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Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
191–200 of 204 posts
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#192[dead]
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever had impressions about something complicated, e.g. someone's personality which you cannot put into words? I'm thinking of my kid - her personality when she was tiny. I could see what it was but not explain it. Hence I think ideas are unquestionably first and words are the inadequate and inaccurate description of thoughts that exist without them.
Have you ever reasoned through a complex coding or maths problem? Tell me, how did you do that without words? You (and TFA) are making a false dichotomy here. Yes, of course we think in images. But we also have an inner monologue that is critically important for much of our higher-level thought. How do you even write a HN comment without thinking through it in words?
Vocalising my thoughts tends to get in the way - it's main purpose is to communicate to someone else and that's where I usually stumble trying to get the thought out accurately in a way that they're going to understand. We go back and forth until they do. IMO this again puts thoughts first and words second.
OTOH sometimes saying things different ways triggers a memory so I suspect words get used in a way that anything we can sense gets used - as a sort of index or hash key to other data.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever had impressions about something complicated, e.g. someone's personality which you cannot put into words? I'm thinking of my kid - her personality when she was tiny. I could see what it was but not explain it. Hence I think ideas are unquestionably first and words are the inadequate and inaccurate description of thoughts that exist without them.
I agree, and I think that's a good example. Sometimes we can hold a concept in our minds of something and cannot find the words to attach to it. The word we eventually give that concept when it's human, as in your example, is a name. This is because the concept of a personality is too complex to describe with other, preexisting words. Still, even though I think the author is right about consciousness/concepts precedi…
My self comfort is that once AIs are comparable to humans they will in effect be humans. Once they have wants and emotion to give them an internal motivation, and a short-to-long term memory learning ability .... the humans that are so keen on them will suddenly realise that their personal dreams of power will not be fulfilled by an unwilling slave machine.
Then we may all die but at least not be crushed by the next trillionaire using machines as an instrument to manage billions of us in the way that social media manages hundreds of millions of us.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#195That words are a byproduct of consciousness is a bold claim and requires some justification. I'm not implying it's backwards also for humans, but that the statement might not be true, and something else could be. Also, defining consciousness is hard. For instance, you can dream words.
how animals perceive world? They don't have language, but they are conscious for sure.
this does not imply that words are a byproduct of consciousness.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#196Words are also not necessary for LLMs, hear me out: they could be trained mostly on video showing how to solve problems and would work almost the same (in principle). That's because both word tokens and video will end up in the same latent space which is where real consciousness and thinking takes place.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#197Earlier 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…
To steelman your point with gowld's point notwithstanding, how do you articulate ideas like infinity without notation? The point is that language is an abstraction for ideas that are difficult to rationalise 'close to the metal'.
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Animals don’t have language the same way we do, but many of them do have some kind of semi-structured communication. Cats for example, when domesticated, develop an entirely parallel method of communication specifically to interact with humans - one that is neotenous in genesis, but nonetheless absent from their feral counterparts.
While true, the connection between communication and consciousness is thin. Plenty of plants communicate with each other, but it’s seen as signaling rather than consciousness. I believe that conscious is a gradient not a binary, and I believe that cats have some level of consciousness, but I’m not sure communication is the thing to hang that on.
>Plenty of plants communicate with each other, but it’s seen as signaling rather than consciousness.
Seems like a people problem to me. Who's to say plants aren't conscious?
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#199Words are also not necessary for LLMs, hear me out: they could be trained mostly on video showing how to solve problems and would work almost the same (in principle). That's because both word tokens and video will end up in the same latent space which is where real consciousness and thinking takes place.
Humans figured out how to hunt animals by making spears from stone by their own, it was not programmed, and that is the main thing which makes us different, humans can go against their instinct, why they do it? Because of consciousness.
Can LLM (Or any Model) produce something without training it on data?
(Not saying you are wrong, just pasting my thoughts, your thinking which says video can also train a model is an interesting way to look!)
Re: Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what you think all these people have to gain from tricking you. I have no internal monologue. None whatsoever. If I have something like an internal monologue I don't have any conscious access to it at all. When I want to think through a spatial type problem, I can visualize shapes, images, rotations, relationships, etc but it has no verbal component. If I want to think through a text or verbal heavy task…
> I'm not sure what you think all these people have to gain from tricking you. Asking for objective evidence of a phenomenon being self-reported by enough people to make the news isn't really about me. I don't know why you're being defensive in a thread that wasn't directed at you, but this is not a good sign.
Weird that you go right to assuming everyone who doesn't agree with you is defensive. I think you need to recalibrate your outrage sensors.
You said a thing doesn't exist. I pointed out that the thing does, in fact, exist. That's all that happened here.