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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#421

Post by cindyllm »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #410
layer8 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Thinking and consciousness don’t by themselves imply emotion and sentience... Sure, but all the examples of conscious and/or thinking beings that we know of have, at the very least, the capacity to suffer. If one is disposed to take these claims of consciousness and thinking seriously, then it follows that AI research should, at minimum, be more closely regulated until further evidence can be discovered one way or t…

[dead]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#422

Post by DoctorOetker »

mentos wrote: post #55
kbrkbr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you tell me how you understand that? Because I sincerely do not. I have frankly no idea how sentience arises from non sentience. But it's a topic that really interests me.

We have examples of non sentience everywhere already with animals. And then an example of sentience with humans. So if you diff our brains the difference lies within a module in our prefrontal cortex. It’s a black box of logic but I can ‘understand’ or be willing to accept that it’s owed to ‘just’ more grey matter adding the self awareness to the rest of the system. But to me the big mystery is how animals have sensa…

I'd like to see a vote here, what percentage of HN readers believe animals have sentience or no sentience?

Clearly most animals are less educated, and most are less intelligent, but non-sentient? That sounds like 200-year old claims that "when one steps on the tail of a cat, it does indeed protest loudly, but not because it feels anything or because it would be sentient, no, no, it protests merely due to selective pressure, programming reflex circuits, since other creatures would show compassion, or back off due to a potential reaction by the cat."

Anyone who has had a pet like a cat or a dog knows they are sentient... if we consider ourselves sentient.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#423

Post by petralithic »

layer8 wrote: post #371
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 feelin…

> Would we call it “thinking”?

Yes I would.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#424

Post by petralithic »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #410
layer8 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Thinking and consciousness don’t by themselves imply emotion and sentience... Sure, but all the examples of conscious and/or thinking beings that we know of have, at the very least, the capacity to suffer. If one is disposed to take these claims of consciousness and thinking seriously, then it follows that AI research should, at minimum, be more closely regulated until further evidence can be discovered one way or t…

Probably because those examples arose in an environment with harm, the Earth, and thus had incent to evolve the capacity to suffer. There is no such case for AI today and creating a Pascal's wager for such minimization is not credible with what we know about them.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#426

Post by savolai »

bithead wrote: post #406
layer8 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 feelin…

Do LLMs ever ask for you to clarify something you said in a way a person who doesn't quite understand what you said will do?

Yeah, as someone who has gained a lot of interaction skills by playing with the constructivist learning ennvironment called the enneagram, I can attest that it much resembles behaviour characteristic of certain enneatypes.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#427

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

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 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.

If one could write a quadrillion-line python script of nothing but if/elif/else statements nested 1 million blocks deep that seemingly parsed your questions and produced seemingly coherent, sensible, valid "chains of reasoning"... would that software be thinking?

And if you don't like the answer, how is the LLM fundamentally different from the software I describe?

>Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because

There is no evidence here. On the very remote possibility that LLMs are at some level doing what humans are doing, I would then feel really pathetic that humans are as non-sapient as the LLMs. The same way that there is a hole in your vision because of a defective retina, there is a hole in your cognition that blinds you to how cognition works. Because of this, you and all the other humans are stumbling around in the dark, trying to invent intelligence by accident, rather than just introspecting and writing it out from scratch. While our species might someday eventually brute force AGI, it would be many thousands of years before we get there.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#428

Post by OrderlyTiamat »

omnicognate wrote: post #182
OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's AlphaEvolve independently discovered a novel matrix multiplication algorithm which beats SOTA on at least one axis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGCmu7YKgPA

That was an impressive result, but AIUI not an example of "coming up with and proving (preferably numerous) significant new theorems without human guidance". For one thing, the output was an algorithm, not a theorem (except in the Curry-Howard sense). More importantly though, AlphaEvolve has to be given an objective function to evaluate the algorithms it generates, so it can't be considered to be working "without hum…

I'll concede to all your points here, but I was nevertheless extremely impressed by this result.

You're right of course that this was not without human guidance but to me even successfully using LLMs just for the mutation step was in and of itself surprising enough that it revised my own certainty that llms absolutely cannot think.

I see this more like a step in the direction of what you're looking for, not as a counter example.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#429

Post by lbrandy »

bloppe wrote: post #408
mrob wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe consciousness needs some kind of mutable internal state because otherwise literally everything is conscious, which makes the concept useless. A rock "computes" a path to fall when you drop it but I don't believe rocks are conscious. Panpsychism is not a common belief.

I think Nagel put it best in 1974: https://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-... Essentially, something is conscious iff "there is something that it is like to be" that thing. Some people find that completely unsatisfying, some people think it's an insight of utter genius. I'm more in the latter camp. Also, I think consciousness is non-binary. Something could be semi-conscious, or more or less consc…

> Anyway, I don't think that there's anything that it's like to be an LLM. I don't see how anybody who knows how they actually work could think that.

While I have almost zero belief that LLMs are conscious, I just don't think this is so trivially asserted.

The easy half of this is thinking that LLMs aren't conscious given what we know about how they work. The hard part (and very, very famously so) is explaining how _you_ are conscious given what we know about how you work. You can't ignore the second half of this problem when making statements like this... because many of the obvious ways to argue that clearly LLMs aren't conscious would also apply to you.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#430

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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