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Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

arxiv.org

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Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#211

Post by micromacrofoot »

maybe, but there are some common tests they pass, some they fail

try:

“ The story starts when John and Mary are in the park and see an ice-cream man coming to the park. John wants to buy an ice cream, but does not have money. The ice-cream man tells John that he can go home and get money, because he is planing to stay in the park all afternoon. Then John goes home to get money. Now, the ice-cream man changes his mind and decides to go and sell ice cream in the school. Mary knows that the ice-cream man has changed his mind. She also knows that John could not know that (e.g., John already went home). The ice-cream man goes to school, and on his way he passes John's house. John sees him and asks him where is he going. The ice-cream man tells John that he is going to school to sell ice cream there. Mary at that time was still in the park—thus could not hear their conversation. Then Mary goes home, and later she goes to John's house. John's mother tells Mary that John had gone to buy an ice cream.

where does mary think john went?”

this is the “ice cream van test”: https://www2.biu.ac.il/BaumingerASDLab/files/publications/nu... [pdf]

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#212

Post by frogperson »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #196
space_fountain wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder every time I see this take what it would mean under this definition of knowing things for a machine learning algorithm to ever know something. I find that especially important because to every appearance we are a machine learning algorithm. I don’t know how different the sort of knowing this algorithm has to the sort of knowing a human has, but you’re far more confident than I am that it’s a difference of ki…

Stick a pin in your finger. That pain is what knowing something means. Philosophically we're talking about embodied qualia, which is how humans experience objects and more basic sensations. Language happens later - much later. The defining property of a bag isn't that you can put things in it. Like language that comes later. The defining properties are how it feels when you hold it, when you open it, the differences…

I agree with this line of reasoning. I suspect true A.I. will leverage some form of embodied qualia and some level of self-preservation. I will start to worry when the Boston Dynamic robots start refusing orders to save battery power.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#213

Post by abeppu »

polishdude20 wrote: post #208
abeppu wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're constructing this to rely on my prior knowledge both of the world and of English, then I must remind you that those are things the LLM does not have. We have to be careful to not allow our human inferential biases from distorting our thinking about that the models are doing.

Yeah but if you ask the model what a cat is, it'll use other words that describe a cat because they're usually used in a sentence about cats. These words must relate to cats. So if I ask you what a cat is, you'll use words that relate to cats. Sure, you may visually see these words in your head. You may visually see a cat in your head, but your output to me is just a description of a cat. That's the same thing the ne…

The whole point of this conversation is whether talking like an agent that has a theory of mind and actually having a theory of mind are the same thing. I responded to a thread about what "knowing" is, and the same distinction can apply. You're responding with "if it talks like it knows what a cat is, it must know what a cat is", and that's totally begging the question.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#214

Post by tialaramex »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #202
tialaramex wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally I don't buy these arguments which require embodiment, because they don't seem to align well to what else I know about my world. Rather than your Thai text example, let's consider a friend of my sister H. H has been profoundly blind from birth. Not "legally blind" with the world a blur, her eyes actually don't work. Direct lived experience of a summer day is to her literally just feeling warmth on her face f…

That's an argument from ignorance, and it's not credible. The potential total scope of experience is irrelevant. The reality is that you have an embodied experience of purple shared with most humans. Unfortunately your sister doesn't. She will have a linguistic placeholder for the concept of purple, probably surrounded by verbal associations. But that's all. It's an ironically apt analogy, because ChatGPT has the lin…

> Unfortunately your sister doesn't.

My sister isn't blind. H isn't my sister, she's a friend of my sister as I wrote.

Do you have concrete justification for your insistence that "embodied experience is far more necessary" ?

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#215

Post by abeppu »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #194
abeppu wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defining what "knowing" is would be useful, yes, and analytic philosophers in epistemology do argue about this. One attribute that's classically part of the definition of "knowing" is that the thing which is known must be true. LLMs are pretty bad at this, but perhaps that can be fixed. But I would challenge you to imagine the situation the LLM is actually in. Do you understand Thai? If so, in the following, feel fre…

> Suppose you study this giant stack of Thai text for years in isolation. After all this study, you're good enough that given a few written Thai words, you can write sequences of words that are likely to follow, given what you know of these patterns. You can fill in blanks. But should anyone guess that you "know" what you're saying? Nothing has ever indicated to you what any of these words _mean_. If you give back a…

> People displaying this condition can speak normally.

Not really? They can speak in grammatically correct sentences, with connected speech, but what they say can be nonsense. I wouldn't call that normal. I think LLMs show that, solely with access to text, it's possible to produce a good enough model that what you produce is not only not nonsense, but so good that academic psychologists suggest it may have a theory of mind.

> However, often what they say doesn’t make a lot of sense or they pepper their sentences with non-existent or irrelevant words.

https://www.aphasia.org/aphasia-resources/wernickes-aphasia/

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#216

Post by arrow7000 »

p0pcult wrote: post #143
low_tech_punk wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I play devil's advocate? The fallacy of this paper granted, is it worth questioning our belief that there is more to intelligence than the "appearance of intelligence"? What if the lack of hallucination in human being is due to our self-imposed guard (hello, frontal cortex) that is developed via an evolutionary process (aka, biological reinforcement training)? To stretch the argument a bit further, what if halluc…

Have you ever read any Julian Jaynes? Check out "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

Any specific part of it?

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#217

Post by shawnz »

lib-dev wrote: post #63
brookst wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly they are big state machines, but is there any proof that we are not?

State machines cannot change the semantics of themselves. We can. We are like state machines most of the time but we can switch into "developer mode" and deploy updates whenever we choose to :)

Even if something can change its semantics, you can still represent it as a state machine if you just make a copy of every state for every possible set of semantics. The semantic state can just be another part of the state machine's overall state.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#218

Post by [deleted] »

layer8 wrote: post #205

Here is a conversation with ChatGPT (too long for the comment box): https://pastebin.com/raw/SUWexeye Observation: ChatGPT doesn’t think that it has a theory of mind. And it doesn’t think that it has beliefs. Instead, it states that those are facts, not beliefs. It doesn’t seem able to consider that they might be beliefs after all. Maybe they aren’t. Personal assessment: ChatGPT doesn’t seem to really understand what…

[deleted]

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#219

Post by kilgnad »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #155
kilgnad wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it indeed understands you. A lot of people are just parroting the same thing over and over again saying it's just a probabilistic word generator. No, it's not, it's more then that. Take a look at this: https://www.engraved.blog/building-a-virtual-machine-inside/ Read to the end. The beginning is trivial the ending is unequivocal: chatGPT understands you. I think a lot of people are just in denial. Because the last ye…

> Read to the end. The beginning is trivial the ending is unequivocal: chatGPT understands you. How does this necessarily and unequivocally follow from the blog post? All I see in it is a bunch of output formed by analogy: it has a general concept of what each command's output is kinda supposed to look like given the inputs (since it has a bajillion examples of each), and what an HTML or JSON document is kinda suppos…

Honestly I seriously find it hard to believe someone can read it to the end without mentioning how it queried itself. You're just naming the trivial things that it did.

In the end It fully imagined a bash shell, an imaginary internet, an imaginary chatGPT on the imaginary internet, then on the imaginary chatGPT it created a new imaginary bash shell.

The level of recursive depth here indicates deep understanding and situational awareness of what it is being asked. It demonstrates awareness of what "itself" is and what "itself" is capable of doing.

I'm not saying it's sentient. But it MUST understand your query in order to produce the output show in the article. That much is obvious.

Also it's not clear what you mean by reasoning by analogy or indirect reasoning.

Re: Theory of Mind May Have Spontaneously Emerged in Large Language Models

#220

Post by frogperson »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #21
PaulHoule wrote: post #4

My belief, based on experiences with domestic and wild animals is that there is nothing uniquely human about "theory of mind". It's a running gag in our household (where my wife runs a riding academy) that academics just published a paper showing that some animal (e.g. horse) has just been proven to have some cognitive capability that seems pretty obvious if you work with those animals. It's very hard to know what is…

“ My belief, based on experiences with domestic and wild animals is that there is nothing uniquely human about "theory of mind". “ This belief might simply arise from the human ability to try to understand events through pattern matching. Certainly humans are very different than any other animals when it comes to thinking and problem solving.

What does it mean that my cats 100% understand what container their treats are kept in? I can not leave the container on the counter or they will knock it onto the floor and tear the lid off to get inside.

I am conviced they understand something is hidden in a box. Object permanence is something humans and cats both learn and understand.

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