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Bag of words, have mercy on us

experimental-history.com

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Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#271

Post by patrickmay »

shrubble wrote: post #59
andai wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a human is just a really expensive, unreliable bag of words. And we get more expensive and more unreliable by the day! There's a quote I love but have misplaced, from the 19th century I think. "Our bodies are just contraptions for carrying our heads around." Or in this instance... bag of words transport system ;)

I think the canonical answer is that humans are “bags of mostly water” .

If I'm remembering the full quote correctly, it's "Ugly bags of mostly water."

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#272

Post by thesz »

danielbln wrote: post #209
thesz wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Human brains aren't magic, special or different. DNA inside neurons uses superconductive quantum computations [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62539-5 As the result, all living cells with DNA emit coherent (as in lasers) light [2]. There is a theory that this light also facilitates intercellular communication. [2] https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-va... Chemical structures…

They are extremely complex, but is that complexity required for building a thinking machine? We don't understand bird physiology enough to build a bird from scratch, but an airplane flies just the same.

The complexities of contemporary computers and complexities of computing-related infrastructure (consider ASML and electricity) are orders of magnitudes higher than what was needed for first computers. The difference? We have something that mimics some aspects of (human) thinking.

How complex our everything computing-related should be to mimic thinking (of humans) little more closely?

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#273

Post by mapontosevenths »

namero999 wrote: post #246
mapontosevenths wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that people instinctively believe they have free will, both because it feels like we do, and because society requires us to behave that way even when we don't. The truth is that the evidence says we don't. See the Libet experiment and its many replications. Your decisions can be predicted from brain scans up to 10 seconds before you make them, which means they are as deterministic as an LLM's. Sorry, I gues…

Libet has only measured the latency of metaconsciousness/cognition, nothing else. It says nothing about free will, which is ill defined anyway.

I've seen that argument repeated ad-nauseum.

It makes sense if you're desperate for free will to be real, but you really have to work for it. Especially when you add in the countless other studies showing that a lot of the reasons we give for our actions, especially in quick or ambiguous choices, are confabulationalist post-hoc constructions. Our own introspection seems mostly to consist of just "making stuff up" to justify the decisions we've already made.

I mean, a reasonable person could argue their way past all the evidence without totally denying it, but "free will" just isn't the simplest explanation that fits the available data. It's possible that free will exists in the same way it's possible that Russels teapot exists.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#274

Post by kaycebasques »

palata wrote: post #2

Slightly unfortunate that "Bag of words" is already a different concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag_of_words . My second thought is that it's not the metaphor that is misleading. People have been told thousands of times that LLMs don't "think", don't "know", don't "feel", but are "just a very impressive autocomplete". If they still really want to completely ignore that, why would they suddenly change their min…

> Slightly unfortunate that "Bag of words" is already a different concept

Yes, subconsciously I kept trying to map this article's ideas to word2vec and continuous-bag-of-words.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#276

Post by thesz »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #214
thesz wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Human brains aren't magic, special or different. DNA inside neurons uses superconductive quantum computations [1]. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62539-5 As the result, all living cells with DNA emit coherent (as in lasers) light [2]. There is a theory that this light also facilitates intercellular communication. [2] https://www.sciencealert.com/we-emit-a-visible-light-that-va... Chemical structures…

All three appear to be technically correct, but are (normally) only incidental to the operation of neurons as neurons. We know this because we can test what aspects of neurons actually lead to practical real world effects. Neurophysiology is not a particularly obscure or occult field, so there are many many papers and textbooks on the topic.(And there's a large subset you can test on yourself, besides, though I would…

  > We know this because we can test what aspects of neurons actually lead to practical real world effects.
Electric current is also quantum phenomena, but it is also very averaged in most circumstances that lead to practical real world effects.

What is wonderful here is that contemporary electronics wizardry that allowed us to have machines that mimic some of thinking, also is very concerned of the quantum-level electromagnetic effects at the transistor level.

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#277

Post by mapontosevenths »

jnd-cz wrote: post #268
mapontosevenths wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that people instinctively believe they have free will, both because it feels like we do, and because society requires us to behave that way even when we don't. The truth is that the evidence says we don't. See the Libet experiment and its many replications. Your decisions can be predicted from brain scans up to 10 seconds before you make them, which means they are as deterministic as an LLM's. Sorry, I gues…

I looked up the Libet experiment: "Implications The experiment raised significant questions about free will and determinism. While it suggested that unconscious brain activity precedes conscious decision-making, Libet argued that this does not negate free will, as individuals can still choose to suppress actions initiated by unconscious processes."

It's been repeated a huge number of time since, and widely debated. When Libet first did the experiment it was only like 200ms before the mind become consciously aware of the decision. More recent studies have shown they can predict actions up to 7-10 seconds before the subject is aware of having made a decision.

It's pretty hard to argue that you're really "free" to make a different decision if your body knew which you would choose 7 seconds before you became aware of it.

I mean, those long term predictions were only something like 60% accurate, but still, the preponderance of evidence says that those decisions are deterministic and we keep finding new ways to predict the outcome sooner and with higher accuracy.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18408715/

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#278

Post by IAmBroom »

sublinear wrote: post #232
danielbln wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are extremely complex, but is that complexity required for building a thinking machine? We don't understand bird physiology enough to build a bird from scratch, but an airplane flies just the same.

Are we not just getting lost in semantics when we say "fly"? An airplane does not at all perform the same behavior as a bird. Do we say that boats or submarines "swim"? Planes and boats disrupt the environments they move through and air and sea freight are massive contributors to pollution.

You seem to have really gone off the rails midway through that post...

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#279

Post by IAmBroom »

In this thread: 99% of posters using their own personal definition of "thinking" without explaining it; 0.99% of posters complaining that it all depends on what that definition is; not enough posts yet for that 0.01% response to occur...

Re: Bag of words, have mercy on us

#280

Post by littlestymaar »

quantummagic wrote: post #262
littlestymaar wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few minutes worth of “personal experience” doesn't really deserve the “personal experience” qualifier.

Why not? It's just a minor example of what's possible, to show the general concept has already started.

> show the general concept has already started

The same way a todler creeping is the start of the general concept of space exploration.

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