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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#361

Post by layer8 »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #276

all this "AI IS THINKING/CONSCIOUS/WHATEVER" but nobody seems worried of that implication that, if that is even remotely true, we are creating a new slave market. This either implies that these people don't actually believes any of this boostering rhetoric and are just cynically trying to cash in or that the technical milieu is in a profoundly disturbing place ethically. To be clear, I don't believe that current AI t…

Thinking and consciousness don’t by themselves imply emotion and sentience (feeling something), and therefore the ability to suffer. It isn’t clear at all that the latter is a thing outside of the context of a biological brain’s biochemistry. It also isn’t clear at all that thinking or consciousness would somehow require that the condition of the automaton that performs these functions would need to be meaningful to the automaton itself (i.e., that the automaton would care about its own condition).

We are not anywhere close to understanding these things. As our understanding improves, our ethics will likely evolve along with that.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#362

Post by KoolKat23 »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #360
KoolKat23 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly the same for humans in the real world. You're focusing too close, abstract up a level. Your point relates to the "micro" system functioning, not the wider "macro" result (think emergent capabilities).

I'm afraid I'd need to see evidence before accepting that humans navigate 'pre-carved channels' in the same way LLMs do. Human learning involves direct interaction with physical reality, not just pattern matching on symbolic representations. Show me the equivalence or concede the point.

Language and math are a world model of physical reality. You could not read a book and make sense of it if this were not true.

An apple falls to the ground because of? gravity.

In real life this is the answer, I'm very sure the pre-carved channel will also lead to gravity.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#363

Post by conartist6 »

tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

Yeah but if I assign it a long job to process I would also say that an x86 CPU is "thinking" about a problem for me.

What we really mean in both cases is "computing," no?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#364

Post by almosthere »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #353
almosthere wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to say "if you put a million monkeys on typewriters you would eventually get shakespear" and no one would ever say that anymore, because now we can literally write shakespear with an LLM. And the monkey strategy has been 100% dismissed as shit.. We know how to deploy monkeys on typewriters, but we don't know what they'll type. We know how to deploy transformers to train and inference a model, but we don't kno…

I was going to use this analogy in the exact opposite way. We do have a very good understanding of how the human brain works. Saying we don't understand how the brain works is like saying we don't understand how the weather works. If you put a million monkeys on typewriters you would eventually get shakespeare is exactly why LLM's will succeed and why humans have succeeded. If this weren't the case why didn't humans…

Yeah no, show me one scientific paper that says we know how the brain works. And not a single neuron because that does absolute shit towards understanding thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#365

Post by almosthere »

procaryote wrote: post #187
almosthere wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We used to say "if you put a million monkeys on typewriters you would eventually get shakespear" and no one would ever say that anymore, because now we can literally write shakespear with an LLM. And the monkey strategy has been 100% dismissed as shit.. We know how to deploy monkeys on typewriters, but we don't know what they'll type. We know how to deploy transformers to train and inference a model, but we don't kno…

To be fair, we also trained the LLM on (among other things) shakespeare, and adjusted the weights so that generating shakespeare would be more likely after that training. We don't claim a JPEG can paint great art, even though certain jpegs do.

So, more proof it's not thinking, right? It can only regurgitate a large if/else superstructure with some jumping around.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#366

Post by beeflet »

inglor_cz wrote: post #317
beeflet wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

consciousness is the feeling of self awareness. I suppose you could prove it as much as any other feeling, by observing the way that people behave

A robot can certainly be programmed to behave in a self-aware way, but making a conclusion about its actual self-awareness would be unfounded. In general, behaviorism wasn't a very productive theory in humans and animals either.

By behaving in a self-aware way, it practices self awareness.

It would only be unfounded if the robot is programmed in a way that seemingly appears to be self-aware but actually isn't (It would need to occasionally act in a non-self aware way, like a manchurian candidate). But if you keep increasing scrutiny, it converges on being self aware because the best way to appear self-aware is to be self-aware.

It's not clear to me what the intrinsic goals of a robot would be if it did practice self-awareness in the first place. But in living things it's to grow and reproduce.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#367

Post by Terr_ »

czl wrote: post #240
crazygringo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> So how is it therefore not actual thinking? Many consider "thinking" something only animals can do, and they are uncomfortable with the idea that animals are biological machines or that life, consciousness, and thinking are fundamentally machine processes. When an LLM generates chain-of-thought tokens, what we might casually call “thinking,” it fills its context window with a sequence of tokens that improves its ab…

Well put, and if it doesn't notice/collapse under introduced contradictions, that's evidence it's not the kind of reasoning we were hoping for. The "real thing" is actually brittle when you do it right.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#368

Post by ivraatiems »

vidarh wrote: post #297
ivraatiems wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless we can find indications that humans can exceed the Turing computable - something we as of yet have no indication is even theoretically possible - there is no rational reason to think it can't. But doesn't this rely on the same thing you suggest we don't have, which is a working and definable definition of consciousness? I think a lot of the 'well, we can't define consciousness so we don't know what it is so…

No, it rests on computability, Turing equivalence, and the total absence of both any kind of evidence to suggest we can exceed the Turing computable, and the lack of even a theoretical framework for what that would mean. Without that any limitations borne out of what LLMs don't currently do are irrelevant.

That doesn't seem right to me. If I understand it right, your logic is:

1. Humans intellect is Turing computable. 2. LLMs are based on Turing-complete technology. 3. Therefore, LLMs can eventually equal human intellect.

But if that is the right chain of assumptions, there's lots of issues with it. First, whether LLMs are Turing complete is a topic of debate. There are points for[0] and against[1].

I suspect they probably _are_, but that doesn't mean LLMs are tautologically indistinguishable from human intelligence. Every computer that uses a Turing-complete programming language can theoretically solve any Turing-computable problem. That does not mean they will ever be able to efficiently or effectively do so in real time under real constraints, or that they are doing so now in a reasonable amount real-world time using extant amounts of real-world computing power.

The processor I'm using to write this might be able to perform all the computations needed for human intellect, but even if it could, that doesn't mean it can do it quickly enough to compute even a single nanosecond of actual human thought before the heat-death of the universe, or even the end of this century.

So when you say:

> Without that any limitations borne out of what LLMs don't currently do are irrelevant.

It seems to me exactly the opposite is true. If we want technology that is anything approaching human intelligence, we need to find approaches which will solve for a number of things LLMs don't currently do. The fact that we don't know exactly what those things are yet is not evidence that those things don't exist. Not only do they likely exist, but the more time we spend simply scaling LLMs instead of trying to find them, the farther we are from any sort of genuine general intelligence.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01992 [1] https://medium.com/heyjobs-tech/turing-completeness-of-llms-...

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#369

Post by KoolKat23 »

almosthere wrote: post #364
KoolKat23 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to use this analogy in the exact opposite way. We do have a very good understanding of how the human brain works. Saying we don't understand how the brain works is like saying we don't understand how the weather works. If you put a million monkeys on typewriters you would eventually get shakespeare is exactly why LLM's will succeed and why humans have succeeded. If this weren't the case why didn't humans…

Yeah no, show me one scientific paper that says we know how the brain works. And not a single neuron because that does absolute shit towards understanding thinking.

This is exactly why I mentioned the weather.

A scientific paper has to be verifiable, you should be able to recreate the experiment and come to the same conclusion. It's very very difficult to do with brains with trillions of parameters and that can't be controlled to the neuron level. Nothwithstanding the ethical issues.

We don't have a world weather simulator that is 100% accurate either given the complex interplay and inability to control the variables i.e. it's not verifiable. It'd be a bit silly to say we don't know why it's going to rain at my house tomorrow.

Until then it is a hypothesis, and we can't say we know even if the overwhelming evidence indicates that in fact that we do know.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#370

Post by nearbuy »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #349
nearbuy wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first article is about someone missing a cerebellum, not part of their cerebrum. That's the motor and balance part of the brain, and as you might expect, the subject of the article has deficits in motor control and balance. The Biology StackExchange answer just says that frontal lobotomies don't kill you. It doesn't say that lobotomized people function normally. The other two articles are just misreporting on hyd…

You're right - I mixed up cerebellum/cerebrum/cortex terminology. My bad. The cases I'm referencing are hydrocephalus patients with severely compressed cerebral tissue who maintained normal cognitive function. The point about structural variation not precluding consciousness stands.

Thanks for clearing it up.

> The point about structural variation not precluding consciousness stands.

Maybe, but my point about high-functioning people with hydrocephalus is that they have the same or similar brain structure (in terms of what exists and how it's connected), just squished gradually over time from fluid pressure. It looks dramatically different in the CT scan, but it's still there, just squished into a different shape.

The brain is also plastic and adaptable of course, and this can help compensate for any damage that occurs. But the scans from those articles don't have the level of detail necessary to show neuron death or teach us about the plasticity of the brain.

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