You are the scariest monster in the woods

>clear links for an evolutionary path

there are clear links for at least 2 evolutionary paths: bird brain architecture is very different from that of mammals and some are among the smartest species on the planet. they have sophisticated language and social relationships, they can deceive (meaning they can put themselves inside another's mind and act accordingly), they solve problems and they invent and engineer tools for specific purposes and use them to that effect. give them time and these bitches might even become our new overlords (if we're still around, that is).

It's confirmation bias in favor of faulty a prioris, usually as the product of the person being a cognitive miser. This is very common to experience even within biology, where non-animal intelligence is irrationally rejected over what I like to call "magic neuron theory". The fact that the nervous system is (empirically!) not the seat of the mind? Selectively ignored in this context. The fact that other biologies have ion-gated communications networks as animals do, including the full set of behaviors and mechanisms? Well it's not a neuron so it doesn't have the magic.

"Intelligence describes a set of properties iff those properties arise as a result of nervous system magic"

It's a futile battle because like I say, it's not rational. Nor is it empirical. It's a desperate clawing to preserve a ridiculous superstition. Try as you might, all you'll end up doing is playing word games until you realize you're being stonewalled by an unthinking adherence to the proposition above. I think the intelligent behaviors of LLMs are pretty obvious if we're being good faith. The problem is you're talking to people who can watch a slime mold plasmodia exhibit learning and sharing of knowledge[1] and they'll give some flagrant ad lib handwaive for why that's not intelligent behavior. Some people simply struggle with pattern blindness towards intelligence, a mind that isn't just another variety of animalia is inconceivable.

[1] - https://asknature.org/strategy/brainless-slime-molds-both-le...

No, they don't - you can update context, make it a sliding window, create a sort of register and train it on maintaining stateful variables, or various other hacks, but outside of actively managing the context, there is no state.

You can't just leave training mode on, which is the only way LLMs can currently have persisted state in the context of what's being discussed.

The context is the percept, the model is engrams. Active training allows the update of engrams by the percepts, but current training regimes require lots of examples, and don't allow for broad updates or radical shifts in the model, so there are fundamental differences in learning capability compared to biological intelligence, as well.

Under standard inference only runs, even if you're using advanced context hacks to persist some sort of pseudo-state, because the underlying engrams are not changed, the "state" is operating within a limited domain, and the underlying latent space can't update to model reality based on patterns in the percepts.

The statefulness of intelligence requires that the model, or engrams, update in harmony with the percepts in real-time, in addition to a model of the model, or an active perceiver - the thing that is doing the experiencing. The utility of consciousness is in predicting changes in the model and learning the meta patterns that allow for things like "ahh-ha" moments, where a bundle of disparate percepts get contextualized and mapped to a pattern, immediately updating the entire model, such that every moment after that pattern is learned uses the new pattern.

Static weights means static latent space means state is not persisted in a way meaningful to intelligence - even if you alter weights, using classifier free guidance or other techniques, stacking LORAs or alterations, you're limited in the global scope by the lack of hierarchical links and other meta-pattern level relationships that would be required for an effective statefulness to be applied to LLMs.

We're probably only a few architecture innovations away from models that can be properly stateful without collapsing. All of the hacks and tricks we do to extend context and imitate persisted state do not scale well and will collapse over extended time or context.

The underlying engrams or weights need to dynamically adapt and update based on a stable learning paradigm, and we just don't have that yet. It might be a few architecture tweaks, or it could be a radical overhaul of structure and optimizers and techniques - transformers might not get us there. I think they probably can, and will, be part of whatever that next architecture will be, but it's not at all obvious or trivial.

But that's the point: there isn't anything substantially different within the scope of computation. If you are given a set of LEGOs and all you can do is snap the pieces together, then there's nothing other than snapping pieces together that you can do. Adding more of the same LEGOs bricks to the set doesn't change the game. It only changes how large the structures you build can be, but scale isn't some kind of magical incantation that can transcend the limits of the system.

Computation is an abstract, syntactic mathematical model. These models formalize the notion of "effective method". Nowhere is semantic content included in these models or conceptually entailed by them, certainly not in physical simulations of them like the device you are reading this post on.

So, we can say that intentionality would be something substantially different. We absolutely do not have intentionality in LLMs or any computational construct. It is shear magical thinking to somehow think it does.

Here are the substantive things you've said so far (i.e. the bits that aren't calling things "stupid" and taking umbridge at imagined slights):

1. You think that instead of actually perceiving mathematical truth we use heuristics and "just guess that it's true". This, as I've already said, is a valid viewpoint. You disagree with one of Penrose' assumptions. I don't think you're right but there is certainly no hard proof available that you're not. It's something that (for now, at least) it's possible to agree to disagree on, which is why, as I said, this is a philosophical debate more than a mathematical one.

2. You strongly imply that Penrose simply didn't think of this objection. This is categorically false. He discusses it at great length in both books. (I mentioned such shallow dismissals, assuming some obvious oversight on his part, in my original comment.)

3 (In your latest reply). You think that Godel's incompleteness theorem is "where the idea came from". This is obviously true. Penrose' argument is absolutely based on Godel's theorem.

4. You think that somehow I don't agree with point 3. I have no idea where you got that idea from.

That, as far as I can see, is it. There isn't any substantive point made that I haven't already responded to in my previous replies, and I think it's now rather too late to add any and expect any sort of response.

As for communication style, you seem to think that writing in a formal tone, which I find necessary when I want to convey information clearly, is condescending and insulting, whereas dismissing things you disagree with as "stupid" on the flimsiest possible basis (and inferring dishonest motives on the part of the person you're discussing all this with) is, presumably, fine. This is another point on which we will have to agree to disagree.