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Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

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Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#141

Post by Fraterkes »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #125
Fraterkes wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The assumption of this sort of argument, if I understand it correctly, is that consciousness is just an ordinary byproduct that appears (or grows gradually) somewhere on the spectrum of complexity. If that’s true, mastering language is basically orthogonal to being conscious (as you’d maybe expect, GPT-2 was pretty good at language, but had a relatively tiny amount of “neurons”). The same is arguably true for world m…

Likewise, what reason do we have to assume that any given human is conscious?

I don’t know why I’m consciousness, but I know that I am. Other people are outwardly very similar to me, so I assume the same is broadly true inwardly.

A rock is outwardly pretty similar to me; in that it exists in the world, has obvious physical boundaries, and is affected by the passage of time. But it is not so outwardly similar that I assume consciousness.

An LLM is also outwardly similar to me, in that it can express itself in language, and seems to ‘contain’ notions about the world. But it is again not necessarily so similar to me, outwardly, that inward similarity is obvious (to me)

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#142

Post by orthoxerox »

tsss wrote: post #117
2snakes wrote: post #22

I do not think the written description of a dog is the same as a dog itself…

Maybe it is. If you think about it hard, you will find that you cannot separate the idea of dog from the word dog. The object dog can only be understood as a perception linked to that idea.

"Ceci n'est pas un chien"

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#143

Post by adamzwasserman »

sometimelurker wrote: post #110
jvanderbot wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love the analogy. I a lot of people had their mind blown by vector space representation of words. The idea that Female + King averaged out around "Queen". Words might foundational to concepts or just really-well-designed ways to transmit them.

You have the word 'bot' in your name and judging by your comment history love using em-dashes. Are you a machine or not?

I can guarantee you that the comment from jvanderbot was not AI generated.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#144

Post by jvanderbot »

sometimelurker wrote: post #120
jvanderbot wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt I used emdashes, but I do us "-". I dont have emdash unicode bound to my keyboard yet. (edit: Hyphenation is not emdash, of course) you can view my profile details freely and decide for yourself, and a quick look might even explain the "bot" suffix.

Oh I figured there's a real human being named Josh Vander and youre his openclaw or something. why do you have the `bot` suffix?

Because I spent 15 years working in robotics, and I'm a nerd who over indexed identity on that :)

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#145

Post by kibwen »

Fraterkes wrote: post #123
kibwen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the Chinese Room shows that the existence of a mapping from input to output, however emergently it might have been devised, is not alone sufficient to demonstrate understanding.

An LLM is a big equation that we solve to get textual output. If Ai proponents already believe an equation can contain consciousness, what about the Chinese Room presents a more compelling counterargument?

I'm not bringing up the Chinese Room in its original sense of asserting that a machine can't have consciousness. Indeed, I have no reason to suspect that human consciousness is irreproducible. Rather, the point here is to emphasize that our methods of determination are insufficient. A man armed with an English-to-Chinese dictionary appears to know Chinese until he's faced with an instance of linguistic ambiguity outside the scope of what a dictionary encodes; in other words, you can, with enough probing, disprove that the room understands Chinese. But how do you prove it in an affirmative sense? Let's use a simpler example: does Hans the Clever Horse understand arithmetic? We can disprove it by throwing enough arithmetic at Hans to prove that his understanding does not generalize, but if Hans did know arithmetic, how would we prove it? There are plenty of things in this category--things that we believe to some confidence level, but cannot prove--but let's frame it for what it is: belief and faith, not proof or logic. Whatever utility I may derive from LLMs, I have every reason to be skeptical of a movement of people whose awe of LLMs echoes the steadfast furor of the religious adherent.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#146

Post by Fraterkes »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #133
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, what reason do we have to assume that any given human is conscious?

Or that anything at all is not conscious?

Because we are, in our life, not always conscious.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#147

Post by gowld »

etrautmann wrote: post #15
michael1999 wrote: post #10

It is not all obvious that consciousness precedes language. Hellen Keller provides a vivid description of her pre-verbal mental state as something less than reflective conscious. > Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or…

I think this is different if you have vision though. I struggle to understand how someone can look at intelligent animals that don’t have language and not intuitively assume that they’re conscious. Yes this is a tricky problem without an answer but IMO the elements of consciousness can exist without language if visual abstractions are present.

Please define "conscious".

Please give an example of an interaction with an animal that suggests that the animal is conscious, but not using language.

Challenge round: Please demonstrate that conscious animals are not using internal idiolect (language with 1 user) and lack the physical ability to develop a form of shared communication for that language.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#148

Post by gowld »

tgv wrote: post #131
michael1999 wrote: post #10

It is not all obvious that consciousness precedes language. Hellen Keller provides a vivid description of her pre-verbal mental state as something less than reflective conscious. > Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or…

Animals communicate, and it may be primitive, but a lot of it doesn't seem to require consciousness. Should someone insist, it then depends on what you call "a word".

Words are like atoms. We also have sentences (molecules) and paragraphs (structures) and more. Complexity matters.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#149

Post by gowld »

vharuck wrote: post #122
pigeonwarz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is likely that language forms a sort of quanta of reasoning. It is far easier to posit a verbal hypothesis pertaining to verbal subjects and test it than to try and do it nonverbally. Maths is probably a great example of this. Try and describe Pythagoras' Theorem without using maths notation or words. Difficult, right? Reasoning is a House of Cards, and without understanding what the card is that exercise becomes…

Math is a terrible example. Euclid's "Elements" was a core book in Western math education for millennia, and it uses drawn geometric proofs. The proofs are then described in Greek, but the rigorous definitions are the pictures. A lot of mathematical fields can be reasoned about and explored by imagining shapes and objects. The end results today are written in notation because this is a standard language that helps cl…

Geometry pictures are absolutely not "rigorous definitions". For 1 thing, pictures of lines aren't finite in extent, and pictures of points are finite in extent.

Some of Euclid's proofs are wrong, because they relied on those non-rigorous picture definitions.

* Book I, Proposition 1 (constructing an equilateral triangle)

* Book I, Proposition 4 (Side-Angle-Side triangle congruence).

* Multiple theorems throughout the Elements rely on the visual "betweenness" of points.

Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards

#150

Post by saltcured »

vitamark wrote: post #66
estearum wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's far more likely that people don't agree on what it means to "have an internal monologue" than that people actually bifurcate that dramatically on cognition. Surely there are some people with an actual difference from baseline, but I don't think it's the near-equal split that seems to appear when you just ask people about internal monologue This is in contrast with aphantasia (complete lack of mental imagery)…

Well, I can't say for the general population, but for me there's just nothing unless I actively try to think of words, sentences and other things. One moment you don't have an idea and the next you do, like a state switch. I really feel like humans argue too much about how computer programs think and at the same time too little about how humans think. The topic is criminally underresearched and the existing research…

You make it sound like there are no ideas until words arrive? For me, my normal ground state is full of thinking that is not linguistic. My mode switch is more like having to turn on the whole language subsystem and pay attention to it, often to the detriment of my native concentration.

When I do think with words, it is usually something I am manipulating with a purpose. It is not the thoughts themselves. I have a thought, and I attempt to render it into words.

Outside of recollection of past speech, it is extremely rare for me to feel like words arrive with a thought I wasn't already holding. Most often, it happens when making jokes and puns in real-time. I am in a mood to be playful, and may have a vague feeling that there is something funny to interject, but cannot separate it from the word combination that comes to mind.

But I can't really think and deliberate verbally. It feels like an act of puppetry.

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