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Thoughts on thinking

dcurt.is

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Re: Thoughts on thinking

#441

Post by fennecbutt »

Andrex wrote: post #203
musicale wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. I would add a couple of things to that. First, humans (like other animals) have instincts and feelings; even newborns can exhibit varying personality traits as well as fears and desires. It's certainly useful to fear things like spiders, snakes, or abandonment without prior experience. Second, an important part of experience is inner life -…

What really fascinates me is gender based toy preferences at (I do not participate in culture wars, this fact just straight up fascinates me as a non-masculine gay guy.)

I am also gay, but not overly feminine at all. Just a gentle nerd lmao.

And I think there's the possibility that those signals are there early on in our brains. If not race cars, then it was swords and bows that were lying around and were appealing. We are products of evolution.

But as to OP's insistence that behaviors innate to our brains as not being derivative. I think in order to qualify, it must be a conscious behaviour. And even so, innate behaviours are derivative in that they came in response directly to our environs. Were they not, those traits would not have been selected as a response to environmental pressure.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#442

Post by socalgal2 »

gitremote wrote: post #349
socalgal2 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious how we know they aren't exposed - 1 year is a long time to see TV shows, TV commercials, toys with pictures of target audience, picture books, etc...

Cars were invented in the early 1900s and the vast majority of human existence was in a world without cars. There cannot be an innate preference for cars, which were a very recent invention.

so you're agreeing with me that any preference seen is probably from exposure and not innate like the studies claim?

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#443

Post by fennecbutt »

voidhorse wrote: post #210
fennecbutt wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% if not 100% of human thought and general output is derivative. Everything we create or do is based on something we've experienced or seen. Try to think of an object that doesn't exist, and isn't based on anything you've ever seen before, a completely new object with no basis in our reality. It's impossible. Writers made elves by adding pointy ears to a human. That's it.

It astonishes me sometimes how completely stupid and reductive some HN takes on arts and creativity can be. I am astounded continually at how we can produce humans who are so capable in one sphere of life and so ignorant and oblivious of others...yet all too willing to make dismissive claims about them... Creativity is much more than the derivative production of artifacts. What the OP is driving at is that creativity…

No my post reeks of my thinking that machines are or will be capable of the same creativity that we attribute to ourselves.

I never said that creative thought mostly being derivative means it's not creative, or that it's a bad thing.

I merely made a point as we see a machine, pointing and laughing at it, that we shouldn't throw stones when we live in glass houses.

But the reaction is certainly interesting. I wonder how many of you believe that humans are magical and that it's impossible to create a sentient machine, even given millenia, or infinite time. I believe it's possible. I don't believe that we're any more magic than a plant, there are many species with much more to their DNA than we have.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#444

Post by abathologist »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #406
abathologist wrote: post #159

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years. The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they…

...The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system…

As a matter of fact, I don't think its true that

> if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

But I also think that this claim is (1) practically impossible to prove and (2) a claim we morally ought to attempt to disprove.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#445

Post by max51 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #228
zdragnar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who has learned a second language can tell you that you aren't proficient just by memorizing vocabulary and grammar. Having a conversation and forming sentences on the fly just feels different- either as a different skill or using a different part of the brain. I also don't think the nature of LLMs being a negative crutch is new knowledge per se; when I was in school, calculus class required a graphing calcula…

> the higher end models (TI-92 etc) that had symbolic equation solvers were also banned I'm surprised it was a problem in the first place. Don't equation solving exercises require you to leave intermediary steps, and you can't just put a "x=5" as a one liner answer ?

We used TI-Nspire CX CAS at my university but it was banned in the first half of the calculus 1 course. It would really make no sense to allow you to bring one to an exam where many questions are one liners, or close to it (eg. "find the derivative of f(x)=7x^5+10"). IIRC, they also banned it in a calc 2 exam. Almost all other courses allowed them and they exams where designed for it (eg. 8 big problems instead of 2).

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#446

Post by ay »

jstummbillig wrote: post #420
ay wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect indeed we have the difference in terminology. I put distinction between “simple” and “easy”. Digging a pit of 1m * 1m * 1m is simple - just displace a cubic meter of soil; but it is not easy as it’s a lot of monotonous physical work. A small excavator makes the task easy but arguably less simple since now you need to also know how to operate the excavator. LLMs make a lot of coding tasks “easy” by being thi…

I actually considered that option, while writing the comment (and should probably have said so, my bad). I guess I considered it improbable that the task you describe you would actually think of as easy. To me, it does not seems to meet the characteristics, specially not after 3500 LOC. To put a little bone on the flesh from my side of the isle: I am currently writing what I would consider a fairly complex (web) syst…

Interesting, so in your experience Gemini 2.5 Pro bests Claude 3.7 ? I didn’t pay much attention to it, will give it a go, thanks for the reference!

Again, I think of the task I mentioned as not easy (it’s a lot of code) but it is simple (it’s a very boring for me code that I know how to write).

Caveat: (and I realized this throughout our exchange) is that the definition of “simple” differs a lot depending on the person and the field they are in vs. the domain of the task.

In part the task was “simple” by my standard is I have three decades of experience in the field, and the task is within my domain (networking protocols). 3500 LoC was what LLM generated, I will need to refactor and probably reduce that.

What you describe in my view would be probably “ complicated” (will require a lot of knowledge I don’t have) & “not easy” (it is lots of code) - I can imagine the data model is probably not trivial, plus you have to think a lot about potential extension points, future data migrations, etc)

Collaborative planning is an interesting new use, I will try it out, thanks for sharing!

FWIW, this past week I wrote up my uses of LLM (Claude 3.7) and published them, for a longer form experience than my comments here).

http://stdio.be/blog/2025-05-18-How-I-use-LLMs/

Your comment that you have to explain very well to it what you want is in part what I wanted to convey - LLM is an amplifier/executor, rather than a creative generator. The initiative is still fully yours.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#447

Post by StefanBatory »

hammock wrote: post #387
StefanBatory wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an surprisingly "strict" (in quotes for obvious reason) honor code. I'm at some uni in Poland, not top tier, but at the same time - not bad either, slighly above average. The amount of cheating I saw - it's almost mundane. Teachers know this, so do we...

It worked. There was still cheating (caught and uncaught), but 50-100x less than what I saw at other schools. And it gave students a sense of pride in their education

I'm genuinely happy to hear that, that it can be done. Really.

I have a huge respect for you and your university.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#448

Post by daveguy »

bsenftner wrote: post #377
daveguy wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are fantastic communicators, who will mirror their audience in an attempt to be better understood, but... This seems to represent a complete misunderstanding of what LLMs are and do. There is not a single LLM that "attempts" to be understood or anything else other than produce tokens. They have no autonomy.

Don't nit pick on my use of the term "attempt", I'm describing how the words used in a prompt generate the context that then generates the reply. In this specific human language context my use of "attempt" is describing the LLMs choice of words in it's reply. I know there is no "attempting" as a human would "attempt". I'm paraphrasing and alluding rather than writing a formal and complex essay.

Stop anthropomorphizing LLMs. You are contributing to the hype and eventual winter / AI backlash.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#449

Post by bccdee »

imperfect_blue wrote: post #402
bccdee wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be a mistake to take the banality of current LLM outputs and extrapolate that into the future. Imagine a chef, congenitally unable to taste or smell food, who has nevertheless studied a million recipes. Can they reproduce existing recipes? Sure, if they follow the instructions perfectly. Can they improvise original recipes? I doubt it. Judging by the instructions alone, the recipes they invent may be indis…

As an amateur home-cook, I find current LLMs incredibly useful as a sounding board for the on-the-fly recipe modifications - for allergies and food sensitivities, adapting preparation methods to available equipment, or substituting produce not available in season. It may not be able to taste the final product, but its reasoning on what's likely to work (and what isn't) has not led me wrong so far.

Sure, but allergies, substitutions, and such are very different from artistic creativity.

Re: Thoughts on thinking

#450

Post by bccdee »

fennecbutt wrote: post #438
bccdee wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think you're stretching the meaning of derivative. At that point, what can ever be called original? Every idea depends on pre-existing concepts. Even Newton stood on the shoulders of giants.

That's my overarching point. That most of human thought is derivative. Even emotion, sure you're happy that you ate a tasty food. But you're happy because your body is flooding you with chemicals to reward you for it, as with many humans over time, it's how it was selected. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just incredibly interesting to me to compare the way I think we act to the way these early models are actin…

You've redefined the word "derivative" so broadly as to make it meaningless. If everything is derivative, then we can no longer draw distinctions in originality. How, then, can we discuss the fact that some things are plainly more original than others?

This just feels evasive to me.

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