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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#421

Post by foobarian »

jcynix wrote: post #376
foobarian wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quantum field effects? You don't need these, IMHO, if you look at how highly parallel things seem to work in brains. Marvin Minsky's theory of a "Society of Mind" describes a (highly) distributed model of the mind. Which BTW, always reminds me of the first Shrek movie, where the donkey jumps up and down, shouting "Take me! Take me!" to Shrek. That's similar to what I observe when I'm undecided but two instances of "s…

Mostly I have a hard time accepting that a Turing machine can experience "consciousness"/awareness. Therefore I also have a hard time with simulatable chemical processes; it feels like there is some missing link there.

All just feelings/vibes unfortunately.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#422

Post by cootsnuck »

Lplololopo wrote: post #232
noduerme wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is that different from any other model of reality that you'd use to winnow a dataset into an answer to a question? The only major difference I see is that beyond a certain number of transformations, people are willing to treat it as some sort of miracle, and too tired to figure out why it came up with the answer it came up with. It's almost like people desperately want to give up their agency and creativi…

Agency? What are you talking about? I want freedom. I want freedom to do what i want and not sitting in front of a computer and coding for some company. Please AI lets burn down knowledge work and labor work. Lets create so much stress to our society that we start rethinking what works mean. Lets redefine work into discovering the world again. Let people do old handcraft jobs, let them do more sports, let them read m…

> Lets redefine work into discovering the world again. Let people do old handcraft jobs, let them do more sports, let them read more, let them write and make more. Let them enjoy nature.

Why leave something so important up to what AI does or doesn't do?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#423

Post by stringfood »

sperandeo wrote: post #416

I don't like to say one way or the other on things. Especially LLM's. However, if ive learned anything about LLMs and real life problems, is to break it down to the foundation like already mention with weights being compared to neurons and map the parallels.

well the article definitely made that parallel - reminds me of how when we cut into brains we can see the neurons, we can see the axons, the grey and white matter, the language centers - but no closer to explaining why we do what we do

Re: They’re made out of weights

#425

Post by seanpquig »

I personally hate the anthropomorphization of AI as much as anyone, but technically can't you make the same reductive argument about human consciousness?

It's just molecules, just atoms. Atoms, nothing bug atoms. Protons, neutrons, electrons...

Re: They’re made out of weights

#426

Post by MichaelZuo »

edbaskerville wrote: post #410
JulianChastain wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the claim subjective experience may be illusory absolutely baffling. I can only speak for myself with certainty, but I am entirely sure I have subjective experience. All the other propositions I believe could be false but I don't see how I can be wrong about experiencing something. I could be a brain in a vat (or weights on a GPU) and be specifically programmed to only come to false beliefs and still I can be…

Indeed. Even positing an illusion seems like a contradiction. If it's illusory, doesn't there need to be a subjective entity experiencing the illusion?

This proves too much. As it would imply parrots have sapiencee.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#427

Post by CGamesPlay »

seanpquig wrote: post #425

I personally hate the anthropomorphization of AI as much as anyone, but technically can't you make the same reductive argument about human consciousness? It's just molecules, just atoms. Atoms, nothing bug atoms. Protons, neutrons, electrons...

> After Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out of Meat".

https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...

Re: They’re made out of weights

#428

Post by wat10000 »

gyomu wrote: post #363
derektank wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? They seem pretty machine-like to me. I certainly don’t think individual cells have any subjective experience or sense of agency. I would b…

> Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? Yes? Literally no machine ever built by humans is capable of (or even hinting at beginnings of capability for) replication or novel synthesis like cells are, let alone autonomously, it’s quite unconceivable that anyone would take this to be a reasonable assumption in the first place.

The assertion is not that cells are machines built by humans (obviously false), merely that they are machines. Which they pretty clearly are, unless you assume the supernatural.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#429

Post by threethirtytwo »

Planktonne wrote: post #141

The original story is an original work made by a human consciousness exploring how it might be different from other forms of consciousness. This one is a pastiche made by a human consciousness borrowing extremely heavily from another human consciousness justifying why something else might be another form of consciousness. That rather undercuts the point; if this was generated by an LLM unprompted, it would be differe…

The story is not a linguistic/rhetorical trick. The "trick" is the point, and the real trick/delusion is in your brain. You and many others have put the idea of consciousness on a pedestal and think it's so special that is must be conceptually profound.

It is not. That is why the "trick" can be performed on anything. That is the point. To show you that consciousness only needs to be a set of weights, not that far off from a toaster. It trivializes what it is to be human and it's also extremely true. Consciousness is a trivial thing, we make it out to be big/important/profound and that is the delusion.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#430

Post by wat10000 »

petra wrote: post #123
kami23 wrote: post #12

This read like poetry to me. Thank you for sharing it. I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness. For a little bit I was working on having linguistics based evals for a kaggle competition. My challenge was whether or not I could mask things well enough to not trigge…

Regarding consciousness , I like the explanation by neuroscientist Ramachandran: https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran07/ramachandran... In short, as far as I can remember: evolutionary, it makes sense to understand other humans, to feel what they feel(empathy - the mirror neurons system), and simulate their thinking and feelings. And once we have those systems, we can also use those on ourselves. And that's…

There's a really, really big gap there. It reminds me of South Park's underpants gnomes.

1. Simulate others' thinking and feelings.

2. ???

3. Consciousness!

Why would one lead to the other? How would one lead to the other?

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