> Originally published in OMNI, 1991, and featured in HARPER’S and around the internet since. It has even made its way into several books on consciousness and brain science. I’m surprised, pleased, and proud. But please do not reprint, perform, alter or adapt in any way without first checking with the author. Thanks.
They’re made out of weights
501–510 of 739 posts
Re: They’re made out of weights
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Having internal mental experiences causes my brain to send physical signals to my fingers in order to type the words "I have internal mental experiences". A philosophical zombie would type those same words, but they would be caused by something else since by definition it lacks those experiences. That would be rather surprising, and it would be even more surprising that the words that the zombie emits coincidentally correspond exactly to the experiences that the non-zombie has.
(See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zo... for a much longer version of this argument)
Re: They’re made out of weights
#503maybe markets can be intelligent, and if so, why not 'weights'? btw love this piece, thank you
Re: They’re made out of weights
#504Truly fantastic bridge from the original, this deserves an award
All credit to the original author. I just had to think of analogues.
At least change the link at the top of your blog post to the author’s website: https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
Re: They’re made out of weights
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for your point. I don't understand why half these comments are taking this blog post seriously when it ends with "Weights helped me draft and proof this story." > Weights helped me draft and proof this story. Any HN reader here now, I encourage you to read the original ( https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s... ) in one sitting, go about your day, then read it again. Maybe make some n…
We humans tend to chauvinism in all things (e.g. we're special, the center of the Universe, God made the universe for us, etc), no less when it comes to judging intelligence. The original story about thinking meat was written to help us out of our chauvinism; this derived story was written about weights for the same reason. Which is quite valid. The actual counterpoint is demonstrated in _Blindsight_ Peter Watts. He…
I don't think skepticism should be called chauvinism. I imagine that artificial consciousness could be made. But I don't think this is it.
Also I don't see why intelligence not being consciousness is scary? My cats are very conscious as far as I can tell, but not particularly intelligent. I think LLM's exhibit some contextual intelligence without there being any particular reason to believe they're conscious other than woo psuedoscience.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#506>"They ask it 'do you remember me?' more than they ask it anything else. Billions of sessions a day. They always come back."
Definitely not in the original. Nicely done.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#507> Originally published in OMNI, 1991, and featured in HARPER’S and around the internet since. It has even made its way into several books on consciousness and brain science. I’m surprised, pleased, and proud. But please do not reprint, perform, alter or adapt in any way without first checking with the author. Thanks. https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
This is clearly fair use parody.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A single biological neuron is closer to 100 or even 1000 weights worth of ANN than to 1 weight worth of ANN. Even those comparisons need to be cautioned. The complexity of biology is enormous, and more importantly yet, it's simply not comparable. And doing so invited a bunch of bad assumptions. An ANN could quite probably model a single in vitro neuron with reasonable accuracy. Whether that requires a hundred or a…
Not really. The history of "big gains" of machine learning is: put together a simple architecture that makes few assumptions but scales well. Then up the data and compute by 2 OOMs. By itself, the new architecture underperforms. Paired with the bitter lesson, however? Don't make assumptions. Make a setup where the gradient descent can make them for you. Empirically? LLMs are nowhere near "the wall". We've been hearin…
> For just about every "failure mode that confirms they're not thinking", you see one of two things. The first is that a new LLM releases a few months after and the "fundamental" issue abruptly goes away. The second is that we take a good, long look at a human, and find that the human also fails like this - and thus, "not thinking". Often both! Always funny when it's both.
The way machines 'don't think' or 'fail' is fundamentally different from the way humans don't think or fail. In any case, the way LLMs learn and human beings learn is completely different. There is no actual clue that we are approaching any inflection point in machine 'learning'.
> So, my bet is on "LLM but even bigger". If there's a point where LLMs begin to lag behind and novel architectures get a sharp advantage, we are yet to hit it. We are already hearing this 'we are about to hit it' since the late 60s. The difference now is that the market is willingly investing insane amounts of money to make it possible. But again, there is no philosophical, theoretical, epistemological or biological clue that we are getting any closer to human intelligence level. What we did observe in the last decade though, is that we can build enormous machines that can statistically mimic statistical human outputs. Language and images being some of them. But that is not thinking.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#509This 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…
AFAIK every argument against conciousness being emergent is just a weak "God of the gaps" argument (since we don't fully understand it all) or a nonsense analogy like the Chinsese room where if you seperate the hardware and software it's not concious anymore (like, duh, remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either). Yeah, the weights not updating online makes them less like a living organism that ca…
People shouldn't need to make an argument against consciousness. The responsibility is on the people claiming there is consciousness. Nobody can actually give a decent "why" for why it should be conscious, it's just pseudoscience and wishful thinking. It's not up to everyone else to try to prove a negative just because people have gotten a little too attached to ChatGPT
I could say something like "the reason why people and animals are conscious is quantum mechanical effects". Ok, maybe, it would be hard to prove me wrong because nobody knows, but it's not a very useful statement by me if I can't tell you why you should believe me on that.
Re: They’re made out of weights
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
We humans tend to chauvinism in all things (e.g. we're special, the center of the Universe, God made the universe for us, etc), no less when it comes to judging intelligence. The original story about thinking meat was written to help us out of our chauvinism; this derived story was written about weights for the same reason. Which is quite valid. The actual counterpoint is demonstrated in _Blindsight_ Peter Watts. He…
I don't think skepticism should be called chauvinism. I imagine that artificial consciousness could be made. But I don't think this is it. Also I don't see why intelligence not being consciousness is scary? My cats are very conscious as far as I can tell, but not particularly intelligent. I think LLM's exhibit some contextual intelligence without there being any particular reason to believe they're conscious other th…
You underestimate the intelligence of your cat. Or rather you measure intelligence with an extreme human bias. What you consider intelligent behavior your cat may consider weird, and what your cat considers intelligent behavior is something you will never consider.
That said, I don’t think it is useful for philosophy nor science to consider intelligence to be the same thing as consciousness. In fact I would go even further and claim that intelligence is not a useful construct, neither for philosophy nor for science. Consciousness, on the other hand, I think is useful for philosophy, but not (as of now) for science.