They’re made out of weights • Hacker News Board

Re: They’re made out of weights

#341

Post by mr_toad » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:17 PM UTC

zkmon wrote: post #156

scotty79 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Voltage is made out of flow of positive electric charges. Not really. What usually flows (in metals) are electrons. Quarks stay where they are. And when we prefer to think about flow of positive charges, the positive charge in question is a hole left by a missing electron. Physically real positive charges (ions) can flow in electrolytes though.

The concept of "flow" is questionable though. Bubbles in water move upwards, but it is actually water that is flowing downward around the bubbles. Just because bubbles do not contain water, we can't say bubbles are not flowing. When it comes to electrons and positive charges, their material existence is equally non-physical. Actually, none of them might be "flowing", as the concept of flowing applies only to physical…

Nevertheless in solid conductors it’s the electrons that move, while the nucleus stays put. If the nucleus starts to move it means your circuit is melting!

Re: They’re made out of weights

#342

Post by gpderetta » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:19 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #247

srean wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data is the code. Training algorithm is the compiler. The weights are the byte code produced to run on the inference VM.

The data is the code is the data. Reality has no distinction between "data" and "code". These terms are categories we impose on systems we design, to make it easier for us to build and reason about them, but they're nothing but mere opinions , and depend less on the system structure, and more on the perspective of the person asking which is which. This is related to, and possibly equivalent with, the core point of bo…

> Reality has no distinction between "data" and "code"

yes, yes, ostensibly the universe is built on lisp.

But we all know that it was hacked together with a lot of perl[1].

[1] you all know the reference.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#343

Post by sixeyes » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:21 PM UTC

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #313

codeflo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and t…

There's two meanings to "the body is a complex machine" and I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. 1) The abstract "dictionary" version: It'd be technically correct to say that the body is a machine under the definition of "A machine is a thermodynamic system that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action.". 2) But there's also the less abstract/technical: "The body is alike…

oh yeah! i recall a paper linked here not so long ago, where it was shown that the dendrites of a neuron do computations themselves. The "weight per neuron" is very simplistic then. At the very least, each actual neuron is a network of weights.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/neural-dendrites-reveal-their...

Re: They’re made out of weights

#344

Post by jordigh » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:22 PM UTC

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

You actually read Being and Time? What the heck do you get out of it? Heidegger just seems to play word games with German words without actually saying anything. "Time is the ripening of temporality." tf do phrases like that mean??

Re: They’re made out of weights

#345

Post by davrosthedalek » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:22 PM UTC

slopinthebag wrote: post #85

doctoboggan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not meant as a gotcha, I am genuinely curious how you believe consciousness can be an emergent property. I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own. C…

Well, I think the "brain as an antenna" theory is also plausible given your preconditions. But I think my issue with the emergence theory is that it seems to imply to me that consciousness is non-physical and non-local. So what entity is actually experiencing the consciousness? It's not that I believe consciousness is physical and local, but people who make the emergence argument seem to believe it is and I can't fig…

I am not sure, but I think you might misunderstand what emergent means. Take chaotic systems, in the math sense. Chaos is a well defined property of, say, iterated dynamic systems.

A linear dynamic, say x_n+1=lambda x_n, or x_n+1=(1-x_n), is never chaotic. But if you multiply them, x_n+1=lambda x_n (1-x_n), it depends on lambda if the system is chaotic.

None of the components are chaotic. But for specific combinations, chaos emerges as an property.

In physics, the mass of mesons and the nucleon is emergent. It's completely different from the constituents' mass. Different from an atom, where its mass is very close to the mass of its nucleus and its electrons.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#346

Post by iku » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:31 PM UTC

yencabulator wrote: post #338

skydhash wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blind people learn concepts of bikes too and in a smiliar way: by description. And by touch and sound. And maybe some were daring enough to drive one, or unlucky enough to get hit by one. But have way more input than just texts.

Obligatory echolocation bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a05kgcI9D2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtVOK04XvA

Wow. Thank you.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#347

Post by Antibabelic » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:33 PM UTC

famouswaffles wrote: post #36

noosphr wrote: post #4

It's not often I see something that's fractally wrong but here we are. There is a dictionary, it's called the tokenizer. There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 The point of the original sh…

>There are grammar rules, they are just very weak because the structure of human language is generally quite weak. When presented with languages which have strong consistent grammars the weights are very easily interpretable as a grammar: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.02177 That paper did not train the models on 'a language with strong consistent grammars'. Mathematical Operation tables are not a language. Grammar itsel…

A language is a set of sentences.

A sentence is a finite sequence of symbols drawn from an alphabet.

In this sense, mathematical operation tables are absolutely a language. As are natural languages.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#348

Post by foobarian » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:33 PM UTC

lobofta wrote: post #292

paulluuk wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency So, I work in AI research (as a research engineer though, not a scientist). I've also studied philosophy and I'm a vegan. Yes yes, insert "they will tell you" joke here, but I promise it's actually relevant this time. First, while I studied philosophy one of the things that stuck with me the most, was the discussion…

Vegan ML engineer here. In total agreement with you. People are just moving the goal post to keep themselves protected from the obvious conclusion: there is nothing really all that special about us humans. Perhaps subjective experience is simply the internal state of a self supervised continuous learning algorithm and we don't like that conclusion very much.

It's too bad it's so hard to pin down a definition, but in practice I feel like most animals with brains experience degrees of qualia. Some mornings after a night of poor sleep when I wake up super-slow I wonder if that's how animals experience thinking.

My biggest problem with "brains are machines" arguments is that there is a risk there is unknown physics at work that is not representable as a Turing machine. What if there is some quantum field effect powering everything?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#349

Post by truculent » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:36 PM UTC

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things.

That agency or free will exists outside of our subjective experience is an assumption; does any given theory need to explain agency, or is it sufficient to explain that we feel we have agency?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#350

Post by tim333 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 12:38 PM UTC

housecarpenter wrote: post #275

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

Why is asking 'can machines think?' assuming our thinking could be modeled as a machine? It's raising the possibility that our thinking could be modeled as a machine. Given that, as you acknowledge, we don't have a clue how our mind works, it seems premature to rule out this possibility. Rather, I would say that ruling it out betrays an assumption that we understand how the mind works enough that we can say that it i…

Indeed, scientific type thinking like that where you ask a question that you can do experiments on to see if machines can pass the test is probably the way to progress. The philosophical waffling mostly just goes in circles.

To investigate consciousness you'll probably get further trying to build conscious machines with agency and comparing them to biological ones than reading Heidegger.