For LLMs there is no consciousness.
Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
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Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#22I do not think the written description of a dog is the same as a dog itself…
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#23Stop for one second and ask yourself a simple question. Where do your words come from? When you speak, what comes first, the idea or the word? Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it? I think we all do. The word is never the start. The word is just the skin. The idea, the consciousness, is the thing sitting under it.
"For an LLM, it is exactly the opposite". Is it really? LLMs don't have words inside, for the most part they operate by applying transformations to a vector that does not contain any words at all. Words that come out of an LLM are just what sampler gives us by looking at the vector that is the result of those transformations. Does this vector contain a world model? Some form of thoughts or reasoning to arrive at the…
>Does this vector contain a world model? Some form of thoughts or reasoning to arrive at the result? That's an open question really.
It is, but it has been explored in various forms. Anthropic have some interesting papers where they can map out concepts to some extent as they exist inside the vectors of the LLM, and they can see e.g. that vectors relating to some concept can appear there some iterations before the LLM emits the tokens that spell it out. (though also, quite frankly, this shouldn't be all that surprising. If they were just picking the next token with no representation of what might follow it the result would be more like the 'one-word-at-a-time' party game than coherent text. They used poetry with a rhyming scheme as an example because it's something where you need to have some idea of what might rhyme with the line before and aim at it at the start of the next line in order to have any degree of success).
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’re stochastic parrots most of the time, with a varying ability to reason but opting for pattern conformity usually
This is getting voted down because people just hate the idea that it's true.
No it's down voted because we didn't stochastic parrot ourselves into landing on the moon and building the internet and modern highways and skyscrapers
Dismissing humanity that was is absurd
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#25It is not all obvious that consciousness precedes language. Hellen Keller provides a vivid description of her pre-verbal mental state as something less than reflective conscious. > Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or…
Helen Keller was blind and deaf from infancy. What her teacher gave her was a way of systematizing what little sensory stimulation she was capable of receiving. "Language", in the topical sense of "the textual encoding of language that LLMs ingest and emit", is certainly not required for consciousness. Rather, what you need is a way to identify and predict patterns borne out of repeated observations, which is complicated by the lack of ability to observe.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#26It is not all obvious that consciousness precedes language. Hellen Keller provides a vivid description of her pre-verbal mental state as something less than reflective conscious. > Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or…
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Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#27"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
And Islam the first verse was ‘read’
The first time I heard about emergent behavior in llms I thought about that.
Maybe thought is too much because I don’t have anything coherent in mind but it feels so captivating like the premise of sci-fi story.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#28Can you please point me to the proof of the first claim?
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#29Words limit our understanding of words because they are intrinsic to a particular kind of understanding. yes? no?
In "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", Christopher Alexander talks about how we can know something is wrong even when we do not know how to make something right. He was talking about this I think
=z==
as opposed to
+|+|+
or
+|+|+|
I happened upon the word "entanglement" and it seems an interesting alternative to the order that is inherent in words.
Our language is all about Actor-verb-object. Entanglement provides a fundamentally different concept. I cannot say "I drove my car on the road" with entanglement. Or at least with entanglement I can say something equally valid like "the road moved my car with me inside."
And entanglement works for the + and | things, at least for me. There is some kind of entanglement (degree) that creates a gestalt.
At least that is the best I can come up with.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#30Isn't it interesting then how much of our intelligence is captured by our words/language? I would've thought to create AI you needed to replicate neurons and synapses and learning. So it's still amazing to me that statistical modelling of our words creates a Claude Opus.