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Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

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Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#211

Post by schoen »

jtr1 wrote: post #195
bigDinosaur wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The jump to 'information processing machines' seems far more correct than anything that came before, I'm curious how you would argue against that? Yes, there are more modern and other interesting theories (e.g. predictive coding) but they seem much closer to cognitive psychology than say, the human brain working like a clock.

I think the argument is that you need to ask how you are measuring when you say it seems more correct than anything that came before. You may just be describing the experience of swimming in the dominant paradigm

One attempt could be "it allows us to make better predictions about the mind".

This article mentions excitement about neural networks overgeneralizing verb inflections, which human language learners also do. If neural networks lead to the discovery of new examples of human cognitive or perceptual errors or illusions, or to the discovery of new effective methods for learning, teaching, or psychotherapy, that could count as evidence that they're a good model of our actual minds.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#212

Post by l33t7332273 »

__loam wrote: post #180
robwwilliams wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you study retinal synaptic circuitry you will not sigh so heavily and you will in fact see striking homologies with hardware neural networks, including feedback between layers and discretized (action potential) outputs via the optic nerve. I recommend reading Synaptic Organization of the Brain or getting into if you are brave, the primary literature on retinal processing of visual input.

I will continue to sigh. The visual cortex is relatively simple and linear. You're not saying something that's as impressive as you think it is.

I think the point of the example is that that is an important part of our brains that is relatively simple and linear and we’ve been able to mimic it.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#213

Post by 4death4 »

yojo wrote: post #59
throw0101a wrote: post #35

> But he could understand so much more than he could say. If you asked him to point to the vacuum cleaner, he would. Perhaps worth noting that it is possible to teach infants (often starting at around 9 months) sign language so that they can more easily signal their desires. Some priority recommended words would probably be: * hungry/more * enough/all done (for when they're full) * drink (perhaps both milk/formula an…

FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/ I have friends who had much more success with it, but the value will largely depend on your child’s relative developmental strengths. A friend’s son with autism got literally years’ benefit out of the gestures before verbal speech caught up.

I had the opposite experience. My daughter had multiple signs down by 7 months.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#214

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

jancsika wrote: post #85
xianshou wrote: post #33

Pour one out for the decline of human exceptionalism! Once you get material-reductionist enough and accept yourself as a pure function of genetics, environment, past experience, and chance, this conclusion becomes inevitable. I also expect it to be the standard within a decade, with AI-human parity of capabilities as the key driver.

I'm not convinced that this material-reductionist view wouldn't just be functionally equivalent to the way a majority of citizens live their lives currently. Now: a chance encounter with someone of a different faith leads a citizen to respect the religious freedom of others in the realm of self-determination. Future: a young hacker's formative experience leads to the idea that citizens should have the basic right to…

> Kinda like those old conservative couples I see in the South where the man is ostensibly the story teller and head of household. But if you listen long enough you notice his wife is whispering nearly every detail of importance to help him maintain coherence.

You've never actually seen this happen because it doesn't happen. This is not how real people interact, it's how the caricatures in your head interact.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#215

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

idle_zealot wrote: post #99
kaibee wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the undiscovered part is why it should feel like anything at all. And this is definitely relevant because consciousness clearly exists enough that we exert physical force about it, so its gotta be somewhere in physics. But where?

Why does it need to be in physics? What would that look like, a Qualia Boson? It could be an emergent property like life itself. Physics doesn't "explain" life, it explains the physical mechanisms behind the chemical interactions that ultimately produce life by virtue of self-replicating patterns spreading and mutating. There is no Life is physics, and yet we see it all around it because it emerges as a complex resul…

If life is an emergent property of physics then it's replicable which means it's not spiritual.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#216

Post by cscurmudgeon »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #134
beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or each successive comparison is just compounding and reiterating the same underlying assumption (and potentially the same mistake) whether it's true or not.

The jump to 'information processing machines' seems far more correct than anything that came before, I'm curious how you would argue against that? Yes, there are more modern and other interesting theories (e.g. predictive coding) but they seem much closer to cognitive psychology than say, the human brain working like a clock.

> I'm curious how you would argue against that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/77517/what-is...

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#217

Post by john-radio »

xigency wrote: post #56

Regarding dismissals of LLM’s on ‘technical’ grounds: Consciousness is first a word and second a concept. And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better than billions of humans worldwide. The software folks have made even more progress than sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists to be able to create an artificial language cortex before we understand our biological mind comprehens…

> The field of philosophy is already ripe with ideas from hundreds of years ago that an artificial intelligence can use against people in debates of free will, self-determination and the nature of existence. This isn’t the battle to pick.

Uh, wouldn't that apply equally to any other topic that has been argued extensively before, and to any tenable position on those topics? Like, I can make ChatGPT argue against your LLM sentience apologist-bot just as easily.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#218

Post by dools »

throw0101a wrote: post #35

> But he could understand so much more than he could say. If you asked him to point to the vacuum cleaner, he would. Perhaps worth noting that it is possible to teach infants (often starting at around 9 months) sign language so that they can more easily signal their desires. Some priority recommended words would probably be: * hungry/more * enough/all done (for when they're full) * drink (perhaps both milk/formula an…

We taught both our kids to sign.

My favourite moment was in March, my daughter was about to turn 2 and wasn't speaking yet.

I asked her if she would like to hear some music.

She made the sign for dog.

I searched youtube for some songs about dogs and she shook her head.

She made the sign for tree.

I was like "dog, tree", she nodded. Hmmm...

I was searching for "dog tree music" when one of the pictures that came up was a christmas tree.

She pointed to that excitedly!

I was like "dog christmas tree music" ... it took me a second to realise that she wanted to listen to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack that I had had playing off YouTube at Christmas 3 months previously!

I put that on again and we danced around to it.

I thought that was totally wild! It was the first time I remember her communicating a really sophisticated preference other than just wanting to eat/drink/help etc.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#219

Post by dools »

hiisukun wrote: post #155
throw0101a wrote: post #35

> But he could understand so much more than he could say. If you asked him to point to the vacuum cleaner, he would. Perhaps worth noting that it is possible to teach infants (often starting at around 9 months) sign language so that they can more easily signal their desires. Some priority recommended words would probably be: * hungry/more * enough/all done (for when they're full) * drink (perhaps both milk/formula an…

This is good advice but with a caveat: some of the muscle control required for particular signs is not able to be learned by children until they're a bit older. For example, voluntary supination/pronation of the forearm is generally not something a 9month old can do. If you try and teach them a common sign for "enough/finished" (fist closed, thumb pointed out, then rotation of the forearm back and forth), or "done" a…

Yeah my daughter used to stick out her index finger and wave it back and forth for finished.

One of my favourite memories of that was when we went to see the Vivid light show in Sydney and there was a contortionist on the street so we stopped to watch. I looked into the stroller and said "What do you think?" and she made the sign for "finished". So we moved on.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#220

Post by slibhb »

xigency wrote: post #56

Regarding dismissals of LLM’s on ‘technical’ grounds: Consciousness is first a word and second a concept. And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better than billions of humans worldwide. The software folks have made even more progress than sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists to be able to create an artificial language cortex before we understand our biological mind comprehens…

With a simple computer, speaker, and accelerometer, you can build a device that says "ouch" when you drop it. Does it feel pain?

My point is that there are good reasons to believe that a hypothetical LLM that can pass a Turing test is a philosophical zombie, i.e. it can mimic human behavior but doesn't have an internal life, feelings, emotions, and isn't conscious. Whether that distinction is important is another question. LLMs provide evidence that consciousness may not be necessary to create sophisticated AIs that can pass or exceed human performance.

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