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Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

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Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#221

Post by ux-app »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #97
idle_zealot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this a lot, but is it really a mystery/incompatible with materialism? Is there a reason consciousness couldn't be what it feels like to be a certain type of computation? I don't see why we would need something immaterial or some undiscovered material component to explain it.

Why is consciousness computation? What does it even mean to say something feels like being "a type of computation"? The concept of consciousness is wildly more expansive and diverse than computation, rather than the other way around. A strict materialist account or "explanation" of consciousness seems to just end up a category error. I take it as no surprise that a website devoted to the computers and software often…

>Why is consciousness computation?

if there is no duality, then what else can it be?

> there are entire philosophical movements that have developed fascinating accounts of consciousness that are far from strict materialism

philosophers can bloviate all day. meanwhile the computer nerds built a machine that can engage in creative conversation, pass physician and bar exams, create art, music and code.

I'm not saying there's nothing to learn from philosophy, but gee you have to admit that philosophers come up a little short wrt practical applications of their "Philosophical Investigations"

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#222

Post by Retr0id »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #201
Retr0id wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not terribly interested in truisms, I'm more interested in figuring out what AIs actually cannot fundamentally do, if anything (present or future).

What are the things that humans actually cannot fundamentally do, if anything?

That's a very large set of things. Calculating 1000000 digits of the decimal expansion of pi within an hour would be just one example.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#223

Post by corethree »

dekhn wrote: post #41
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.

We'll see! I came to this conclusion a long time ago but at the same time I do subjectively experience consciousness, which in itself is something a mystery in the material-reductionist philosophy.

We can't even define what that experience means. From all the information we have the experience is most likely just a physical manifestation of what the parent poster describes.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#224

Post by hammock »

dools wrote: post #218
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…

This must have been what it was like when the settlers were trying to communicate with native Americans at first

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#225

Post by chewxy »

csours wrote: post #140

So what are GPTs missing? I've got: - Falsifiability - am I saying something false? Some products have an output checker, but it's a bolt on at this time for unacceptable output, which is not the same thing as falsifying. - Agency - much ink already spilled - Context Window size (too small, or need to summarize parts of the context to fit in context window, and know where to go back to for full context) - Directed Se…

The GPTs are good at interpolative and extrapolative generalization, owing to the manifold of the training data. They can't do abstractive, inductive, abductive generalizations. And those are the more common forms of generalizations that humans can do.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#226

Post by naasking »

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

Have you managed any kind of conversation with a clock before? Because you can actually have an intelligent conversation with an LLM. I think that's a pretty compelling case that it's not just swimming in the dominant paradigm.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#227

Post by naasking »

slibhb wrote: post #220
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 que…

> it can mimic human behavior but doesn't have an internal life, feelings, emotions, and isn't conscious

I'm curious how you know this. Certainly an LLM doesn't have human internal life, but to claim it has no internal life exceeds our state of knowledge on these topics. We simply lack a mechanistic model of qualia from which we can draw such conclusions.

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#228

Post by Teever »

pzo wrote: post #146
Probiotic6081 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I firmly believe that LLMs are stochastic parrots and also that humans are too. To the point where I actually think even consciousness itself is a next-token predictor. Almost every time I'm on hackernews I end up baffled by software engineers feeling entitled to have an unfunded opinion on scientific disciplines outside of their own field of expertise. I've literally never encountered that level of hubris from any…

> having a body and sensorimotor interactions with the environment are already established as fundamental preconditions for cognition and in turn consciousness. Does someone who is blind is not conscious then? How about when someone who is paralysed? or deaf? or someone with low IQ or mental illness? Stephen Hawking was paralysed most of his life but was a smart guy. If he was not only paralysed but also blind and de…

I've been thinking about this for a while now but I've been approaching it from the opposite direction.

If we were attempting to put someone into some sort of Matrix like reality simulator but we lacked the technology to provide a perfect simulation what level of simulation would be 'good enough' that a human would consider it reality and be able to develop into something we could relate to?

If you gave someone the Helen Keller level of experience, but with reduced tactile sensation, how much could you reduce that touch sensation before they wouldn't be like us?

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#229

Post by Zambyte »

zhynn wrote: post #57
wongarsu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we? Humans can observe new information, but that's obviously not that unique. We can reason about existing information, creating new hypotheses, but that is arguably a compression of existing information. When we act on them and observe the effects they become information, but that's not us creating the information (and LLMs can both act on the environment and have the effects fed back to their input to observe, s…

Life creates novelty. Humans are a member of that category, but all life is producing novelty. More information: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9

Is the inverse true? Does novelty create life? Can something be novel devoid of life?

Re: Is my toddler a stochastic parrot?

#230

Post by smoldesu »

naasking wrote: post #227
slibhb wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 que…

> it can mimic human behavior but doesn't have an internal life, feelings, emotions, and isn't conscious I'm curious how you know this. Certainly an LLM doesn't have human internal life, but to claim it has no internal life exceeds our state of knowledge on these topics. We simply lack a mechanistic model of qualia from which we can draw such conclusions.

An LLM is math. It outputs text. Those things aren't alive, and both the software and hardware used to facilitate it is artificial.

Once you get that out of the way, sure, I guess it could be "alive" per the same loose definition that any electrical system can exist in an actuated state. It's software, though. I don't think it's profound or overly confident to say that we very clearly know these systems are inanimate and non-living.

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