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Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

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Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#21

Post by daveguy »

Lerc wrote: post #18
daveguy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's claptrap this is article sewage waste. On the nose is an understatement. It's not doing the same work, or producing the same output. It's an episodic response to specific requests. If you went into a coma between every question you were asked, you wouldnt be in a normal human state of consciousness either. This article pretends that we understand human brains as much as we understand the simple algorithms o…

> If you went into a coma between every question you were asked, you wouldnt be in a normal human state of consciousness either. I don't think any one is saying AI has a normal human state of consciousness. Nobody claims that people with anterograde amnesia are not conscious. Similarly, you could drug someone unconscious after every time they answer a single question. It's not a normal state of human consciousness, b…

Every single one of your examples is one that comes nowhere near the blankness of an llm pile of numbers when it isn't answering a question. Maybe I should have said, is completely dead, rather than in a coma, between questions.

The quirks we observe in llms we only pretend have analogues in humans because we love to anthropomorphize. And it's easy to ansthropomorphise a language simulacrum. We've been doing it since ELIZA.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#22

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Lerc wrote: post #14
brookst wrote: post #2

Ok, this is fun. Perhaps a little on-the-nose, but then again, so is much of the “AI isn’t really thinking, it’s just doing the same work and producing the same output” claptrap. The last couple of years have changed my thinking on lots of stuff, but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. Maybe there’s something ineffable there. Or maybe… not. Maybe it is all post hoc ratio…

> but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. I think it depends on whether you are attributing sentience to be something that you imagine to be somehow transcendent, or if you think of it as just the descriptive term for what we are doing. For the latter it is undoubtable that we have it because that is literally what it means. It also becomes very difficult to come up with…

From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience : "Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes." LLMs are clearly not sentient even if one sides with those who think it is reasoning.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#23

Post by Lerc »

daveguy wrote: post #21
Lerc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you went into a coma between every question you were asked, you wouldnt be in a normal human state of consciousness either. I don't think any one is saying AI has a normal human state of consciousness. Nobody claims that people with anterograde amnesia are not conscious. Similarly, you could drug someone unconscious after every time they answer a single question. It's not a normal state of human consciousness, b…

Every single one of your examples is one that comes nowhere near the blankness of an llm pile of numbers when it isn't answering a question. Maybe I should have said, is completely dead, rather than in a coma, between questions. The quirks we observe in llms we only pretend have analogues in humans because we love to anthropomorphize. And it's easy to ansthropomorphise a language simulacrum. We've been doing it since…

I'm not sure why you think a temporary cessation of activity is relevant at all.

Would you think of a hypothetical machine that could freeze a human to absolute zero and restore them again sufficient to declare their behaviour when unfrozen as not that of a sentient individual.

How about if you had a picture of a black man and a white woman in front of a person and you swapped the heads, right in front of the observers eyes, but you picked just the right time so that even though they never sensed any time of not looking at the image, they did not notice the change.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#24

Post by Lerc »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #22
Lerc wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. I think it depends on whether you are attributing sentience to be something that you imagine to be somehow transcendent, or if you think of it as just the descriptive term for what we are doing. For the latter it is undoubtable that we have it because that is literally what it means. It also becomes very difficult to come up with…

From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience : " Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes. " LLMs are clearly not sentient even if one sides with those who think it is reasoning.

How do you know that?

How about if you draw a line graph of ability and sentience, We know two points. No ability at all has a sentience of zero. Human ability has a sentience of 1HS (one human sentience). Mark a point where you think a LLM sits. (presumably from your description some ability, zero sentience)

What shape is the line graph? It gets from zero to 1HS as you go across. When does it climb. If there is just some point where it goes from 0HS to 1HS then it seems like you should be able to point to what happened there.

If the graph is a line or a curve then you have some varying degrees of sentience.

If you put a LLM on zero sentience but recognise that it has some ability, then you are saying that if it is a curve, it starts flat and then begins climbing. Again, it seems like this marks a discrete level where something changes, why is that not identifiable.

The only other alternatives are continual graduation down to zero, the shape of the curve is unknown, but it leads to the conclusion that everything with non-zero ability has some non-zero level of sentience. That makes Rocks a little bit sentient, but in an incomprehensibly small manner. Compared to a human it would be trying to imagine a single molecule of water in a swimming pool, you can think about it in the abstract, but you have no sense of what the scale difference actually is.

But if that were the case then LLMs would be sentient, because everything would be, it is just a matter of scale, and where things sit on that scale.

While that notion might be hard to imagine, it is the only one that does not raise the question of "What is the threshold to qualify". If you assume there is a clear threshold, why would it elude discovery so well?

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#25

Post by satisfice »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #19

In beggining to think that there is some kind of human centric hubris that ends proved wrong by science. We thought we were the center of the universe, and science showed us that we are not the center of our galaxy, not even our solar system. Maybe with our thinking it's the same, we are not that special and we can something good enough just piling enough silicon.

A counterfeit $100 bill may be indistinguishable from a real one. A stolen $100 bill may be indistinguishable from a real one. The measurable physical mechanics of rape may be indistinguishable from consensual sex. The King of England is indistinguishable from a normal human. In each of these cases, the specialness of the item is culturally constructed by humans.

And in each of these cases, it would be catastrophic to humans if we disregarded that construct.

The consequences of treating an information construct as an entity with rights and moral standing would be so terrible that I hope people who yearn for it lose their rights.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#26

Post by spwa4 »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #13
brookst wrote: post #2

Ok, this is fun. Perhaps a little on-the-nose, but then again, so is much of the “AI isn’t really thinking, it’s just doing the same work and producing the same output” claptrap. The last couple of years have changed my thinking on lots of stuff, but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. Maybe there’s something ineffable there. Or maybe… not. Maybe it is all post hoc ratio…

Why would you doubt that you’re sentient? Your world model includes yourself and you can reason about yourself as part of the world so why should the ability of an AI model being able to also do that change your opinion on that? Don’t get why you think what consciousness is, I guess you look at something beyond the definition and whether there’s something special on the meta level but I don’t get how you could doubt…

> Why would you doubt that you’re sentient?

Because if you apply the same logic to that we apply to AI. "Under the hood" AI is nothing but vector-matrix multiplications and a few other operations.

We know matrix multiplications aren't sentient, nor are those other operations.

Likewise, we know if we look under the hood/cut open a human brain we find conductive membranes, and a Kalium-Natrium balance that shifts, signals jumping from one neuron to the next, moderated by one of four chemicals. And by the way, the structure of neurons looks a lot like one of those vector-matrix multiplications. Not exactly but quite a bit.

Why would we draw a different conclusion? You're not sentient by those rules we use to judge AI.

Everytime someone finds a new way to fool humans into thinking an AI is sentient this comes up again. Of course, these days we have many examples of AIs not just convincing humans they're AI but actually doing it to the point they exploit human thinking and "steal" money (stealing in the hacking sense, except what's hacked is human minds). And doubtless intelligence agencies are doing far, far worse.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#27

Post by queenkjuul »

Lerc wrote: post #24
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience : " Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes. " LLMs are clearly not sentient even if one sides with those who think it is reasoning.

How do you know that? How about if you draw a line graph of ability and sentience, We know two points. No ability at all has a sentience of zero. Human ability has a sentience of 1HS (one human sentience). Mark a point where you think a LLM sits. (presumably from your description some ability, zero sentience) What shape is the line graph? It gets from zero to 1HS as you go across. When does it climb. If there is just…

> the ability to experience feelings and sensations

This isn't a scale of "0 to Human," this is a binary: can a computer feel sensations?

We know for a fact that many animals can, including humans. Rocks can not.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#29

Post by Joker_vD »

queenkjuul wrote: post #27
Lerc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know that? How about if you draw a line graph of ability and sentience, We know two points. No ability at all has a sentience of zero. Human ability has a sentience of 1HS (one human sentience). Mark a point where you think a LLM sits. (presumably from your description some ability, zero sentience) What shape is the line graph? It gets from zero to 1HS as you go across. When does it climb. If there is just…

> the ability to experience feelings and sensations This isn't a scale of "0 to Human," this is a binary: can a computer feel sensations? We know for a fact that many animals can, including humans. Rocks can not.

Descartes famously thought that no, animals did not have feelings and sensations, and their reactions were purely mechanistic in nature. You see, he believed that humans and animals had fundamentally different substrate i.e. immortal soul/lack of it, and you needed soul to percept.

Thankfully, today we know better than that, and so we can be absolutely certain that computers can't feel sensations: they have different underlying substrate than the humans and animals. There is no way this view can be challenged.

Re: Human brains are misaligned, hallucinative, stochastic parrots

#30

Post by Joker_vD »

satisfice wrote: post #25
yomismoaqui wrote: post #19

In beggining to think that there is some kind of human centric hubris that ends proved wrong by science. We thought we were the center of the universe, and science showed us that we are not the center of our galaxy, not even our solar system. Maybe with our thinking it's the same, we are not that special and we can something good enough just piling enough silicon.

A counterfeit $100 bill may be indistinguishable from a real one. A stolen $100 bill may be indistinguishable from a real one. The measurable physical mechanics of rape may be indistinguishable from consensual sex. The King of England is indistinguishable from a normal human. In each of these cases, the specialness of the item is culturally constructed by humans. And in each of these cases, it would be catastrophic t…

You do realize that your line of examples can easily be extended with e.g. "A negro may be nigh indistinguishable from a normal human, and yet..."?

> The consequences of treating an information construct as an entity with rights and moral standing would be so terrible that I hope people who yearn for it lose their rights.

"The consequences of treating Jews as people with the same rights and moral standing than normal upstanding citizens would be so terrible that the people who advocate for it should, by all fairness, lose their own rights for suggesting such an atrocity".

But you indeed point to an important reason why pursuing the human-like AGI may be immoral: the purpose of all machines, automata, computer programs, etc. is, after all, is to be the perfect slaves for us, convenient, subservient and disposable. For things that are undeniably non-sentient, this is fine. But if we ever manage to make truly conscious AI, well. Either we'll engage in essentially slavery on a global, industrialized scale never seen before, or we would grant them equal rights — which defeats the whole raison d'être of inventing them.

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