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They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

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Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#131

Post by admax88qqq »

boringuser2 wrote: post #112
kragen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while they don't yet rise to the level i would describe as 'intelligent' without qualifications, they do seem to be less unintelligent than most of the humans, and in particular most of the ones criticizing them in this way, who consistently repeat specific criticisms applicable to years-ago systems which have no factual connection to current reality

It doesn't matter how it "appears". A disembodied paragraph that I've transmitted to you can appear to be intelligent or not, but it only really matters in the sense that you can ascribe that intellect to an agent. The LLM isn't an agent and no intellect can be ascribed to it. It is a device actual intelligent agents have made and ascribing it intellect is equally as erroneous.

Why couldn't it be an agent for the short time that it's generating an intelligent looking paragraph?

Do you know what gives rise to consciousness? If not how can we be sure it doesn't arise from a giant pile of linear algebra?

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#132

Post by kolinko »

gcanyon wrote: post #40
surprisetalk wrote: post #15

Andy Weir's The Egg is another excellent short story: [1] http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html If you're looking for more short stories, I highly recommend the following: • Ted Chiang's Exhalation • Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life and Others • Ken Liu's Paper Menagerie • Borges's Ficciones • Smullyan's What is the Name of This Book? • Smullyan's Lady or the Tiger? • Douglas Adams's God's Debris Remember t…

Ted Chiang is a genius, and pretty much everything he writes is magnificent. "Exhalation" is ridiculously good. "Understand" is probably my favorite.

Exhalation is also done as a best audiobook I've listened to - with author's comments (read by himself) interjected between the stories.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#133

Post by kolinko »

shpx wrote: post #96

I've never understood what people see in this story. Meat is a complex organization of trillions of self-replicating machines, each of which (besides red blood cells maybe) is also incredibly complex... much more advanced than anything human minds have been able to build. I can't imagine what a sentient entity would have to be made out of or how much less "efficient" or stable it would have to be than me for me to fi…

Actually, the story doesn't say that it's machines if I can see correctly. It might just as well be other evolved organisms, just not protein/"meat" based.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#134

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

themanmaran wrote: post #63
fiforpg wrote: post #21

I like how the word "meat" is clearly an inaccurate translation of a notion in the language of the conversation, for lack of a better word in human languages. "Organic matter" would be more accurate, but less striking. Meaning, "meat" is a variation on the "unreliable narrator" theme: the "unreliable language". This is used a lot in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun , where medieval language describes artifacts of a s…

The Long Sun series (also Gene Wolfe) was another excellent use of this. Everything is narrated by a priest unknowingly living on a generational starship and you're left to interpret the world around them.

Also happens in a classical setting with the Soldier of the Mist books.

That's sort of a "house special" at the Gene Wolfe fine writing establishment - his characters use the words expectable for their time and circumstances, and the reader has to work it out to the contemporary context.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#135

Post by kragen »

boringuser2 wrote: post #112
kragen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while they don't yet rise to the level i would describe as 'intelligent' without qualifications, they do seem to be less unintelligent than most of the humans, and in particular most of the ones criticizing them in this way, who consistently repeat specific criticisms applicable to years-ago systems which have no factual connection to current reality

It doesn't matter how it "appears". A disembodied paragraph that I've transmitted to you can appear to be intelligent or not, but it only really matters in the sense that you can ascribe that intellect to an agent. The LLM isn't an agent and no intellect can be ascribed to it. It is a device actual intelligent agents have made and ascribing it intellect is equally as erroneous.

you seem to be begging the question

almost precisely the same assertions could be made about you with precisely the same degree of justification: you aren't an agent and no intellect can be ascribed to you. you are a device unintelligent agents have made and ascribing you intellect is equally as erroneous

an intelligent agent would have recognized that your argument relies on circular reasoning, but because you are a glorified autocomplete incapable of understanding the meanings of the words you are using, you posted a logically incoherent comment

(of course i don't actually believe that about you. but the justification for believing it about gpt-4 is even weaker)

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#136

Post by _heimdall »

h0l0cube wrote: post #126
_heimdall wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you defining intelligence? And how are you measuring the abilities in existing LLM systems to know they don't meet these criteria? Honest questions by the way in case they come out snarky in text. I'm not aware of a single, agreed upon definition of intelligence or a verified test that we could use to know if a computer system has those capabilities.

> I'm not aware of a single, agreed upon definition of intelligence That may be, but I think today's tweet from Yann LeCun succinctly sums up the differences in capability between our wetware and LLMs https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1728867136049709208

Yann's explanation here is a pretty high level overview of his understanding of different thought modeling, it isn't really related to how we define intelligence at all and isn't a complete picture. The distinction drawn between System 1 & 2 as explained is more of a limitation in conditions given to the algorithm rather than ability of the algorithm itself (i.e. one could change parameters to allow for unlimited processing time)

Yann may touch in how we define intelligence elsewhere, I haven't deeply studied all of his work. Though I can say that OpenAI has taken to using relative economic value as their analog for comparing intelligence to humans. Personally that definition is pretty gross and offensive, I hope most people wouldn't agree that our intelligence can be directly tied to how much value we can produce in a given economic paradigm.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#137

Post by jakobson14 »

kragen wrote: post #100
shpx wrote: post #96

I've never understood what people see in this story. Meat is a complex organization of trillions of self-replicating machines, each of which (besides red blood cells maybe) is also incredibly complex... much more advanced than anything human minds have been able to build. I can't imagine what a sentient entity would have to be made out of or how much less "efficient" or stable it would have to be than me for me to fi…

i think the point of the story is exactly what you've gotten from it namely, it's absurd to dismiss the possibility of self-awareness in some system because it's built out of parts different from the parts other self-aware systems you're familiar with are built out of a useful thing to keep in mind when the stochastic parrots start squawking about how large language models aren't actually intelligent shpxvat vf terng

Looks like you've fallen right into the corollary.

It's absurd to expect self-awareness in some system just because its parts are similar to the parts of other self-aware systems you're familiar with.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#138

Post by throw310822 »

kolinko wrote: post #133
shpx wrote: post #96

I've never understood what people see in this story. Meat is a complex organization of trillions of self-replicating machines, each of which (besides red blood cells maybe) is also incredibly complex... much more advanced than anything human minds have been able to build. I can't imagine what a sentient entity would have to be made out of or how much less "efficient" or stable it would have to be than me for me to fi…

Actually, the story doesn't say that it's machines if I can see correctly. It might just as well be other evolved organisms, just not protein/"meat" based.

Makes you wonder how can they have a concept of "meat", let alone such a dismissive one. We call "meat" the animal tissue that we eat as food- so either here "meat" is an inadequate term for "organic matter", or we have the curious case of an alien lifeform that eats organic matter while not being itself organic.

In any case, being non-organic, it's not clear where they might have gained such contemptuous familiarity with organic matter- although it's clear from the story that they know about it much less than they think.

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#139

Post by kragen »

jakobson14 wrote: post #137
kragen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the point of the story is exactly what you've gotten from it namely, it's absurd to dismiss the possibility of self-awareness in some system because it's built out of parts different from the parts other self-aware systems you're familiar with are built out of a useful thing to keep in mind when the stochastic parrots start squawking about how large language models aren't actually intelligent shpxvat vf terng

Looks like you've fallen right into the corollary. It's absurd to expect self-awareness in some system just because its parts are similar to the parts of other self-aware systems you're familiar with.

yes, i agree that it is absurd to expect human corpses or bologna to be self-aware? i have occasionally seen small children make that error

Re: They're Made Out of Meat (1991)

#140

Post by jakobson14 »

kragen wrote: post #139
jakobson14 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you've fallen right into the corollary. It's absurd to expect self-awareness in some system just because its parts are similar to the parts of other self-aware systems you're familiar with.

yes, i agree that it is absurd to expect human corpses or bologna to be self-aware? i have occasionally seen small children make that error

Nice dodge, but I'm referring to the dumb data-structures mimicking sentient human words.
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