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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#221

Post by goatlover »

gwd wrote: post #196
handfuloflight wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an oversimplification. Thinking computers can create more swimming submarines, but the inverse is not possible. Swimming is a closed solution; thinking is a meta-solution.

I think you missed the point of that quote. Birds fly, and airplanes fly; fish swim but submarines don't. It's an accident of language that we define "swim" in a way that excludes what submarines do. They move about under their own power under the water, so it's not very interesting to ask whether they "swim" or not. Most people I've talked to who insist that LLMs aren't "thinking" turn out to have a similar perspect…

Reading the quote in context seems to indicate Dijkstra meant something else. His article is a complaint about overselling computers as doing or augmenting the thinking for humans. It's funny how the quote was lifted out of an article and became famous on it's own.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867...

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#222

Post by handfuloflight »

gwd wrote: post #196
handfuloflight wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an oversimplification. Thinking computers can create more swimming submarines, but the inverse is not possible. Swimming is a closed solution; thinking is a meta-solution.

I think you missed the point of that quote. Birds fly, and airplanes fly; fish swim but submarines don't. It's an accident of language that we define "swim" in a way that excludes what submarines do. They move about under their own power under the water, so it's not very interesting to ask whether they "swim" or not. Most people I've talked to who insist that LLMs aren't "thinking" turn out to have a similar perspect…

Then you're missing the point of my rebuttal. You say submarines don't swim [like fish] despite both moving through water, the only distinction is mechanism. Can AI recursively create new capabilities like thinking does, or just execute tasks like submarines do? That's the question.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#223

Post by goatlover »

jmcodes wrote: post #215
zahlman wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but then humans don’t have zero input Humans don't require input to, say, decide to go for a walk. What's missing in the LLM is volition .

Our entire extistence and experience is nothing _but_ input. Temperature changes, visual stimulus, auditory stimulus, body cues, random thoughts firing, etc.. Those are all going on all the time.

Random thoughts firing wouldn't be input, they're an internal process to the organism.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#224

Post by rustystump »

crazygringo wrote: post #184
Terr_ wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm so baffled when I see this being blindly asserted. With the reasoning models, you can literally watch their thought process. Not true, you are falling for a very classic (prehistoric, even) human illusion known as experiencing a story : 1. There is a story-like document being extruded out of a machine humans explicitly designed for generating documents, and which humans trained on a bajillion stories humans alr…

You're claiming that the thinking is just a fictional story intended to look like it. But this is false, because the thinking exhibits cause and effect and a lot of good reasoning. If you change the inputs, the thinking continues to be pretty good with the new inputs. It's not a story, it's not fictional, it's producing genuinely reasonable conclusions around data it hasn't seen before. So how is it therefore not act…

The problem is that the overwhelming majority of input it has in-fact seen somewhere in the corpus it was trained on. Certainly not one for one but easily an 98% match. This is the whole point of what the other person is trying to comment on i think. The reality is most of language is regurgitating 99% to communicate an internal state in a very compressed form. That 1% tho maybe is the magic that makes us human. We create net new information unseen in the corpus.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#225

Post by uwagar »

myrmidon wrote: post #113
prmph wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you simulated a human brain by the atom, That is what we don't know is possible. You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered. And from what we even know currently, atoms are too coarse to form the basis of such "cloning" And, my viewpoint is that, even if this were possible, just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If it is the arrangement…

> You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered You would not need the simulation to be perfect; there is ample evidence that our brains a quite robust against disturbances. > just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If you don't want that to be true, you need some kind of magic, that makes the simulation behave differently from reality. How woul…

dude u need to do some psychedelics.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#227

Post by eloisant »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #219

The article misses three critical points: 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon 2. Ignores the cerebellum cases - We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum, which contradicts simplistic "brain = deep learning" equivalences 3. Most damnin…

This is why I'm very skeptical about the "Nobel prize level" claims. To win a Nobel prize you would have to produce something completely new. LLM will probably be able to reach a Ph.D. level of understanding existing research, but bringing something new is a different matter.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#228

Post by goatlover »

triclops200 wrote: post #152
paxys wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet we can ignore our biology, or act in ways that are the opposite of what our biology tells us. Can someone map all internal and external stimuli that a person encounters into a set of deterministic actions? Simply put, we have not the faintest idea how our brains actually work, and so saying saying "LLMs think the same way as humans" is laughable.

As a researcher in these fields: this reasoning is tired, overblown, and just wrong. We have a lot of understanding of how the brain works overall. You don't. Go read the active inference book by Friston et. al. for some of the epistemological and behavioral mechanics (Yes, this applies to llms as well, they easily satisfy the requirements to be considered the mathematical object described as a markov blanket). And,…

> And, yes, if you could somehow freeze a human's current physical configuration at some time, you would absolutely, in principle, given what we know about the universe, be able to concretely map input to into actions. You cannot separate a human's representative configuration from their environment in this way, so, behavior appears much more non-deterministic.

What's the point in making an argument in principle for something that's not feasible? That's like arguing we could in principle isolate a room with a physicist looking inside a box to see whether the cat is alive or dead, putting the entire experiment is superposition to test Many Worlds or whatever interpretation.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#229

Post by jdauriemma »

mrob wrote: post #142

I don't believe LLMs can be conscious during inference because LLM inference is just repeated evaluation of a deterministic [0] pure function. It takes a list of tokens and outputs a set of token probabilities. Any randomness is part of the sampler that selects a token based on the generated probabilities, not the LLM itself. There is no internal state that persists between tokens [1], so there can be no continuity o…

I don't think the author is saying that LLMs are conscious or alive.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#230

Post by jmcodes »

goatlover wrote: post #223
jmcodes wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our entire extistence and experience is nothing _but_ input. Temperature changes, visual stimulus, auditory stimulus, body cues, random thoughts firing, etc.. Those are all going on all the time.

Random thoughts firing wouldn't be input, they're an internal process to the organism.

It's a process that I don't have conscious control over.

I don't choose to think random thoughts they appear.

Which is different than thoughts I consciously choose to think and engage with.

From my subjective perspective it is an input into my field of awareness.

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