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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

#111

Post by zkmon »

> First there is a concept, a feeling, an image, and then the words come out to describe it.

Nope. Concepts, feelings and ideas do not exist independent of expression (words, sounds, responses). Humans have the same process as LlMs have. And that's precisely why LMs are able to succeed. Similar to how camera works based on the working of an eye, or how aeroplane works based on a birds wing.

If you still believe that concepts exist independently, imagine a creature that can't express, make sounds, or respond with actions. What exactly is a "concept or feeling" to such creature? Do trees have concepts and feelings? Infact trees could, because they can respond to stimulants.

If you can't describe or perceive a thing, that thing doesn't exist in your world. It's that simple.

What you are describing as "translating thoughts into words" is actually, refining your expression. The expression already exists at the same time as the thought.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#112

Post by jvanderbot »

sometimelurker wrote: post #110
jvanderbot wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love the analogy. I a lot of people had their mind blown by vector space representation of words. The idea that Female + King averaged out around "Queen". Words might foundational to concepts or just really-well-designed ways to transmit them.

You have the word 'bot' in your name and judging by your comment history love using em-dashes. Are you a machine or not?

I doubt I used emdashes, but I do us "-". I dont have emdash unicode bound to my keyboard yet. (edit: Hyphenation is not emdash, of course)

you can view my profile details freely and decide for yourself, and a quick look might even explain the "bot" suffix.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#113

Post by dinfinity »

sometimelurker wrote: post #107
jacobr1 wrote: post #20

LLMs 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…

And they do have internal latent vectors for their own states, so there's some kind of recursion/introspectiveness dynamic.

Exactly. The translation back to words is the final step, so in a way very similar to what the post describes.

Improvements in model performance have been made exactly by having intermediate steps stay in the form of internal representations rather than words.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#114

Post by jacobr1 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #93
kibwen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the Chinese Room shows that the existence of a mapping from input to output, however emergently it might have been devised, is not alone sufficient to demonstrate understanding.

"Understanding" is your word, it doesn't appear in the source article nor the comment you're responding to. The Chinese Room argument does not attempt to show that a mapping from input to output can't implement a latent space, or that it can't implement complex models of what the language is describing. If a person can express those things explicitly in the output, or if you have to do them in order to correctly resp…

Right - the point I was refuting is that LLMs are "just statistical models of words." More is going on. Does that imply "understanding?" I don't know, I'm not sure we have a good enough definition to say. But it does mean that the models are more complex that say, markov chain graphs with corpus frequencies. It seems we are encoding data in the latent space with much higher complexity than "just words." There is higher order semantic information being captured - probably not the same has human "thoughts" - but again - also not _just words_.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#115

Post by estearum »

lightedman wrote: post #105
Fraterkes wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for the pupil dilation thing? Sounds fascinating!

I scored a 68 on the VVIQ and I can watch my pupils dilate in response to me 'seeing' something in my mind. It doesn't have to be a bright light in my mind's eye, I can imagine something that would trigger a fight or flight response and make the same thing happen.

Yeah this is another test they use: imagine something frightening and "normal people" will get clammy hands and elevated heart rates while aphantasics will not

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#116

Post by brookst »

devmor wrote: post #65
etrautmann wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is different if you have vision though. I struggle to understand how someone can look at intelligent animals that don’t have language and not intuitively assume that they’re conscious. Yes this is a tricky problem without an answer but IMO the elements of consciousness can exist without language if visual abstractions are present.

Animals don’t have language the same way we do, but many of them do have some kind of semi-structured communication. Cats for example, when domesticated, develop an entirely parallel method of communication specifically to interact with humans - one that is neotenous in genesis, but nonetheless absent from their feral counterparts.

While true, the connection between communication and consciousness is thin. Plenty of plants communicate with each other, but it’s seen as signaling rather than consciousness.

I believe that conscious is a gradient not a binary, and I believe that cats have some level of consciousness, but I’m not sure communication is the thing to hang that on.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#117

Post by tsss »

2snakes wrote: post #22

I do not think the written description of a dog is the same as a dog itself…

Maybe it is. If you think about it hard, you will find that you cannot separate the idea of dog from the word dog. The object dog can only be understood as a perception linked to that idea.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#118

Post by justbees »

estearum wrote: post #55
vitamark wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10…

IMO it's far more likely that people don't agree on what it means to "have an internal monologue" than that people actually bifurcate that dramatically on cognition. Surely there are some people with an actual difference from baseline, but I don't think it's the near-equal split that seems to appear when you just ask people about internal monologue This is in contrast with aphantasia (complete lack of mental imagery)…

My mom has aphantasia and we were both shocked to discover it even exists.

She saw something about it online and then started asking everyone in the family if they could picture an apple in their mind. We all said - yes of course, what are you talking about?

And she said, "When you say the word apple, I think of the concept of an apple. It's juicy. It's crisp. It's red, etc, but I don't SEE an apple. I just know what it is."

She had no concept that other people literally saw the apple and I had no concept that people couldn't see the apple.

I asked her what she thought the phrase "in your minds eye" meant for her entire life and she said she thought it just meant exactly what she was describing and not literally seeing anything...

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#119

Post by estearum »

amalcon wrote: post #91
estearum wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's far more likely that people don't agree on what it means to "have an internal monologue" than that people actually bifurcate that dramatically on cognition. Surely there are some people with an actual difference from baseline, but I don't think it's the near-equal split that seems to appear when you just ask people about internal monologue This is in contrast with aphantasia (complete lack of mental imagery)…

I don't think a bifurcation of cognition is necessary to explain this. You get both people who claim to always think with words (to the point where they don't understand how it's possible to think without one), and people who claim never to outside of linguistic tasks like writing (to the point where they need "internal monologue" explained to them). In my experience, if you get down to it -- most people will have ex…

I still think it's far more likely that people aren't describing the same thing. People are very, very bad at interpreting and experiencing their mind's inner workings. Then getting them to describe and compare those inner workings is, IMO, largely a fool's errand. I'll wait until someone develops an external validation of this to believe it.

I say this as someone who pays a lot of attention to my mind's inner workings (meditation etc, near-complete aphantasic) and the more I pay attention to the inner workings, the less I know the answer to whether or not I have an inner monologue.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#120

Post by sometimelurker »

jvanderbot wrote: post #112
sometimelurker wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the word 'bot' in your name and judging by your comment history love using em-dashes. Are you a machine or not?

I doubt I used emdashes, but I do us "-". I dont have emdash unicode bound to my keyboard yet. (edit: Hyphenation is not emdash, of course) you can view my profile details freely and decide for yourself, and a quick look might even explain the "bot" suffix.

Oh I figured there's a real human being named Josh Vander and youre his openclaw or something. why do you have the `bot` suffix?
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