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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#201

Post by handfuloflight »

DavidPiper wrote: post #192
npinsker wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a great answer to GP’s question!

It's also nonsense. (Swimming and thinking are both human capabilities, not solutions to problems.) But of course here we are back in the endless semantic debate about what "thinking" is, exactly to the GP's (and Edsger Dijkstra's) point.

Swimming and thinking being 'human capabilities' doesn't preclude them from also being solutions to evolutionary problems: aquatic locomotion and adaptive problem solving, respectively.

And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#202

Post by kapone »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #172
esafak wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is, though, because it challenges our belief that only biological entities can think, and thinking is a core part of our identity, unlike swimming.

> our belief that only biological entities can think Whose belief is that? As a computer scientist my perspective of all of this is as different methods of computing and we have a pretty solid foundations on computability (though, it does seem a bit frightening how many present-day devs have no background in the foundation of the Theory of Computation). There's a pretty common naive belief that somehow "thinking" is…

[dead]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#203

Post by plufz »

danielbln wrote: post #162
iammjm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine needing without thinking (like being hungry), but feelings? How and in what space would that even manifest? Like where would such a sensation like, say, sadness reside?

Emotions tend to manifest as physical sensations, and if you don't think that's true it's likely you haven't been paying attention. See also https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/mapping-h...

But that is just our nervous system that is located in both the brain and the body, they are obviously one connected system. Sure you can have reflexes and simple learning without a brain, but you need cognition for feelings. That is sort of the definition of what feeling are.

One popular definition: feelings are the subjective, conscious mental experience of an emotion, or the conscious perception of bodily states that arise from physiological and neural responses to stimuli

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#205

Post by paulhebert »

gf000 wrote: post #145
educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

What people are interested in is finding a definition for intelligence, that is an exact boundary. That's why we first considered tool use, being able to plan ahead as intelligence, until we have found that these are not all that rare in the animal kingdom in some shape. Then with the advent of IT what we imagined as impossible turned out to be feasible to solve, while what we though of as easy (e.g. robot movements…

Interestingly, I think the distinction between human and animal thinking is much more arbitrary than the distinction between humans and LLMs.

Although an LLM can mimic a human well, I’d wager the processes going on in a crow’s brain are much closer to ours than an LLM

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#206

Post by gwd »

paxys wrote: post #100
educasean wrote: post #69

The debate around whether or not transformer-architecture-based AIs can "think" or not is so exhausting and I'm over it. What's much more interesting is the question of "If what LLMs do today isn't actual thinking, what is something that only an actually thinking entity can do that LLMs can't?". Otherwise we go in endless circles about language and meaning of words instead of discussing practical, demonstrable capabi…

Don't be sycophantic. Disagree and push back when appropriate. Come up with original thought and original ideas. Have long term goals that aren't programmed by an external source. Do something unprompted. The last one IMO is more complex than the rest, because LLMs are fundamentally autocomplete machines. But what happens if you don't give them any prompt? Can they spontaneously come up with something, anything, with…

> The last one IMO is more complex than the rest, because LLMs are fundamentally autocomplete machines. But what happens if you don't give them any prompt? Can they spontaneously come up with something, anything, without any external input?

Human children typically spend 18 years of their lives being RLHF'd before let them loose. How many people do something truly out of the bounds of the "prompting" they've received during that time?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#207

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

The number of people willing to launch into debates about whether LLMs are thinking, intelligent, conscious, etc, without actually defining those terms, never ceases to amaze me.

I'm not sure that "thinking", unlike intelligence, is even that interesting of a concept. It's basically just reasoning/planning (i.e. chained what-if prediction). Sometimes you're reasoning/planning (thinking) what to say, and other times just reasoning/planning to yourself (based on an internal vs external focus).

Of course one can always CHOOSE to make analogies between any two things, in this case the mechanics of what's going on internal to an LLM and a brain, but I'm not sure it's very useful in this case. Using anthropomorphic language to describe LLMs seems more likely to confuse rather than provide any insight, especially since they are built with the sole function of mimicking humans, so you are basically gaslighting yourself if you regard them as actually human-like.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#208

Post by prmph »

myrmidon wrote: post #165
prmph wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "quite robust against disturbances." does not mean that the essential thing gives rise to consciousness is only approximate. To give an example from software, you can write software is robust against bad input, attempts to crash it, even bit flips. But, if I came in and just changed a single character in the source code, that may cause it to fail compilation, fail to run, or become quite buggy. > If you don't want…

How is it a false dichotomy? If you want consciousness to NOT be simulateable, then you need some essential component to our minds that can't be simulated (call it soul or whatever) and for that thing to interface with our physical bodies (obviously). We have zero evidence for either. > does not mean that the essential thing gives rise to consciousness is only approximate But we have 8 billion different instances tha…

> plenty of them have all kinds of defects,

Defects that have not rendered them unconscious, as long as they still are alive. You seem not to see the circularity of your argument.

I gave you an example to show that robustness against adverse conditions is NOT the same as internal resiliency. Those defect, as far as we know, are not affecting the origin of consciousness itself. Which is my point.

> How is it a false dichotomy? If you want consciousness to NOT be simulateable, then you need some essential component to our minds that can't be simulated (call it soul or whatever) and for that thing to interface with our physical bodies (obviously).

If you need two things to happen at the same time in sync with each other no matter if they are separated by billions of miles, then you need faster-than-light travel, or some magic [1]; see what I did there?

1. I.e., quantum entanglement

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#209

Post by goatlover »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #172
esafak wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is, though, because it challenges our belief that only biological entities can think, and thinking is a core part of our identity, unlike swimming.

> our belief that only biological entities can think Whose belief is that? As a computer scientist my perspective of all of this is as different methods of computing and we have a pretty solid foundations on computability (though, it does seem a bit frightening how many present-day devs have no background in the foundation of the Theory of Computation). There's a pretty common naive belief that somehow "thinking" is…

One argument for thinking being different from computing is that thought is fundamentally embodied, conscious and metaphorical. Computing would be an abstracted activity from thinking that we've automated with machines.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#210

Post by DavidPiper »

handfuloflight wrote: post #201
DavidPiper wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also nonsense. (Swimming and thinking are both human capabilities, not solutions to problems.) But of course here we are back in the endless semantic debate about what "thinking" is, exactly to the GP's (and Edsger Dijkstra's) point.

Swimming and thinking being 'human capabilities' doesn't preclude them from also being solutions to evolutionary problems: aquatic locomotion and adaptive problem solving, respectively. And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing.

> And pointing out that we're in a 'semantic debate' while simultaneously insisting on your own semantic framework (capabilities vs solutions) is exactly the move you're critiquing.

I know, that's the point I'm making.

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