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Life is more than an engineering problem

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Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#161

Post by bsenftner »

wholinator2 wrote: post #145
weego wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

I think it's really up to the highly nebulous definition. Even in your comment is implied that reasoning and consciousness are two names of the same thing but i'd argue one is here and one will never be provable ever. Reason is working through logical steps, much like a program. It's a set of conditions that get checked and a logical structure that uses that information to reach a conclusion. That's what sets it apar…

I agree that reasoning and consciousness are different, however what I do not see being discussed by the AI research community is the necessity to define and then develop "artificial comprehension".

At this point in time, the act of comprehension is a scientific mystery.

I'd say 'consciousness' is the ongoing ever present comprehension of the moment, a feedback self conversation assessing the current situation a being finds itself. This act requires reasoning, as comprehension is the "sandbox" in which reasoning occurs.

But what is comprehension? It's the instantaneous reverse engineering of observations for verification of reality: is what I observe normal, possible or a threat? If one cannot "understand" an observation then the potential the observation is a threat grows. That 'understanding" is reverse engineering the observation to identify it's range of possible behavior and therefore one's safety in relation to that observation.

Comprehension is extremely complex: arbitrary input goes in and a world model with one's safety and next actions comes out.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#162

Post by nuancebydefault »

weego wrote: post #125
abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

Counter point: what is it about scraping the Internet and indexing it cleverly that makes you believe that would lead to the the creation of the ability to reason above it's programming? No one in neuroscience, psychology or any related field can point to reasoning or 'consciousness' or whatever you wish to call it and say it appeared from X. Yet we have this West Coast IT cultish thinking that if we throw money at i…

From its answers I already conclude it is already reasoning above its programming. I do not see why someone in neuroscience or psychology would need to say it appeared, since they do not know better what reasoning is than any average human.

Reasoning is undefined, but a human recognizes it when it appears. I don't see consciousness part of that story. Also, whether you call it emulated or played reasoning or not, apparently does not matter. The results are what they are.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#163

Post by corimaith »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #99
sleepytree wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I write a book that contains Einstein's theory of relativity by virtue of me copying it, did I create the theory? Did my copying of it indicate anything about my understanding of it? Would you be justified to think the next book I write would have anything of original value? I think what he is trying to say is that LLMs current architecture seems to mainly work by understanding patterns in the existing body of kno…

> If I write a book that contains Einstein's theory of relativity by virtue of me copying it, did I create the theory? Did my copying of it indicate anything about my understanding of it? Would you be justified to think the next book I write would have anything of original value? No, but you described a `cp` command, not an LLM. "Creativity" in the sense of coming up with something new is trivial to implement in comp…

>Creativity" in the sense of coming up with something new is trivial to implement in computers, and has long been solved. Take some pattern - of words, of data, of thought. Perturb it randomly. Done. That's creativity.

Formal Proof Systems aren't even nearly close to completion, and for patterns we don't have a strong enough formal system to fully represent the problem space.

If we take the P=NP problem, that likely can be solved formally that a machine could do, but what is the "pattern" here that we are traversing here? There is a definitely a deeper superstructure behind these problems, but we can only glean the tips, and I don't think the LLMs with statistical techniques can glean further in either. Natural Language is not sufficient.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#164

Post by ip26 »

whatever1 wrote: post #156
ip26 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can an LLM discover a new theory of natural law, such as prove or disprove string theory? This is what I ponder. The creation or discovery of something new that it can’t just copy, that would have to be discovered via human thought otherwise. Something provably true. The equivalent of discovering general relativity before humans had.

I mean the vast vast majority of people cannot prove/disprove theorems either, but we still consider ourselves as intelligent.

I’m not demanding it discover new science before it can be called intelligent. It’s a thought experiment.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#165

Post by nuancebydefault »

eterps wrote: post #108
abecedarius wrote: post #68

Chiang makes some insightful points, e.g. about what we mean by magic. Then I come to > [LLMs] can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? If an AI proves a theorem is it only…

> and wonder how an intelligent person can still think this, can be so absolute about it. What is "actual" reasoning here? Large language models excel at processing and generating text, but they fundamentally operate on existing knowledge. Their creativity appears limited to recombining known information in novel ways, rather than generating truly original insights. True reasoning capability would involve the ability…

> True reasoning capability would involve the ability to analyze complex situations and generate entirely new solutions, independent of existing patterns or combinations.

You mean like alphago did in its 36th move?

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#166

Post by nuancebydefault »

benreesman wrote: post #75
emtel wrote: post #70

I like Chiang’s stories, but he simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to LLMs. Forget the philosophical points - he claims that LLMs are strictly worse than search engines for information retrieval. This is just obviously false, I can give you dozens of conversations from my ChatGPT history over the past two months which would have been impossible to get answers to on Google.

LLMs are generally better search tools for certain topics today , but search engines have been in serious decline for at least 15 years. IMHO old-school Google remains the high water mark of generalized information retrieval, with advantages ranging from speed to semi-durable citation. I strongly suspect there is a cohort thing going on here, many HN users today weren’t involved in technology yet back when Google wor…

Google search works at least as well as 15 years ago, the results are now just more interleaved with ads that are harder to distinguish from what you are really searching for.

That's exactly where LLMs come in, the model inside the weights has more than answers, they can find sense in data.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#167

Post by BrenBarn »

sukruh wrote: post #34

I agreed with almost all of it until: >My stance on this has probably shifted in a negative direction over time, primarily because of my growing awareness of how often technology is used for wealth accumulation. I don’t think capitalism will solve the problems that capitalism creates, so I’d be much more optimistic about technological development if we could prevent it from making a few people extremely rich. What's…

> What's wrong with people getting rich by producing goods and services, and selling these to willing buyers?

If you take this sentence and change "people getting rich" to something else (like "fomenting drug addiction" or "polluting the environment"), does anything change? Whether the inequality is a result of "selling goods to willing buyers" is a complete red herring. If that consequence is bad, it doesn't really matter whether it's a result of supposedly "fair" market exchanges.

Others have already pointed out that it's not really plausible to avoid the "different" problems you mention while still allowing unlimited wealth inequality. But aside from that, how do you know that the buyers are willing? What is the set of alternatives being considered to decide if a person is "willingly" choosing a certain product? It's difficult to even maintain the pretense of "willing buyers" in a "free market" when some individuals control a large market share. Miners living in a company town were "willing" to buy groceries from the company store in the sense that they needed to buy groceries, but they didn't really have any other options for how to express their "market preference".

Even if markets were free, there's nothing inherently good about a free market. What's good is a free society, where people in aggregate have substantive freedom to do what makes them happy. That goal isn't furthered by allowing a small number of wealthy people to pursue their goals while a large number of less wealthy people are unable to do so.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#168

Post by Barrin92 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #154
Barrin92 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What's the difference? The pain receptors. The human brain doesn't just "have" pain receptors. Your entire body, including your brain, is one system. Your brain isn't piloting your body like a mech. This brain body dualism is a misconception of how biological organisms work. You are your pain receptors just like you are your brain, and removing any part would alter your perception of the world. >How does this differ…

If you were technologically advanced to the point of being able to float a human brain in a vat, and connect up all the nerves going into that brain to synthetic sensors with the appropriate signalling outputs, then you could construct a synthetic reality for that brain that it would not be able to distinguish from its previous brain-in-a-body experiences. As far as learning, human learning is certainly much slower t…

>you could construct a synthetic reality for that brain that it would not be able to distinguish from its previous brain-in-a-body experiences.

No. I'd recommend reading Dennett's Consciousness Explained for a longer treatment of this, but if you want to have an experience just like you, you need a body and an environment just like you. Sure it could be synthetic in the sense of it being artificially constructed, you could have artificial limbs, but it can be no different from the one you have, it cannot be a vat. There is no "Cartesian Theater" in the brain, your experience is already distributed throughout both your brain and body. Your experience isn't something being "fed into you" (the brain) from the outside, the entire perception emerges in the first place through being embodied in the world. The concept of the thought experiment itself would not even make sense without implicitly assuming an embodied reality beforehand setting it up.

Just like there is no philosophical zombie that's somehow materially identical but without sentience, the reverse doesn't exist either. There is no disembodied computer with the experiences of an organic being because they function in entirely different ways.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#169

Post by kmmlng »

d4mi3n wrote: post #142
rcxdude wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more that if you actually work with LLMs they will display reasoning. It's not particularly good or deep reasoning (I would generally say they have a superhuman amount of knowledge but are really quite unintelligent), but it is more than simply recall.

Waters are often muddied here by our own psychology. We (as a species) tend to ascribe intelligence to things that can speak. Even more so when someone (or thing in this case) can not just speak, but articulate well. We know these are algorithms, but how many people fall in love or make friends over nothing but a letter or text message? Capabilities for reasoning aside, we should all be very careful of our perception…

This seems like the classic shifting of goalposts to determine when AI has actually become intelligent. Is the ability to communicate not a form of intelligence? We don't have to pretend like these models are super intelligent, but to deny them any intelligence seems too far for me.

Re: Life is more than an engineering problem

#170

Post by layer8 »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #116
vouwfietsman wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it is clear humans are capable of ... Its not though, nobody really knows what most of the words in that sentence mean in the technical or algorithmical sense, and hence you can't really say whether llms do or don't possess these skills.

>nobody really knows what most of the words in that sentence mean in the technical or algorithmical sense And nobody really knows what consciousness is, but we all experience it in a distinct, internal way that lets us navigate the world and express ourselves to others, yet apparently some comments seem to dismiss this elephant of sensation in the room by pretending it's no different than some cut and dried computati…

I disagree with that characterization. I don’t experience consciousness as an “internal way that lets us navigate the world and express ourselves to others”. To me it is a purely perceptional experience, as I concluded after much introspection. Sure it feeds back into one’s behavior, mostly because we prefer certain experiences over others, but I can’t identify anything in my inner experience that is qualitatively different in nature from a pure mechanism. I do agree that LLMs severely lack awareness (not just self-awareness) and thus also consciousness. But that’s not about being a “mere” computational system.
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