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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#131

Post by anthem2025 »

jackcviers3 wrote: post #128
paxys wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be sycophantic. Disagree and push back when appropriate. Come up with original thought and original ideas. Have long term goals that aren't programmed by an external source. Do something unprompted. The last one IMO is more complex than the rest, because LLMs are fundamentally autocomplete machines. But what happens if you don't give them any prompt? Can they spontaneously come up with something, anything, with…

The last one is fairly simple to solve. Set up a microphone in any busy location where conversations are occurring. In an agentic loop, send random snippets of audio recordings for transcriptions to be converted to text. Randomly send that to an llm, appending to a conversational context. Then, also hook up a chat interface to discuss topics with the output from the llm. The random background noise and the context ou…

[dead]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#132

Post by Terr_ »

crazygringo wrote: post #99
heresie-dabord wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a midpoint between "AIs are useless and do not actually think" and "AIs think like humans" LLMs (AIs) are not useless. But they do not actually think . What is trivially true is that they do not actually need to think . (As far as the Turing Test, Eliza patients, and VC investors are concerned, the point has been proven.) If the technology is helping us write text and code, it is by definition useful . > In 2003, t…

> But they do not actually think. I'm so baffled when I see this being blindly asserted. With the reasoning models, you can literally watch their thought process . You can see them pattern-match to determine a strategy to attack a problem, go through it piece-by-piece, revisit assumptions, reformulate strategy, and then consolidate findings to produce a final result. If that's not thinking, I literally don't know wha…

> I'm so baffled when I see this being blindly asserted. With the reasoning models, you can literally watch their thought process.

Not true, you are falling for a very classic (prehistoric, even) human illusion known as experiencing a story:

1. There is a story-like document being extruded out of a machine humans explicitly designed for generating documents, and which humans trained on a bajillion stories humans already made.

2. When you "talk" to a chatbot, that is an iterative build of a (remote, hidden) story document, where one of the characters is adopting your text-input and the other's dialogue is being "performed" at you.

3. The "reasoning" in newer versions is just the "internal monologue" of a film noir detective character, and equally as fictional as anything that character "says out loud" to the (fictional) smokin-hot client who sashayed the (fictional) rent-overdue office bearing your (real) query on its (fictional) lips.

> If that's not thinking, I literally don't know what is.

All sorts of algorithms can achieve useful outcomes with "that made sense to me" flows, but that doesn't mean we automatically consider them to be capital-T Thinking.

> So I have to ask you: when you claim they don't think -- what are you basing this on?

Consider the following document from an unknown source, and the "chain of reasoning" and "thinking" that your human brain perceives when encountering it:

    My name is Robot Robbie.
    That high-carbon steel gear looks delicious. 
    Too much carbon is bad, but that isn't true here.
    I must ask before taking.    
    "Give me the gear, please."
    Now I have the gear.
    It would be even better with fresh manure.
    Now to find a cow, because cows make manure.
Now whose reasoning/thinking is going on? Can you point to the mind that enjoys steel and manure? Is it in the room with us right now? :P

In other words, the reasoning is illusory. Even if we accept that the unknown author is a thinking intelligence for the sake of argument... it doesn't tell you what the author's thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#135

Post by zahlman »

IanCal wrote: post #106
paxys wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be sycophantic. Disagree and push back when appropriate. Come up with original thought and original ideas. Have long term goals that aren't programmed by an external source. Do something unprompted. The last one IMO is more complex than the rest, because LLMs are fundamentally autocomplete machines. But what happens if you don't give them any prompt? Can they spontaneously come up with something, anything, with…

> Don't be sycophantic. Disagree and push back when appropriate. They can do this though. > Can they spontaneously come up with something, anything, without any external input? I don’t see any why not, but then humans don’t have zero input so I’m not sure why that’s useful.

> but then humans don’t have zero input

Humans don't require input to, say, decide to go for a walk.

What's missing in the LLM is volition.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#136

Post by nrclark »

ffwd wrote: post #105

I think something that's missing from AI is the ability humans have to combine and think about ANY sequence of patterns as much as we want. A simple example is say I think about a sequence of "banana - car - dog - house". I can if I want to in my mind, replace car with tree, then replace tree with rainbow, then replace rainbow with something else, etc... I can sit and think about random nonsense for as long as I want…

one possible counter-argument: can you say for sure how your brain is creating those replacement words? When you replace tree with rainbow, does rainbow come to mind because of an unconscious neural mapping between both words and "forest"?

It's entirely possible that our brains are complex pattern matchers, not all that different than an LLM.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#137

Post by bloppe »

educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

Ya, the fact this was published on November 3, 2025 is pretty hilarious. This was last year's debate.

I think the best avenue toward actually answering your questions starts with OpenWorm [1]. I helped out in a Connectomics research lab in college. The technological and epistemic hurdles are pretty daunting, but so were those for Genomics last century, and now full-genome sequencing is cheap and our understanding of various genes is improving at an accelerating pace. If we can "just" accurately simulate a natural mammalian brain on a molecular level using supercomputers, I think people would finally agree that we've achieved a truly thinking machine.

[1]: https://archive.ph/0j2Jp

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#138

Post by prmph »

myrmidon wrote: post #113
prmph wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you simulated a human brain by the atom, That is what we don't know is possible. You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered. And from what we even know currently, atoms are too coarse to form the basis of such "cloning" And, my viewpoint is that, even if this were possible, just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If it is the arrangement…

> You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered You would not need the simulation to be perfect; there is ample evidence that our brains a quite robust against disturbances. > just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If you don't want that to be true, you need some kind of magic, that makes the simulation behave differently from reality. How woul…

> "quite robust against disturbances."

does not mean that the essential thing gives rise to consciousness is only approximate. To give an example from software, you can write software is robust against bad input, attempts to crash it, even bit flips. But, if I came in and just changed a single character in the source code, that may cause it to fail compilation, fail to run, or become quite buggy.

> If you don't want that to be true, you need some kind of magic,

This is just what I'm saying is a false dichotomy. The only reason some are unable to see beyond it is that we think the basic logic we understand are all there could be.

In this respect physics has been very helpful, because without peering into reality, we would have kept deluding ourselves that pure reason was enough to understand the world.

It's like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a well educated person or scientist from the 16th century without the benefit of experimental evidence. No way they'd believe you. In fact, they'd accuse you of violating basic logic.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#139

Post by baq »

crazygringo wrote: post #99
heresie-dabord wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a midpoint between "AIs are useless and do not actually think" and "AIs think like humans" LLMs (AIs) are not useless. But they do not actually think . What is trivially true is that they do not actually need to think . (As far as the Turing Test, Eliza patients, and VC investors are concerned, the point has been proven.) If the technology is helping us write text and code, it is by definition useful . > In 2003, t…

> But they do not actually think. I'm so baffled when I see this being blindly asserted. With the reasoning models, you can literally watch their thought process . You can see them pattern-match to determine a strategy to attack a problem, go through it piece-by-piece, revisit assumptions, reformulate strategy, and then consolidate findings to produce a final result. If that's not thinking, I literally don't know wha…

Brains are pretrained models, change my mind. (Not LLMs obviously, to be perfectly clear)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#140

Post by BeetleB »

paxys wrote: post #100
educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

Don't be sycophantic. Disagree and push back when appropriate. Come up with original thought and original ideas. Have long term goals that aren't programmed by an external source. Do something unprompted. The last one IMO is more complex than the rest, because LLMs are fundamentally autocomplete machines. But what happens if you don't give them any prompt? Can they spontaneously come up with something, anything, with…

> Disagree and push back

The other day an LLM gave me a script that had undeclared identifiers (it hallucinated a constant from an import).

When I informed it, it said "You must have copy/pasted incorrectly."

When I pushed back, it said "Now you trust me: The script is perfectly correct. You should look into whether there is a problem with the installation/config on your computer."

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