I do not think the written description of a dog is the same as a dog itself…
Nothing is the same as the dog but we probably store a lot of sensory information, emotions and images relating to dogs in our heads.
Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
31–40 of 204 posts
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#32The author is making a big mistake by making a normative claim about 'true' intelligence and consciousness.
Is there a correct way to cognize? And although he feels cognizing works in a very specific direction, his brain is basically doing a very similar guessing game on a deep level with training of pathways that started at birth. Basing the argument in a feeling about consciousness is not convincing.
The author thinks they are describing a unique human magic, forgetting Augustine's insight that human thought doesn't precede the word, but is brought into consciousness by it.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#33No, I don't think so. Language is intimately intertwined with our understanding of the world. Many people make the mistake to think that languages are about the spelling or the sound or maybe the grammar. But in reality they are about how words are defined only on relation to each other. A symbol is defined by what it is not. This relationship between symbols structures how we think about the world and how we fantasize and desire.
You can perhaps have a consciousness without words, but not without language.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#34"At its core, it is a big pile of words that predicts the next word, using some maths the computers figured out."
"An LLM predicts the next word based on all the words before it. That is the whole story. There is no idea sitting underneath. The words are everything."
This is just flat out wrong.
Words are used as training data, to build a system of vector embeddings. The LLM contains no words. That was the training data long discarded.
Vector embeddings are groupings of meanings derived from the relationship between the words in its training data. This entire system is modelled after human neural mechanisms in a way that machines can emulate.
"But your brain works the other way around. First there is a concept, a feeling, an image, and then the words come out to describe it. (At least, this is how I feel my own brain working.) For us, words are the byproduct of consciousness."
It's working the same way around (you are not saying Ai has consciousness that is derived from words!). And you make a huge jump from the concept that 'words come from concepts' to 'words are the byproduct of consciousness'. Because 'concepts' are not equal to 'consciousness'.
In fact you do not define consciousness at all, making it hard to determine what argument you are actually making at all. You seem to think humans have this trait of 'consciousness' but can't explain or evidence it beyond 'feeling it'.
Consciousness it defined by many as the ability to experience events and process thoughts or qualia. It's hard to test this, and we can see why that is with an AI - it may claim to be conscious, or even claim not to be, but how can we trust either answer? Philosophers aren't even sure to trust another human who claims to be conscious, and we struggle constantly to determine at what point creatures the animal kingdom are conscious or not. Cats? Lobsters? Snails? or even across the plants?
Before you can refute the consciousness of AI, first establish the consciousness of humans. A better question to ask is what does the uncanny emergent ability of an AI to mimic a human say about consciousness?
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#35But LLMs aren't just shuffling words around. Words (tokens) are the "human interface" at the edges. Text input gets embedded, then there's this huge latent-space computation in the middle, and only at the tail end does that get converted back into word/token probabilities. So just saying that "words are the source" isn't entirely correct and feels misleading.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#36> 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?
Let's take a feral human, do they achieve the same with language powered humans? No, obviously. It means language does something we can't replace with "consciousness". Maybe something life preserving, putting consciousness downstream of language use.
But more generally - how can 8B humans make a living on this planet? Not without language, that is for sure! We long passed the stage where we could exist without language at our consumption rate. We can't even exist without math, population collapse would be the outcome.
Minds are downstream from language & math. For example, is music downstream of piano or piano downstream of music? I think you can't cut this cleanly. They developed in relation to the other, recursion between tool and art form is already old.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#37It 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…
Similarly, I'm reading "Supernormal Stimuli" now, and there's a whole section on infants raised by various animals (chimps, wolves, chickens, leopards, etc, etc). When they are found and brought back to human societies, basically none of them develop full language and integrate fully.
There's also the grim history of language deprivation experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experimen...
It really does seem like language is a key part of how we develop our human intelligence.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#38It 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…
Well, language is not really required for thinking and conscious experiences, a huge chunk of people don't even have an internal monologue, and some (that'd be me) don't have any "byproducts" of thought process.
Though there are recent experiments showing that unconscious brain retains language processing abilities [1], so the two might be as well independent systems
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#39"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.
Word in the Bible is not meaning the actual word (like sematic array of characters) but more like greek word logos
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#40As others have remarked: this is an unsubstantiated claim.
I am actually using LLMs to perform controlled experiments to determine if the opposite is true, and that consciousness is a byproduct of language as Jaynes might have agreed.