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Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
251–260 of 268 posts
Re: Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Philosophy is an intrinsically human thing. It has to be." What is philosophy? Thinking? Reasoning? Thinking about thinking? You're asserting that only a human brain can think and reason? Surely other animals can as well. Couldn't aliens as well? Why can't this crazy electronic box? Where do we draw the line? Do dolphins not have internal experiences? Dogs? Cats? Mice? Fish? Worms? Bugs? Amoebas? We don't even reall…
I suggest you print out this exchange and spend a week away from the computer, then re-read what was printed. I'm not trying to be rude but I gave you the answers. Alien philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not aliens. Tree philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not trees. Dolphin philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not dolphins, etc. Everything else you mentioned is "hallucinatory" and you nee…
These discussions are older than computers. I suggest you take a beginner level philosophy course.
Re: Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, a proper definition of reasoning must be provided. How are you defining reasoning, exactly? You imply that formal logic is reasoning. Is reasoning just formal logic or is formal logic just a subset of reasoning? If a subset, what’s the rest of it? Since they implement logic, do Prolog programs “reason” or are they just performing inference according to the SLD resolution algorithm?
> proper definition of reasoning must be provided It will be related to the context. If a process tells me that "if the light is blue and the sound is sharp then the lever must be lowered", it outputs reasoning; if what the activity did was running on conditional paths like an Expert System, what it did was different from the content and only improper reasoning; if the activity produced semantic evaluations about the…
> If a process tells me that "if the light is blue and the sound is sharp then the lever must be lowered", it outputs reasoning
By this definition, all computer programs using simple IF statements are reasoning.
Re: Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine a calculator program that computes billions of two number multiplications accurately by looking up prior examples but fails on simple multiplications often as it doesn’t have it in its training dataset. > We won’t say the program actually multiplies numbers. That's a good analogy. To extend it further, in cases where the calculator can't handle a question - e.g. numbers too large - a properly designed calcu…
This is a strawman. LLMs have the ability to identify when they can’t solve a question just like humans.
A strawman? Don’t be ridiculous. Hallucination remains an unsolved problem, and LLMs do not have any meaningful ability to recognize when a conversation has steered outside the training data.
If you can somehow change that, there is a Turing award waiting.
Re: Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suggest you print out this exchange and spend a week away from the computer, then re-read what was printed. I'm not trying to be rude but I gave you the answers. Alien philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not aliens. Tree philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not trees. Dolphin philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not dolphins, etc. Everything else you mentioned is "hallucinatory" and you nee…
"Alien philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not aliens" Plenty of non-Chinese people study Chinese philosophy. It isn't at all irrelevant if the goal is to understand the Chinese (not to mention that some of their ideas may be relevant to us as well). If we learned that aliens existed, I'm sure plenty of humans would want to study their philosophy too.
Chinese are human.
Our only reference point with an alien philosophy would be that we can only approach it from human basis
Re: Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suggest you print out this exchange and spend a week away from the computer, then re-read what was printed. I'm not trying to be rude but I gave you the answers. Alien philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not aliens. Tree philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not trees. Dolphin philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not dolphins, etc. Everything else you mentioned is "hallucinatory" and you nee…
> irrelevant to us because we're not What an unnecessarily dismissive "argument". I'm certainly not a CPU, nor a painting, nor a bird, yet plenty of people find these topics and many others interesting.
Yes, because they are human and that is the whole point.
An LLM can't find anything interesting except that it parroted the word interesting from prior written human text.
Re: Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is not semantics. For decades, logic and CS researchers have known what reasoning is. Curious what this is!
This is a great resource https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handbook_of_Automated_Reasonin...
Lots of people asking here for this clear definition.
If you understand this well, please lay it out here in a straightforward manner.
Re: Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
#258I'll admit that I find this discussion a bit navel-gazy. It has become a question of semantics not a question of actual functionality. The question has become "what do we mean when we use the word 'reasoning'" which is uninteresting. Dijkstra said[1] "... the question whether computers can think. The question is just as relevant and just as meaningful as the question whether submarines can swim." I don't see a clear…
Philosophical thinking about the nature of things is actually pretty enjoyable for some of us and probably a good thing to have in society The answers to these questions probably do start to inform how we should treat these AI machines as a society too. For instance, legally, should AI have human rights? Well, we have to try and understand how much of an independent entity AIs are, how "conscious" they are, before we…
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Re: Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'll admit that I find this discussion a bit navel-gazy. It has become a question of semantics not a question of actual functionality Ah, so you're more in the Investor mindset than the Scientist mindset. All you care about is results, not how it got there. There's a whiff of "hey, it's magic!" to that.
No, that's stupid. The question of how LLMs (and "LRM"'s, an unfortunate and by the article's own admission, already outdated term) accomplish what they accomplish is fascinating. The question of whether they reason is meaningless. Most of the article is about the latter, with tiny tiny tiny bits of the former.
> The question of whether they reason is meaningless.
I'd disagree. Reason is the most reliable way we currently have of drawing conclusions (fewest false negatives, at least), so if we want to build AI that can draw similarly strong conclusions, it could be useful for them to reason.
It also helps to reframe our ideas of what they're doing - i.e., don't call it "reasoning" if it's not actually that reliable, because it builds a false trust in their conclusions.
And last - epistemologically, is there a connection between what LRMs are doing now and actual reasoning? Is it possible to smoothly transition from one to the other? Exploring different types of cognition and the connections between them mathematically is pretty damn interesting
Re: Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the other comments pointing out that LLMs do not have senses and because of that they do not "experience" an apple at all are correct. When given a sequence of tokens e.g. "an apple tastes " an LLM performs a mathematical transformation that modifies the input tokens using the stored weights within the model to predict the most statistically likely next token(s) (which may be "sweet and crisp..."). It's important…
Tell me why only human brains are capable of whatever thought, conscious, or experience is (if you can define them) and I'll congratulate you on solving the hard problem of consciousness.
Reading both your comments, I don't see them suggest that only human brains are capable of experience. Not even "only animal brains", for that matter.