Chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con • Hacker News Board

Re: Chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

#11

Post by K0balt » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 10:31 AM UTC

Since it is objectively true that LLMs are predictive text engines first and foremost, it leads me to the hypothesis that the intelligence displayed by them, and by association, perhaps humans as well, is in fact imbedded into memetic structures themselves in some kind of n-dimensional probability matrix.

In the same way that an arbitrarily detailed simulation could in theory be made into a “make your own adventure”lookup table, where the next “page” (screen bitmap) was determined by the “control” inputs, the underpinnings of reason could easily be contained in a mundane and deceptively static medium such as a kind of multidimensionally linked list structure.

It could be that neural networks inherently gravitate towards the processing of symbolic grammar (sequences of “symbols”) and that the ordered complexity inherent in arbitrarily high dimensional interrelations of these symbols in human memetic structures is sufficient to create the process that we think of as reasoning or even sentience.

While I definitely struggle to intuit this interpretation from an emotional standpoint, the sheer multitude of states possible inside such a system are sufficient to appear infinite and therefore intrinsically dynamic, and I fail to find evidence that they could not be instead developed from a static data structure .

If there is a grain of truth to this hypothesis it would fundamentally change the philosophical landscape not only around LLMs but also regarding intelligence itself, the implication being not that LLMs might be intelligent, but rather that biological intelligence might in fact derive its behavior from iterating over multidimensional matrixes of learned data, and that human intelligence owes much more to culture (a vastly expanded data set) than we may have previously imagined.

Re: Chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

#12

Post by grantcas » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 6:55 PM UTC

xg15 wrote: post #2

As someone who admittedly belongs more to the "AI believer" side, I find the vagueness of the training data increasingly frustrating. The thing that impressed me most about LLMs so far is less the factual correctness or incorrectness of its output but the fact that it appears (!) to understand the instructions that are given. I.e., even if you give it an improbable and outlandish task ("write a poem about kernel debu…

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461

Re: Chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

#13

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

kytazo wrote: post #5

To be honest, there have been occasions where I've been failing miserably for some time to come up with solutions to some sysadmin nature problems with my own systems and I've taken my problem straight to GPT-4 with a clear explanation of the issue alongside with any diagnostics I thought would make sense. To my very surprise, GPT-4 did an astonishing job reasoning on the specifics of my system (aarch64 exotic setup,…

Papers on arXiv where people try prompt engineering systematically find that chatbots, by short-circuiting, gets the answer right from 30-90% of the time depending on if the problem is terribly difficult or relatively easy.

You’re very likely to get good results with the first example that comes to your head because it will be something conventional for which the short-circuiting gets the right answer. Once you sample the problem space fairly you find the glass is maybe half-full or half-empty but it’s clear to me that one of the competences the chatbot has is getting people to give it more credit than it deserves.

Re: Chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

#14

Post by martingalex2 » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 9:42 PM UTC

K0balt wrote: post #11

Since it is objectively true that LLMs are predictive text engines first and foremost, it leads me to the hypothesis that the intelligence displayed by them, and by association, perhaps humans as well, is in fact imbedded into memetic structures themselves in some kind of n-dimensional probability matrix. In the same way that an arbitrarily detailed simulation could in theory be made into a “make your own adventure”l…

I'd love to get an AI philosopher to address the interesting thought experiment here. I think this really needs to get at the truth - paraphrasing Stephen Wolfram - of whether language is actually much simpler than we've all assumed all along.