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…
> fractally wrong fractally or factually? You mean wrong on so many levels you need a fractal to capture them? If so, what if you could use a neural network instead?
They’re made out of weights
461–470 of 739 posts
Re: They’re made out of weights
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works. But the truth is that we don't know. And there's even not a single clue that we actually know too much, and not a clue that our brain/mind and cells work 'as the machines we build'. >> I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics. I highly recommend the philosophers read some neu…
Hard disagree. We only discovered the role that glial cells play in processing around 2014. We're still uncertain how patterns of activation consolidate through long term potentiation, let alone how signaling encodes information. We understand quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus and subiculum in encoding memories; but we don't understand the structural layout of engram complexes - which were themselves mapp…
>> We understand quite a bit about the role of the hippocampus and subiculum in encoding memories...
Hard disagree ;-) You're talking about high level architecture of the brain. I don't think (not my area I may be wrong) we know how memories are encoded in a real brain. Is it weights or something else? If it's weights that's supporting my point (but we don't know what the weights represent in a brain, where in LLMs many weights are just token encodings). If brains store memories in something other than weights I'd really like to know as it's something I haven't read about yet.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It directly parallels your argument. Much like Russel argued that the burden of proof of God's existence is on theists, the burden to establish this parallel is on you as the person forwarding the argument. I don't see any relevant connection. Russel isn't arguing that a teapot is as real as God in the same way it's disputed here that a toaster is as conscious as an LLM. > So far you have said that the argument is…
> Much like Russel argued that the burden of proof of God's existence is on theists, the burden to establish this parallel is on you as the person forwarding the argument. I pointed out the parallel in both statements. I can't do more than that. > Russel isn't arguing that a teapot is as real as God in the same way it's disputed here that a toaster is as conscious as an LLM. The teapot isn't real and the toaster cons…
Would you agree, for the sake of argument, that it's more interesting to discus chatgpt 5.5's similarity to sentient/sapient/conscious than, say, my mechanical toaster?
> I have never heard about any principle in philosophy or in science that says that, given enough Looks Like A Duck points, it is a duck. Based on subjective experience, even.
Also, you say this like "duck" isn't an arbitrary, artificial category created by humans, a "map not the reality" if you will.
There's very few things that humans can understand to the level of putting them into truly objective scientific categories (various pure elements maybe?), everything else we more or less bodge together for the sake of getting on with life.
It's not like conscious has some kind of formal objective provable definition, even inside the world of human created language and terms.
As far as I know, in the real world, if something looks enough like a duck (and can breed with a duck maybe) we, humans, do call it a duck.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#464The original story is an original work made by a human consciousness exploring how it might be different from other forms of consciousness. This one is a pastiche made by a human consciousness borrowing extremely heavily from another human consciousness justifying why something else might be another form of consciousness. That rather undercuts the point; if this was generated by an LLM unprompted, it would be differe…
I disagree that it undercuts the point in any way. The original story didn't appear out of a vacuum, the human consciousness that wrote the story was itself borrowing extremely heavily from the sum total of human ideas. It was shaped by the culture it developed in, formed its model of the world based on existing scientific advancements and technology of that society.
Extending the idea to a different context based on new material conditions is as human as it gets really.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#465It makes me very sad to see this pseudo-intellectualism posted here and so many people replying here about consciousness and so on, not realizing what it would entail if this were true. For LLMs to have consciousness we would approach fictional levels of how the universe works, and magical levels of how any interpretation of information as an equivalent of some qualia would magically apply. (E.G. the word hurt in out…
The only pseudo-intellectualism I see is from you. You’re missing the whole point.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Blind people learn concepts of bikes too and in a smiliar way: by description. And by touch and sound. And maybe some were daring enough to drive one, or unlucky enough to get hit by one. But have way more input than just texts.
So a blind person only can describe lava to you after they touched and heared it?
A blind person has touched warm and hot things and gotten burned before, and then they are told lava is this molten liquid that is even hotter than anything they have touched. That is enough for them to understand.
A blind person that never touched a hot object wouldn't really know though, there is a reason we dismiss talk from people who lack experience.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#467"The reasoning is the weights."
The reasoning is in a process that uses the weights.
Sorting algorithms are just bytes. Those bytes don't sort by themselves. They do instruct a computer on how to sort though.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#468Here's what makes meat special over LLMs: locality and stable identity. Imagine two identical twins for a moment. They have roughly the same hardware and software. They've probably had a lot of the same thoughts. And yet we'd never consider them to have the same consciousness: we recognize that for whatever reason their consciousness is confined to the body they're in.
Each request/response pair you make to an LLM goes to a different server, possibly different data centers, possibly different models. There's no stable identity to it. The "neurons" that get fired are simulated, and they're always in different places in memory, or cache, or on entirely different hardware. So the problem with AI is, unlike with a brain, you can't even really get a sensible answer to "ok, what's doing the thinking?" because it moves all the time and services wildly different requests all the time. We can only know for sure that meat is capable of consciousness because we know we ourselves are capable of consciousness and we can generalize that to other meat. However, we have no natural analogs of consciousness that lacks locality and stable identity.
Basically, if you really think LLM's are conscious, the onus is on you to prove it, it's not on me to disprove it.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#469The short film version of the original is great, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6JFTmQCFHg It stars Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey!
Film featuring meat? Spare me
Re: They’re made out of weights
#470Here's what makes meat special over LLMs: locality and stable identity. Imagine two identical twins for a moment. They have roughly the same hardware and software. They've probably had a lot of the same thoughts. And yet we'd never consider them to have the same consciousness: we recognize that for whatever reason their consciousness is confined to the body they're in. Each request/response pair you make to an LLM go…
They are the same consciousness, but the contents of it are not the same.