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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#371

Post by layer8 »

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…

Sometimes after a night’s sleep, we wake up with an insight on a topic or a solution to a problem we encountered the day before. Did we “think” in our sleep to come up with the insight or solution? For all we know, it’s an unconscious process. Would we call it “thinking”?

The term “thinking” is rather ill-defined, too bound to how we perceive our own wakeful thinking.

When conversing with LLMs, I never get the feeling that they have a solid grasp on the conversation. When you dig into topics, there is always a little too much vagueness, a slight but clear lack of coherence, continuity and awareness, a prevalence of cookie-cutter verbiage. It feels like a mind that isn’t fully “there” — and maybe not at all.

I would agree that LLMs reason (well, the reasoning models). But “thinking”? I don’t know. There is something missing.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#372

Post by almosthere »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #212
almosthere wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code that builds the models and performance inference from it is code we have written. The data in the model is obviously the big trick. But what I'm saying is that if you run inference, that alone does not give it super-powers over your computer. You can write some agentic framework where it WOULD have power over your computer, but that's not what I'm referring to. It's not a living thing inside the computer, it…

This is a bad take. We didn't write the model, we wrote an algorithm that searches the space of models that conform to some high level constraints as specified by the stacked transformer architecture. But stacked transformers are a very general computational paradigm. The training aspect converges the parameters to a specific model that well reproduces the training data. But the computational circuits the model picks…

However there is another big problem, this would require a blob of data in a file to be labelled as "alive" even if it's on a disk in a garbage dump with no cpu or gpu anywhere near it.

The inference software that would normally read from that file is also not alive, as it's literally very concise code that we wrote to traverse through that file.

So if the disk isn't alive, the file on it isn't alive, the inference software is not alive - then what are you saying is alive and thinking?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#373

Post by ivraatiems »

vidarh wrote: post #298
prmph wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also don't know for sure whether or not you are "possessed of subjective experience" as I can't measure it. Then why make an argument based on what you do not know?

My point exactly. The person I replied to did just that.

I think the parent is trying to point out the difference between our positions:

You say the limits of LLMs don't matter, because we don't have definitions strong enough to describe them.

I say the limits of LLMs do matter and the fact that we can't yet define them rigorously means we aren't able to fix them (assuming we want to).

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#374

Post by quantum_state »

prmph wrote: post #67
myrmidon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you consider it sentient? Absolutely. If you simulated a human brain by the atom, would you think the resulting construct would NOT be? What would be missing? I think consciousness is simply an emergent property of our nervous system, but in order to express itself "language" is obviously needed and thus requires lots of complexity (more than what we typically see in animals or computer systems until recently…

> 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…

At some point, quantum effects will need to be accounted for. The no cloning theorem will make it hard to replicate the quantum state of the brain.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#375

Post by ACCount37 »

snozolli wrote: post #183

During the pandemic, I experimented with vaping marijuana to see if I could improve my sleep quality. It worked to a degree, but after a few weeks of nightly use, I began to experience what I think is depersonalization. I would be walking with friends and talking about our day, while simultaneously thinking, "this isn't actually me doing this, this is just a surface-level interaction being carried out almost by autom…

Humans don't have this understanding, it seems. That their own "intelligence" isn't magic, isn't infallible, and is flawed in many of the same ways LLMs are.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#376

Post by KoolKat23 »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #355
KoolKat23 wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Consciousness itself is probably just an illusion, a phenomena/name of something that occurs when you bunch thinking together. Think of this objectively and base it on what we know of the brain. It literally is working off of what hardware we have, there's no magic. 2. That's just a well adapted neural network (I suspect more brain is left than you let on). Multimodal model making the most of its limited compute a…

1. 'Probably just an illusion' is doing heavy lifting here. Either provide evidence or admit this is speculation. You can't use an unproven claim about consciousness to dismiss concerns about conflating it with text generation. 2. Yes, there are documented cases of people with massive cranial cavities living normal lives. https://x.com/i/status/1728796851456156136 . The point isn't that they have 'just enough' brain.…

1. What's your definition of consciousness, let's start there. 2. Absolutely, it's a spectrum. Insects have function. 3. "Humans navigate maps built by other humans through language." You said it yourself. They use this exact same data, so why won't they know it if they used it. Humans are their bodies in the physical world.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#377

Post by geon »

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…

Having seen LLMs so many times produce incoherent, nonsensical and invalid chains of reasoning...

LLMs are little more than RNGs. They are the tea leaves and you read whatever you want into them.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#378

Post by tim333 »

bjourne wrote: post #247
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…

> 1. Conflates consciousness with "thinking" - LLMs may process information effectively without being conscious, but the article treats these as the same phenomenon There is NO WAY you can define "consciousness" in such a non-tautological, non-circular way that it includes all humans but excludes all LLMs.

>NO WAY you can define "consciousness" ... that it includes all humans but excludes all LLMs

That doesn't seem so hard - how about awareness of thoughts feelings, emotions and what's going on around you? Fairly close to human consciousness, excludes current LLMs.

I don't think it's very relevant to the article though which very sensibly avoids the topic and sticks to thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#379

Post by andoando »

adamzwasserman wrote: post #327
andoando wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think that Wittgenstein had it right when he said: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." Why would we not? We live in the same physical world and encounter the same problems.

You're actually proving Wittgenstein's point. We share the same physical world, but we don't encounter the same problems. A lion's concerns - territory, hunting, pride hierarchy - are fundamentally different from ours: mortgages, meaning, relationships. And here's the kicker: you don't even fully understand me, and I'm human. What makes you think you'd understand a lion?

Thats only a minor subset of our thoughts. If you were going hiking what kind of thoughts would you have? "There are trees there", "Its raining I should get cover", "I can hide in the bushes", "Im not sure if I cna climb over this or not". "There is x on the left and y on the right", "the wind went away" etc etc etc etc.

The origins of human language were no doubt communicating such simple thoughts and not about your deep inner psyche and the complexities of the 21st century.

There's actually quite a bit of evidence that all language, even complex words, are rooted in spatial relationships.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#380

Post by tim333 »

yalogin wrote: post #264

I don't see how we make the jump from current LLMs to AGI. May be it's my limited understanding of the research but current LLMs seem to not have any properties that indicate AGI. Would love to get thoughts from someone that understands it

I think they are missing "I thought about that and have changed my mind" stuff. GPTs are pre-trained and don't change their weights after, whereas humans do. That seems to be one big part that is missing but could be built in the future.
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