The weights start with a random manifold. The training takes data and shapes the manifold, weight by weight, in many cycles. Once the training is the done manifold is fixed. When a new inference has to be done the query(q) is projected in the manifold space. This projection is dropped on the manifold and the gravity of the manifold gives an answer of q+1 length. Which(qw+i) is dropped qw+n times to output a final res…
The weights are code, the prompt is code, the output is code. Is the meat code?
The data is the code. Training algorithm is the compiler. The weights are the byte code produced to run on the inference VM.
This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…
For obvious survival reasons we evolved to have sensory/cognitive access to our own activity, self-monitoring, and self-modeling ourselves. The self-modeling, is in such a tight loop, it melds "ourselves" and our model of ourselves, our thinking and choices, and experience of our thinking and choices, into one component. Like you can't analyze half a wheel of a bicycle and be talking about the same thing. This awaren…
> We literally spend almost all day, every day, thinking about ourselves, in terms of our inner self.
> That is consciousness.
So thinking is consciousness?
Can there be consciousness without content? E.g. can I just be conscious of being conscious? If so, consciousness cannot be defined as the thing(s) we're conscious of.
I proposed in another comment that consciousness and self-awareness are at least close cousins, and perhaps the same phenomenon. If that's true, then that's an axis upon which you might create comparative measures. Yes, hamsters are conscious, but they don't have a sense of self to the same degree that gorillas do. If you posit capacity for language as another emergent property of sufficiently-complex networks, then…
I'm not sure consciousness and self-awareness are the same thing. First is we can be conscious when we sleep/during REM sleep, where it's arguable we are not self-aware. And if not that, we can even do it when awake, for example when we think about a movie, or a philosophical problem, we can have conscious thoughts that are not related to the self. This leads me to believe consciousness is separate from self-awarenes…
Sure, but capacity for self-awareness? I'd guess that hamsters dream, and that their subconscious processes (eg, desires for food and sleep and sex), and maybe even emotions, run much like ours. It's just that humans, with more complex neural networks, have more layers added on top. It's similar to how the brain-stems of everything from lizards on "up" function similarly, but humans have more-developed pre-frontal cortexes and so forth. (Don't hold me to those details, please, I'm not a neuro-anatomist! You can see where I'm going with that, though, right?)
I have to agree. It is messed up that transformers can just talk, and it been pretty normalized. We are only talking about the impact they will have and whether they can do what people say they can, but we arent talking about how crazy it is that they can talk
I come back to this every so often as well. After so many years of looking at Markov chain outputs that almost looked like they made sense or chatbot systems rewriting your sentence back at you, software which can simply talk is a heady thing.
This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…
AFAIK every argument against conciousness being emergent is just a weak "God of the gaps" argument (since we don't fully understand it all) or a nonsense analogy like the Chinsese room where if you seperate the hardware and software it's not concious anymore (like, duh, remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either). Yeah, the weights not updating online makes them less like a living organism that ca…
I don't find the Chinese room compelling, since it appeals to intuition where our intuition is already not trustworthy. It's like trying to use intuition to understand quantum mechanics; you can't.
How do you actually know the Chinese room isn't conscious? It's merely obvious that it isn't, but that's not evidence.
The original story is an original work made by a human consciousness exploring how it might be different from other forms of consciousness. This one is a pastiche made by a human consciousness borrowing extremely heavily from another human consciousness justifying why something else might be another form of consciousness. That rather undercuts the point; if this was generated by an LLM unprompted, it would be differe…
You can't do the same with a toaster. Physically you could write that story. But it would fall flat because the toaster is not a compelling subject in a discussion of consciousness. You don't have to believe that LLMs or AI agents are conscious to acknowledge that the argument for their consciousness is far more compelling than any other technological artifact.
Oh, no. When you add thermal sensing and offsetting ambient temperature, you can add all kind of "seemingly" intelligent features like feeling the emotions of the bread, and creating the perfect toast without hurting the cute little bread slices, making them perfectly blonde while not showing cruelty to them. They can even adapt to their environment and the characteristics of the bread even with simplest of mechanism…
Who have you ever heard make a sincere, good faith argument that a toaster is conscious? Who do you imagine would argue against you if you asserted they were mere automata? If you can't identify anyone, then this analogy doesn't work.
> Who have you ever heard make a sincere, good faith argument that a toaster is conscious?
More than one, for many classes of devices, incl. toasters. Some were drunk, some were insane, and some were delusional.
LLMs are no different. They are automata, yet delusional people bring out pitchforks and torches when someone points out that they are just statistical models, and they don't even work when there's no input to them.
Who have you ever heard make a sincere, good faith argument that a toaster is conscious? Who do you imagine would argue against you if you asserted they were mere automata? If you can't identify anyone, then this analogy doesn't work.
> Who have you ever heard make a sincere, good faith argument that a toaster is conscious? More than one, for many classes of devices, incl. toasters. Some were drunk, some were insane, and some were delusional. LLMs are no different. They are automata, yet delusional people bring out pitchforks and torches when someone points out that they are just statistical models, and they don't even work when there's no input t…
Their being statistical models and their being conscious are not contradictory unless proven otherwise. That's not knowledge, it is assumption.
It would appear to me you have no interest in a real, good faith discussion on this topic because you think anyone who disagrees with you is necessarily delusional. Which is a shame, and that's the kind of dogma you are criticizing.
This was exactly the point of the story, it's too uncomfortable to admit that we don't know what consciousness is and what is and isn't conscious, so we just brush it under the rug.