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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

#131

Post by tgv »

michael1999 wrote: post #10

It 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…

Animals communicate, and it may be primitive, but a lot of it doesn't seem to require consciousness. Should someone insist, it then depends on what you call "a word".

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

#132

Post by kibwen »

Marha01 wrote: post #81
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.

The Chinese Room as a whole understands.

That's irrelevant to what we're talking about, though. The point here is not to assert whether or not the room understands, but to emphasize that our methods are insufficient to demonstrate this. You could posit that the room understands, or you could posit the reverse, and neither argument can be refuted.

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

#133

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #125
Fraterkes wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption of this sort of argument, if I understand it correctly, is that consciousness is just an ordinary byproduct that appears (or grows gradually) somewhere on the spectrum of complexity. If that’s true, mastering language is basically orthogonal to being conscious (as you’d maybe expect, GPT-2 was pretty good at language, but had a relatively tiny amount of “neurons”). The same is arguably true for world m…

Likewise, what reason do we have to assume that any given human is conscious?

Or that anything at all is not conscious?

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

#135

Post by kazinator »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #80
sourdecor wrote: post #46

Reminds 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…

While I know what Douglas Hofstadter's book "Godel Escher Bach - an eternal golden braid" is, it might be worth revisiting your apparent assumption that more or less everybody on HN knows about a book from 47 years ago (regardless of its significance to those of us who have encountered it already).

LOL, I happen to have a "Hofstadter_GEB.pdf" open on my desktop; been there for months.

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

#136

Post by infinite_spin »

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)…

I'm very reluctant to believe people when they say they don't have an internal monologue. Studies on the matter all appear to rely on self-reported data, not objective measurements. It's been shown that electromyography can be used to measure myoelectric signals produced when a person subvocalizes their speech (i.e. an inner monologue). It works well enough to reconstruct and synthesize that speech.

So we could test this objectively, and I'm not sure why we haven't.

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

#137

Post by bayarearefugee »

vitamark wrote: post #38
michael1999 wrote: post #10

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

There is also a rather thorny chicken and egg problem.

If language is required for thinking and conscious experience how did we manage to develop language in the first place.

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

#138

Post by orthoxerox »

zkmon wrote: post #111

> 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…

My son is insufficiently verbal (he's of the kind that communicates with quotes, but really struggles to express or understand new sentences), and I am quite sure he has concepts, feelings and ideas.

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

#139

Post by Dependance »

brotchie wrote: post #90
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #59

Maybe consciousness just does not exist. Could it be that humans invented it to feel superior to animals, but it does not really exist? I wonder if we will think of the word "consciousness" in the same way we think of the word "aether" in the future.

If consciousness didn’t exist, you wouldn’t exist! you’d have no interior experience.

How do you know they have one ?

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

#140

Post by triceratops »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #137
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…

There is also a rather thorny chicken and egg problem. If language is required for thinking and conscious experience how did we manage to develop language in the first place.

Human level thinking and conscious experience aren't required for language. Dogs understand spoken words and gestures. They're also pretty good at making themselves understood through noises and body language. Humans have better hardware than dogs for making noises.

I could see language development bootstrapping abstract thinking over generations in humans.

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