick »

Planktonne wrote: post #293
maxbond wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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].

No, the original "they're made out of meat" works because we're confident that we are in fact intelligent and conscious, despite how ridiculous and unlikely the author manages to make it sound.

"They're made out of weights" works precisely because LLMs really do have this mysterious property that they seem somehow intelligent even though nobody can explain exactly why, and there's active debate over whether they could be considered conscious.

The thing being discussed isn't simply an arbitrary MacGuffin; in both cases the nature of the thing is central to the impact of the story.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#302

Post by LudwigNagasena »

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

I don't see how any of the works you referenced can account for that either? Since when is the problem of consciousness solved and we can definitely say what does or doesn't result in consciousness?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#303

Post by Planktonne »

iainmerrick wrote: post #301
Planktonne wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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].

No, the original "they're made out of meat" works because we're confident that we are in fact intelligent and conscious, despite how ridiculous and unlikely the author manages to make it sound. "They're made out of weights" works precisely because LLMs really do have this mysterious property that they seem somehow intelligent even though nobody can explain exactly why, and there's active debate over whether they coul…

I disagree; it works in the original because it's the unlikely consciousness that produces the text itself; in the LLM case, it's produced by the likely consciousness.

"Imagine how other intelligences would view us", written by us, hits a lot less hard when it's "imagine how our intelligences view a thing we are claiming is intelligent", not written by it.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#304

Post by jodrellblank »

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…

“Reflections on trusting trust” is the paper that posits a compiler which is edited once so that when it compiles a program, it adds a security vulnerability to it, and when it compiles it’s own source code, it adds this edit into itself. Then it is used to compile its own source code once. Then this edit is removed.

Now any study of the program or compiler source code will not show any vulnerability, but compiling the program will make a vulnerable program, and recompiling the compiler from its clean source code will not fix the situation.

This carrying down of a pattern which is not written down anywhere, a flaming torch lighting a torch lighting a torch, is analogous to four billion years of life on Earth. We talk like DNA is an everything-code that defines a human and a human brain, but it’s the implicit behaviour of cells (‘compiler’) and the mechanisms inside them which interpret DNA. The unbroken chain of life getting more and more complex and never being restarted from scratch, with the behaviours not written down anywhere for us to study. How does DNA arrange for x, y, z to happen? Maybe it doesn’t at all.

Accidentally stumbling on a mechanism that is simple enough to be recreated with every human birth might be possible, accidentally stumbling on a mechanism that took evolution billions of years to find and which it has hung onto by copying it and has never recreated it from scratch, could be much less likely, in a much bigger search space.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#305

Post by keybored »

maxbond wrote: post #250
keybored wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> What's the relevance?

It directly parallels your 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?

There are two aspects here.

1. That people find the question interesting

2. That it has any bearing on reality (ontology?)

The first aspect is anthropology. Russel’s Teapot is not supposed to undercut any anthropological arguments. It’s supposed to undercut the second aspect.

So far you have said that the argument is compelling. What’s that got to do with reality? A robot cow could be sexually arousing to a real bull.

> 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.

Yeah. AIs know how to use computers. What’s this got to do with consciousness? Whether or not you are an AI is practical and disprovable. Consciousness is so ephemeral (for lack of a better word, not literally) that Philosophical Zombies is a real argument/thought experiment.

You may think I’m being coy (“Can you be straight with me”) but that’s not my intent at all.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#307

Post by red75prime »

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…

> There is also an epistemological assumption that prevails, and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works.

It's good that it doesn't matter. Stochastic gradient descent works (or doesn't work) regardless of whether we know how the brain does its thing.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#308

Post by IsTom »

layer8 wrote: post #273
IsTom wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This way of thinking can only explain externally-visible parts of consciousness. It does nothing to address internal experience of being conscious and qualia. I don't think the internal experience has any bearing on physical reality (P-zombies would act the same externally) which makes this something outside of the realm of currently understood physics.

The internal experience has bearing on physical reality right here, because without it you wouldn’t have written about it and caused these words to appear on my screen in physical reality. It affects your thinking, and hence your actions and utterances in the physical word. For reasons like that, I don’t think that P-zombies are possible.

Internal experience affects movement of physical molecules in what way?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#309

Post by vkazanov »

bux93 wrote: post #116
vkazanov wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, physically absolutely nothing. But conceptually they seem to to form this very generic function from inputs to outputs that neurons also form.

Only if you ignore almost every input and output that neurons have. https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothing-like-a-brain-an... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9665914/ This is why making more neuromorphic NNs is still an active area of research, although they typically all focus on another extremely simplified model (spiking neural networks).

I don't ignore anything. I just refuse to accept the magical thinking around biological machines that are our brains/bodies. There are inputs, there are outputs, there is hidden function.

And it seems that, given enough input/outputs/compute, it is possible to train the necessary function.

Details of how the building bricks look like (matmul, electromagnetism or quantum effects) are not that relevant in the broader picture.

What is missing right now, is the fact that the function in question changes over time in biomachines, while our LLMs are static at inference time.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#310

Post by lxgr »

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…

> Modern psychology more or less has settled around the idea that consciousness is a product of the body.

The kind of consciousness we know. Jumping to the conclusion that that's the only kind possible, or even stronger that the way ours evolved is the only way this could have happened, is completely invalid.

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