171–180 of 424 posts
For those who can’t and don’t think in words this is unsurprising.
Right, I think it's less than 50% of people that have an "inner voice" - using language to think. Other animals with at best very limited language, are still highly intelligent and capable of reasoning - apes, dogs, rats, crows, ...
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How would someone think in words? You mean the words in the pictures or...?
I think in words. For me during thought there is a literal voice in my putting my thoughts into words.
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I asked both OpenAI and Claude the same difficult programming question. Each gave a nearly identical response down to the variable names and example values. I then looked it up and they had each copy/pasted the same Stack overflow answer. Furthermore, the answer was extremely wrong, the language I used was superficially similar to the source material, but the programming concepts were entirely different. What this te…
Humans copy/paste from SO too. Does that prove humans can’t reason?
It could be said not as well as the ones that don't need SO.
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Can you count without using a "language"? Try it now: Tap your hand on the desk randomly. Can you recall how many times you did it without "saying" a sequence in your head like "1, 2, 3" or "A, B, C" etc? If yes, how far can you count? With a language it's effectively infinite. You could theoretically go up to "1 million 5 hundred 43 thousand, 2 hundred and 10" and effortlessly know what comes next.
Many animals can do some form of counting of small numbers where there's no connection to language possible.
This is an important result. The actual paper [1] says that functional MRI (which is measuring which parts of the brain are active by sensing blood flow) indicates that different brain hardware is used for non-language and language functions. This has been suspected for years, but now there's an experimental result. What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs. It's not clear what that someth…
When you look at how humans play chess they employ several different cognitive strategies. Memorization, calculation, strategic thinking, heuristics, and learned experience. When the first chess engines came out they only employed one of these: calculation. It wasn't until relatively recently that we had computer programs that could perform all of them. But it turns out that if you scale that up with enough compute y…
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/llms-cant-perform-genuine...
or do you maybe think no logical reasoning is needed to do everything a human can do? Tho humans seem to be able to do logical reasoning
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When you look at how humans play chess they employ several different cognitive strategies. Memorization, calculation, strategic thinking, heuristics, and learned experience. When the first chess engines came out they only employed one of these: calculation. It wasn't until relatively recently that we had computer programs that could perform all of them. But it turns out that if you scale that up with enough compute y…
It sounds like you think this research is wrong? (it claims llms can not reason) https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/llms-cant-perform-genuine... or do you maybe think no logical reasoning is needed to do everything a human can do? Tho humans seem to be able to do logical reasoning
I think the paper should've included controls, because we don't know how strong the result is. They certainly may have proven that humans can't reason either.
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To a point. If you drill down this far into the fundamentals of cognition you begin to define it. Otherwise you may as well call a cantaloupe sentient
I don't think anyone defines AI as "doing the thing that biological brains do" though, we define it in terms of capabilities of the system.
This is an important result. The actual paper [1] says that functional MRI (which is measuring which parts of the brain are active by sensing blood flow) indicates that different brain hardware is used for non-language and language functions. This has been suspected for years, but now there's an experimental result. What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs. It's not clear what that someth…
> What this tells us for AI is that we need something else besides LLMs. Humans not taking this approach doesn’t mean that AI cannot.
As always, barely anyone reads the actual claims in the article and we're left with people opining on the title. The claims here are exceptionally limited. You don't need spoken language to do well on cognitive tests, but that has never been a subject of debate. Obviously the deaf get on fine without spoken language. People suffering from aphasia, but still capable of communication via other mechanisms, still do well…
> Language's purpose is thought Language's purpose - why it arose - is more likely communication, primarily external communication. The benefit of using language to communicate with yourself via "inner voice" - think in terms of words - seems a secondary benefit, especially considering that less than 50% of people report doing this. But certainly language, especially when using a large vocabulary of abstract and spec…
For one, how would you know? It left no fossils, nor do we have any other kind of record from that time.
For another, the very question implies a teleological view of evolution, which is arguably wrong.
As for what 50% of people report (where did that number come from?), we have virtually zero intuitive insight into the inner workings of our minds in general, or of the way we process language. All the knowledge that has been obtained about how language works--linguistics--has been obtained by external observation of a black box. (FMRIs and the like provide a little insight inside that black box, but only at the most general level--and again, that's not intuition.)
Is this not obvious? Language is a very poor substitute for freely flowing electrical information - it is evolved to compensate for the bottlenecks to external communication - bottlenecks that are lacking an internal analogue. It's also a highly advanced feature - something as heavily optiimised as evolved life would not allow something as vital as cognition to be hampered by a lack of means for high fidelity externa…
No. But I'm going to stop there, because there are pages of comments saying the exact opposite (and of course some agreeing with you) above.