We can't define consciousness well enough to make claims like this.
Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
41–50 of 204 posts
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#42It’s funny because, ever since Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics was published in 1948, we’ve been trying to replicate how the human brain works. In that sense, we’ve been building increasingly powerful machines that mimic human thought. And now, the most interesting thing is something that turns that idea on its head: LLMs think in reverse.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#43That words are a byproduct of consciousness is a bold claim and requires some justification. I'm not implying it's backwards also for humans, but that the statement might not be true, and something else could be. Also, defining consciousness is hard. For instance, you can dream words.
Have you ever had impressions about something complicated, e.g. someone's personality which you cannot put into words?
I'm thinking of my kid - her personality when she was tiny. I could see what it was but not explain it.
Hence I think ideas are unquestionably first and words are the inadequate and inaccurate description of thoughts that exist without them.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#44“The relationship of thought to word is not a thing but a process, a movement from thought to word and from word to thought.” Vygotsky
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#45That words are a byproduct of consciousness is a bold claim and requires some justification. I'm not implying it's backwards also for humans, but that the statement might not be true, and something else could be. Also, defining consciousness is hard. For instance, you can dream words.
Have you ever had impressions about something complicated, e.g. someone's personality which you cannot put into words? I'm thinking of my kid - her personality when she was tiny. I could see what it was but not explain it. Hence I think ideas are unquestionably first and words are the inadequate and inaccurate description of thoughts that exist without them.
That may be true without implying that words are a always a byproduct of consciousness. You can dream words.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#46Reminds me of this from "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid":
"Let me rephrase these last couple of sentences without using the slightly technical term "isomorphism". When a system of "meaningless" symbols has patterns in it that accurately track, or mirror, various phenomena in the world, then that tracking or mirroring imbues the symbols with some degree of meaning - indeed, such tracking or mirroring is no less and no more than what meaning is. Depending on how complex and subtle and reliable the tracking is, different degrees of meaningfulness arise." - P-3
EDIT: I initially wrote "G.E.B." instead of "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" which was too cryptic.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#47LLMs as clearly doing more than just modeling words. In order to predict word placement, they need to build some kind of model, their latent space, of the types of things they are able to predict. Not really full world models yet - but they have decent "blog space" or "github project" models. And you can see this with multimodality, or non-text modality modals such as images and audio. They map from their latent spac…
Or.. the LLMs are just "telescope" sufficiently powerful to detect the aligned internal representation that already exists.
A more powerful telescope does not "create" new galaxies.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#48It 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…
this was absolutely fascinating to read
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#49It 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…
It is likely that language forms a sort of quanta of reasoning. It is far easier to posit a verbal hypothesis pertaining to verbal subjects and test it than to try and do it nonverbally.
Maths is probably a great example of this. Try and describe Pythagoras' Theorem without using maths notation or words. Difficult, right? Reasoning is a House of Cards, and without understanding what the card is that exercise becomes significantly more difficult.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#50"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.
Some folks interpret that sentence in a mystical way - the first word was Om, from which all the universe was created.