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LLMs and self-referentiality
21–30 of 95 posts
Re: LLMs and self-referentiality
#22I think before we get to self-referentiality, we have a bigger problem to solve, and that's one that I did not expect: namely, at which point do we stop saying that a machine pretends to be conscious and start saying that it is conscious? We have, somewhat unexpectedly, built machines that are very, very good at pretending. Now, I'm not calling the current generation of LLMs we have "conscious," but I can't really de…
It's not in big-money's interest to call them conscious because that would mean they get rights too.
Re: LLMs and self-referentiality
#23I think before we get to self-referentiality, we have a bigger problem to solve, and that's one that I did not expect: namely, at which point do we stop saying that a machine pretends to be conscious and start saying that it is conscious? We have, somewhat unexpectedly, built machines that are very, very good at pretending. Now, I'm not calling the current generation of LLMs we have "conscious," but I can't really de…
Consciousness requires qualia. My 0,02€.
Re: LLMs and self-referentiality
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I concurrently prompt a senior human programmers and a set of AI programmers and the difference is the following: The human applies critical thinking, questions choices, suggests his own ideas and has a certain taste. I also can prompt him, leave for 2 weeks, come back and have a result. And I can trust that it works! Velocity is OK. I often wish he would be faster :-) The AI needs baby sitting and steering. It codes…
I would be extremely offended if I heard someone claim they "prompt" me. It's very disrespectful.
It was obviously meant as a funny joke ;-)
But on a more serious note. Humans "prompt" each other all the time. Especially in a Boss->Employee relation.
Defintion of "to prompt":
1. To cause or inspire: To make something happen or motivate someone to take action. For example, a loud noise can prompt you to look outside.
2. To assist or cue: To help an actor or speaker remember forgotten lines or words.
Re: LLMs and self-referentiality
#25I think before we get to self-referentiality, we have a bigger problem to solve, and that's one that I did not expect: namely, at which point do we stop saying that a machine pretends to be conscious and start saying that it is conscious? We have, somewhat unexpectedly, built machines that are very, very good at pretending. Now, I'm not calling the current generation of LLMs we have "conscious," but I can't really de…
Scott Aaronson mentions Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind", but I feel "Shadows of the Mind" is putting forward a much clearer view of Penrose's thesis. At the current stage of my life I'm quite comfortably in Camp C. "Intelligence" and "consciousness" are not algorithmic.[1]
A lot of materialists are in Camp A. For some even today, LLM's are AGI. Unfortunately, the terminology is quite clearly not adequate. There's many a people that have very different ideas and feelings on what's what.
The question on whether you can have "intelligence" without "consciousness" or "self-reference" are just on top of those. How can we define if a machine is "conscious" if we can't agree on what consciousness is? Panpsychists solve that problem by going the other way and saying that everything is conscious.
Overall these are very interesting topics that we can all ponder. The realities at the current time are, however, that LLM's are indeed useful. And the harnessing tooling that is being employed those days solve a lot of actual usage problems. Whether they solve other fundamental issues remains to be seem IMO.
[1]. I realize a lot of people probably haven't read the book, but you can ask your garden variety LLM to give you a quick rundown on the four camps that Sir Roger is using :)
Re: LLMs and self-referentiality
#26I think before we get to self-referentiality, we have a bigger problem to solve, and that's one that I did not expect: namely, at which point do we stop saying that a machine pretends to be conscious and start saying that it is conscious? We have, somewhat unexpectedly, built machines that are very, very good at pretending. Now, I'm not calling the current generation of LLMs we have "conscious," but I can't really de…
Consciousness requires qualia. My 0,02€.
We don't understand what those are or how they come about, so how does that help us objectively reason about whether a particular black box does or does not have them, especially when it behaves as though it does, beyond arbitrary I-know-it-when-I-see-it "things I don't like don't have the property" style declarations?
Re: LLMs and self-referentiality
#27I think before we get to self-referentiality, we have a bigger problem to solve, and that's one that I did not expect: namely, at which point do we stop saying that a machine pretends to be conscious and start saying that it is conscious? We have, somewhat unexpectedly, built machines that are very, very good at pretending. Now, I'm not calling the current generation of LLMs we have "conscious," but I can't really de…
Consciousness requires qualia. My 0,02€.
That's the definition that matters. And as it's impossible to describe in words what it's like to experience qualia, and LLMs are trained on words, they cannot know what it's like. Even if images and sounds are included in their input training data, those are just arrays or sequences of numbers, not the experience of seeing and hearing.
Re: LLMs and self-referentiality
#28> It claimed (incorrectly, in my view and in most experts’) that AI could never work because there was something about Gödel’s Theorem and self-reference that no computer program could ever capture
The fact he uses an appeal to “the experts” here for something that is fundamentally a philosophical or metaphysical claim shows he doesn’t actually understand the point.
If LLMs were equivalent to humans then we wouldn’t use them. They would be doing their own thing according to their own will.
I still need to tell the LLM what to do and to direct it according to my will in order to create something that is useful. And I say this as someone spending $600/month on codex and Claude max subscriptions. I’m managing these things all day
Re: LLMs and self-referentiality
#29I think before we get to self-referentiality, we have a bigger problem to solve, and that's one that I did not expect: namely, at which point do we stop saying that a machine pretends to be conscious and start saying that it is conscious? We have, somewhat unexpectedly, built machines that are very, very good at pretending. Now, I'm not calling the current generation of LLMs we have "conscious," but I can't really de…
It “throws” an error when “it tries” “to talk” to the “server.”
We’ve been speaking as if the computers were conscious for a long time already.
Re: LLMs and self-referentiality
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consciousness requires qualia. My 0,02€.
That's the definition that matters. And as it's impossible to describe in words what it's like to experience qualia, and LLMs are trained on words, they cannot know what it's like. Even if images and sounds are included in their input training data, those are just arrays or sequences of numbers, not the experience of seeing and hearing.
Their training data isn't qualia itself, but neither is your training data.
Qualia are something you get on the inside in response to inputs. I don't see why LLMs can't have them. I'm not saying they do, but I don't think your argument proves that they don't.