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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#491

Post by darepublic »

sumitkumar wrote: post #148

The weights start with a random manifold. The training takes data and shapes the manifold, weight by weight, in many cycles. Once the training is the done manifold is fixed. When a new inference has to be done the query(q) is projected in the manifold space. This projection is dropped on the manifold and the gravity of the manifold gives an answer of q+1 length. Which(qw+i) is dropped qw+n times to output a final res…

It's like a giant plinko board where the shape of the original disc guides how it falls through the apparatus, and the apparatus has been tuned so that different discs end up in the exits we want them to

Re: They’re made out of weights

#492

Post by darepublic »

This made me think of a game like fallout where a surviving llm is treated like some kind of indecipherable oracle left over from the ancients. And then as humanity recovers someone finally looks under the hood of the Oracle to discover there is no great magic

Re: They’re made out of weights

#493

Post by raincole »

sarchertech wrote: post #388
raincole wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> subjective experience and agency, amongst other things In other words, souls? I'm sorry if that sounds accusing, but to me it sounds like you're talking about souls that are independent to the physical world, just with more 'scientific-y' wording. (I fully understand that some people believe souls exist.)

I don’t think the OP is discussing mind-body dualism. There are many materialists who believe that consciousness maybe a non-computational process. But it is worth pointing out that something like 80% of the world (it fluctuates depending on the survey but its around that) believes in some non-physical spirit, life force, or soul. It’s a very HN bubble thing to start a discussion with the assumption that everyone mus…

I acknowledge and understand that many people believe in the existence of souls. But I hope they just say it rather than try to wrap the concepts in layers of jargons.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#494

Post by layer8 »

IsTom wrote: post #474
layer8 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internal experience is an input to your mind (that’s how you know about it), and what your mind perceives affects what it does. The better question is: how can what you experience possibly not affect your actions?

What you do is determined by physical action of neurons. There is no need for there to be someone to perceive it.

By definition, internal experience is something you perceive, and what you perceive informs how you act. Therefore internal experience affects outward physical action.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#495

Post by f_klem »

codeflo wrote: post #259
f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and t…

Refuting the "subjective experience" axiom does not lead to 'any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons', you also need to explain why the subjective experience is tied to neurons. And that's precisely what computational theories of mind do not account for: the link between subjective experience and neurons. I am not arguing that neurons (or the brain) are not a necessary condition for subjective experience.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#496

Post by narrator »

lxgr wrote: post #179
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…

> 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 less about being too tired and more about being realistic about the limits of understanding. Consider mass and energy flows in planet-scale systems: At some point we call these “weather” and change the tools with which we study them, but…

If you're going to make something smarter than a person, you got to be convinced that you're only going to be able to understand it on the single training step level and then inductively trust that the rest of it works. We do empirical testing of course with evals, but there's sort of an art to figuring out what is theoretically going to improve eval performance. Trying to fit the meaning of all those weights in your little human brain and working back from there isn't going to work for more than a little slice of the dataset at a time because that's all we can fit in our understanding.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#497

Post by culi »

yencabulator wrote: post #338
skydhash wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blind people learn concepts of bikes too and in a smiliar way: by description. And by touch and sound. And maybe some were daring enough to drive one, or unlucky enough to get hit by one. But have way more input than just texts.

Obligatory echolocation bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a05kgcI9D2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAtVOK04XvA

Invisibilia's episode was my first exposure to it.

https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...

The man posits that clicking is instinctual for blind people but they are told to quiet down in class and most never develop their echolocation abilities

Re: They’re made out of weights

#498

Post by pixl97 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #47
pixl97 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a video game a physical property of a computer?

Yes

So then we can assume consciousness is a physical property of brains, as we can measure the electrical signals of consciousness versus when we are unconscious.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#499

Post by narrator »

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…

The solution we've come up with is move all the unpleasant work stuff to China where people don't complain about doing it because they already have communism, and therefore everything is of course effortlessly perfect there.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#500

Post by f_klem »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #313
codeflo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and t…

There's two meanings to "the body is a complex machine" and I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. 1) The abstract "dictionary" version: It'd be technically correct to say that the body is a machine under the definition of "A machine is a thermodynamic system that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action.". 2) But there's also the less abstract/technical: "The body is alike…

I agree, we can miss the forest for the trees.

1) This definition could actually be expanded (for example, with definitions from Mumford or Reuleaux). But still this definition cannot be applied directly to living organisms. 2) This is in my opinion one of the sources of misunderstanding. We mainly operate on analogies and metaphors, so we have build this 'analogy space' around the idea that living organisms are machines. But it is only when we say 'alike' that we can truly gather some meaning out of it all, going beyond the 'behaves like' or 'is conceptualized as' when it gets messy.

> With regard to AI, there's a lot of people extrapolating "There is no magical animating spirit, the brain is just a pile of stochastic molecules following the laws of physics" into "The brain is an inert pile of matter, computers are an inert pile of matter, ergo AI/LLMs are like the brain!"

This is exactly my point. There is a fallacy operating from "A is not B" to "A is C". And this fallacy is pervasive in the AI research field, the book from Dreyfus (What Computers can't still do) explains that in much detail.

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