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Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
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Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
#152[deleted]
Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
it indeed understands you. A lot of people are just parroting the same thing over and over again saying it's just a probabilistic word generator. No, it's not, it's more then that. Take a look at this: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/ Read to the end. The beginning is trivial the ending is unequivocal: chatGPT understands you. I think a lot of people are just in denial. Because the last ye…
I think about its 4000 token length. For the brief amount of time that it absorbs and processes those 4000 tokens, is there a glimmer of a hint of sentience? Like it is microscopically sentient for very short bursts and then resets back to zero.
Does sentience need memory? I would say it's orthogonal. There are examples of people in the real world who only remember things for about 3 minutes before they lose it. They can't form any real memories. These people are still sentient despite lack of memory. See: https://www.damninteresting.com/living-in-the-moment/
If chatGPT was sentient, I would say it has nothing to do with the 4000 character limit. The 4000 character limit has more to do with it's ability to display evidence of "sentience".
Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Human minds have semantic relationships to the rest of the world that LLMs do not have. This is a bold claim that seems built on a presumption of mind-body dualism. Brains don't have semantic relationships with anything. They are neurons hooked up to sensors and actuators. Any inferences they produce are the result of statistical processes.
> This is a bold claim that seems built on a presumption of mind-body dualism. Not at all. I'm a physicalist; I don't believe the mind is a separate thing from the brain. > Brains don't have semantic relationships with anything. Yes, they do: you describe them yourself: > They are neurons hooked up to sensors and actuators. Those are semantic relationships with the rest of the world. Although your short description d…
>Those are semantic relationships with the rest of the world.
If this is all that counts as semantic relationships, then I see no reason why a language model doesn't have this kind of semantic relationship, albeit in a very different modality. Tokens and their co-occurrences are a kind of sensor to the world. In the same way we discover quantum mechanics by way of induction over indirect relationships among the signals incident to our perceptual apparatus (the sensors and actuators that translate external signals into internal signals), a language model could learn much about the world by way of induction over token co-occurrences. Sure, there are limits, conscious perception of the world being the big one, but I see no reason to think conscious perception of X is required to know or understand X.
Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is mind blowing to me. can anyone with more knowledge on the topic explain how ChatGPT is demonstrating this level of what seems like genuine understanding and reasoning? Like others I assumed that ChatGPT is gluing words together that commonly occur together. This is way more than that.
it indeed understands you. A lot of people are just parroting the same thing over and over again saying it's just a probabilistic word generator. No, it's not, it's more then that. Take a look at this: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/ Read to the end. The beginning is trivial the ending is unequivocal: chatGPT understands you. I think a lot of people are just in denial. Because the last ye…
> Read to the end. The beginning is trivial the ending is unequivocal: chatGPT understands you.
How does this necessarily and unequivocally follow from the blog post?
All I see in it is a bunch of output formed by analogy: it has a general concept of what each command's output is kinda supposed to look like given the inputs (since it has a bajillion examples of each), and what an HTML or JSON document is kinda supposed to look like, and how free-form information tends to fit into these documents.
I'll admit that this direct reasoning by analogy is impressive, simply for the fact that nothing else but humans can do it with such consistency, but it's a very long way off from the indirect reasoning I'd expect from a sentient entity.
Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I'm not convinced, in your hypothetical, that the participant does not "know" Thai at that point. Seeing a young child learn language, it's a lot more adaptive than I think we tend to see language learning, as we often think about learning language as a teenager and not a toddler. I agree the machine does not know what a pizza tastes like nor does it know what it is to _want_ pizza, but I'm not sure that…
Maybe the participant "knows" something about the Thai language? But that's different from knowing anything about the things being discussed. The jumping off point for this, which motivated a question about what it is to know, was the comment: > What this article is not showing (but either irresponsibly or naively suggests) is that the LLM knows what a bag is, what a person is, what popcorn and chocolate are, and can…
Language doesn’t come first for humans. Experiencing the world does. Languages then become symbols to communicate experiencing the world through our senses and emotional/mental states. I’m not sure why people get hung up on language models not being the same thing when they start and end with language.
Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Defining what "knowing" is would be useful, yes, and analytic philosophers in epistemology do argue about this. One attribute that's classically part of the definition of "knowing" is that the thing which is known must be true. LLMs are pretty bad at this, but perhaps that can be fixed. But I would challenge you to imagine the situation the LLM is actually in. Do you understand Thai? If so, in the following, feel fre…
Let me respond with an analogy of my own. Imagine you are a scientist on an alien world. The aliens primary experience the world through magnetic fields. They live deep in the atmosphere of a hot Jupiter like planet and rarely touch anything and have no eyes. Still they are intelligent beings and so quickly they are able to establish communication with you. A computer translates and you both have to become a bit more…
> my question is if you, the human, can learn to understand what it is to perceive magnetic fields? I think obviously the answer is yes.
I certainly don't see that as obvious, and I would guess that while you can learn _about_ their perceptual mode, you can't learn what it is like to perceive magnetic fields just through talking about it. I would consider the Mary's Room thought experiment, and the What Is It Like To Be a Bat paper from Nagel.
I think there's a relationship to the Chinese Room, but I want to be clear. In the original formulation, the person in the room follows a book of pre-provided instructions to produce a response. The LLM and person in the Thai text completion scenario must learn an equivalent set of instructions themselves, and for this I would claim that they are comparable to the human + book combination in the original Chinese Room. The person who learns to complete Thai text doesn't know what they're talking about, but they know more than the person following instructions in the Chinese Room. But clearly they still don't know what a Thai speaker knows.
> I guess it just feels like this general argument, that merely seeing things and making predictions that turn out to be right isn't enough to understand it will never go away. We could have a full fledged robot walking around having conversations and I could dispute its ability to really understand.
No, perhaps the end of my original statement didn't make this clear, but I think AI systems _can_ know things, and knowing is not a binary but part of a range. StabilityAI / DALL-e know quite a bit about the relationship between texts and images, and the structure within images -- but they _don't_ know about bodies, physical reality, etc etc. A system that has multiple modalities of perception, learns to physically navigate the world, interact with objects, make and execute plans by understanding the likely effects of actions, etc -- knows and understands a lot. I'm not arguing about a hard limitation of AI; I'm arguing about a limitation of the way our current AIs are built and trained.
Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
#158Humans are very soon going to learn that they are not nearly as special as they tell themselves they are.
What's life if its not personal?
Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's no way to know for sure that anyone other than yourself experiences consciousness. All you can do is judge for yourself that what they're describing matches closely enough with your own experiences that they're probably experiencing the same thing you are. That judgment is not just based on the words other people use. It is based on knowing that other people's brains and minds have the same sort of semantic…
I'll dig up a source in a bit, but there is a critical period of development in which a child must be exposed to language, or they will fail to develop the very core skills that you're suggesting are innate abilities in a person regardless of their upbringing. This is exactly how you learned everything you know; your parents talked to you. Language grants you the ability to define concepts in the first place, without…
> the very core skills that you're suggesting are innate abilities in a person regardless of their upbringing
I have made no such claim.
> This is exactly how you learned everything you know; your parents talked to you.
This is not even remotely close to being correct.
> Language grants you the ability to define concepts in the first place
There is a vast literature in cognitive science that disagrees with you.
Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you object to the term "mind", just leave it out and read "brain and mind" as just "brain". I'm a physicalist so I don't think the mind is something separate from the brain anyway, so it's all the same to me.
If a jellyfish was able to have a conversation with you where it credibly described what it's like to be conscious, would you reject it because it doesn't have a brain and therefore cannot have a mind in the same sense as you?
Show me such a jellyfish and I'll give you an answer.