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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#551

Post by f_klem »

jordigh wrote: post #344
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…

You actually read Being and Time? What the heck do you get out of it? Heidegger just seems to play word games with German words without actually saying anything. "Time is the ripening of temporality." tf do phrases like that mean??

Yes. I read the spanish translation (with occasional reading of the german original). A lot is lost in translation (I do not regard english translations too high). So yes, it is a difficult reading, on a difficult topic. He is not playing with words, but defining concepts in a very specific way. What I would recommend is reading Heidegger through other authors (Being-in-the-world, also by Dreyfus, would be a starting point).

Re: They’re made out of weights

#552

Post by jhonof »

ozgung wrote: post #454
Avicebron wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes dude. You may need to expand your horizons a bit.

That's my point. Everything from 1927 is already in plain sight and a part of the current public knowledge. Horizon can only be expanded at the cutting edges.

> Horizon can only be expanded at the cutting edges.

Ironically this was advice Ralph Waldo Emerson gave in 1840 so by your logic it's irrelevant just because it's old.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#553

Post by ACCount37 »

f_klem wrote: post #545
ACCount37 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think cognitive linguistics has that much to say about AI nowadays. Let alone philosophy. The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with, and work around, respectively. From ther…

> I don't think cognitive linguistics has that much to say about AI nowadays. Let alone philosophy. I would like to read those sources. > The biggest contributions from linguistics are probably "human languages mostly have statistical regularities rather than hard rules" and "the sum of data humans get from birth to language acquisition is insufficient to learn a language from scratch". Which LLMs already work with,…

Again: either stop using > quotes or learn to use them better. Fucking unreadable.

I reiterate: philosophy is almost entirely worthless for AI design. We want to design systems that work, not systems that sound good on paper. If philosophy had a practical application in that, we'd stop calling it "philosophy" and start calling it "math", "science" or "engineering".

Re: They’re made out of weights

#554

Post by kelseyfrog »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #135
kelseyfrog wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like someone confusing the map and territory can exist without needing to invoke the metaphysical. Maybe, I'm misunderstanding tho

If something happens "on the map" doesn't that imply the map to exist and be some sort of metaphysical thing? As opposed to a purely theoretical construction.

I think you can be a monist and still have a map. To me it's similar in the sense of "all models are wrong, some are useful." A mathematical model (a map) doesn't require a metaphysical foundation to exist. Right?

Re: They’re made out of weights

#555

Post by CuriouslyC »

f_klem wrote: post #550
CuriouslyC wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the stuff you cite is that it is coming from consciousness via an anthropomorphic perspective. The priors baked in are poisoning the logic. The question we have to answer is "Why do we think we're magical matter uniquely blessed with consciousness?" If you go far enough down the rabbit hole on that question, the answer you will come to is either "we're not" or "because god" (with a lot of pseudo-scie…

There is no way of dealing with these topics via a non-anthropomorphic perspective. That has been already (in my view) proved by Heidegger and then Derrida. Last time I read about panpsychism, it was deeply flawed. But I can't remember the sources (sorry).

If it's so deeply flawed, should be easy to state why in an ELI5 manner. For example: The emergence hypothesis requires physical processes to effectively create new dimensions of information (700nm light -> "red" qualia) which we're somehow incapable of directly measuring with all the tools of modern physics.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#556

Post by runarberg »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #521
runarberg wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but after that we get too tired and give up on how the brain works and treat it like a miracle. I disagree. We know very well how neurons work, and we have a pretty good idea of how neural activity translates to behavior. In other words, we have a pretty good idea on how the brain works. We stop at consciousness because as of yet it is in the realm of philosophy, not science. We don‘t know what consciousness is or…

Saying we have a good idea of how the brain works massively overstates the case... We know how neurons fire. We do not know how a brain turns that into thought, meaning, intention, experience and on and on. That is not "pretty well understanding the brain", it's understanding some components and hand waving the thing we actually care about.

What I actually care about is how neural activity translates to behavior. And we have a good enough idea of that that we can design SSRI medicine to treat depression, or neurological tests to detect Alzheimer. As for experience we do know something and we are learning more with cognitive psychology, in e.g. priming experiments etc.

I feel like the search for consciousness is to psychology what the search for the Aether was for physics and chemistry. I think it is a worthwhile search, and maybe we will discover something important during that search, but we should also be prepared to find out that the thing might not exist, or it’s presumed properties are better explained with a different model.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#557

Post by YeahThisIsMe »

darepublic wrote: post #491
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

That's a scam.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#558

Post by danielmarkbruce »

runarberg wrote: post #556
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying we have a good idea of how the brain works massively overstates the case... We know how neurons fire. We do not know how a brain turns that into thought, meaning, intention, experience and on and on. That is not "pretty well understanding the brain", it's understanding some components and hand waving the thing we actually care about.

What I actually care about is how neural activity translates to behavior. And we have a good enough idea of that that we can design SSRI medicine to treat depression, or neurological tests to detect Alzheimer. As for experience we do know something and we are learning more with cognitive psychology, in e.g. priming experiments etc. I feel like the search for consciousness is to psychology what the search for the Aeth…

SSRIs are not evidence that we understand how neural activity becomes behavior. They are evidence that you can perturb a system usefully without understanding it very well. That is exactly my point.

Respectfully, you are miles out of your depth here.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#559

Post by mjg2 »

simpaticoder wrote: post #539
mjg2 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roger that, thank you. w/r/g your recapitulation of my point: yes, the story is unoriginal and pointless, and the HN community seems to eat it up-- isn't that odd. So I still disagree with your elucidated point (as you end with "which is valid"): the OP author is using prior art fiction to bolster their opinion of LLM-based software tools as being a possible vector of sentience, not to disarm our chauvinism like the…

The point is valid regardless of whether you judge LLM to be sentient or not, because the point is to say "don't let your prejudice about substrate bias your decision". Or in other words, if you're going to weigh something don't tip the scale. This is good advice whatever the outcome of the measurement. Blindsight is a remarkable book - I hope you enjoy it!

Ah I see now that I am in agreement with you, thank you for being a patient interlocutor. I do not discard and rule out the possibility of a different substrate being the well-spring from which sentience emerges.

Plainly, based on the current ground trodded and the trajectory laid out by the frontier AI labs, I do not have concrete evidence/proof of sentience having emerged from LLM-based software tools as of June 4 2026 nor do I expect it to happen in the future based on my understanding and observations of this technology. I'm not excluding the possibility but wielding skepticism. I am open to being proven wrong with new discoveries.

Which is why (to return to my lashing of the dead horse) I don't see OP's post as worthwhile. Their post reiterates a point that is already valid (the prior art) with no new substantial discovery. Which is why "unoriginal and pointless" is apt, a novel idea was not presented; it's just some vain virtue signaling.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#560

Post by svachalek »

aureate wrote: post #194

Assume LLMs have conscious experiences. Take a session with an LLM. A prompt is fed to the LLM. It generates some text. Another input is fed in, comprising the previous prompt, the generated text and a new prompt. The model generates some more text. This continues for a while and the session concludes. Some questions: 1. Let's say we perform the exact same experiment, running the same program on the same computer wit…

I appreciate actually attempting to engage with the concept skeptically rather than assuming an answer in either direction.

As someone who's fairly neutral on the answer, I'd speculate:

1. Consciousness seems to me to be the awareness of the processing, not the processing itself. So running a program does not produce consciousness as there's no awareness, no feedback loop. Now a program that has self monitoring, alerting coupled to error handling that triggers the program to behave differently going forward, I would say has a minimal consciousness, and it's not a single experience, it's multiple equivalent experiences. If there were any differences at all we'd say it's obviously not one experience, so I don't see how the elimination of the last difference in the processing collapses all those separate experiences into a single one.

More specifically to this discussion, with LLMs we can often see them using a word, and through autoregression the following words reveal that the original word choice is now realized to be incorrect, and it attempts to correct midstream. You can also see them responding to error messages from the environment or criticism from the users but as external feedback these have a weaker claim to evidence of consciousness imo.

2. I'd say the experience is equivalent, "same" has slightly different semantics but perhaps even that fits. This thought experiment is equivalent to asking, what if we took a snapshot of your brain as weights, and then ran the calculations on a GPU rather than your neurons, and you to all external indications, GPU you acted the same as brain you. Would that change of venue eliminate the consciousness of your thoughts?

3. Since I am defining consciousness as awareness of the processing, this depends where the awareness is located. The LLM would have very different internal states in between the input and output tokens, but if its self awareness was only based on its own output the experience would be equivalent. If it was deeper such that it had ongoing awareness of the embeddings and so on, the experience would change.

4. This is where it gets really interesting, because it starts to get more into a nonbinary idea of consciousness. I think it's clear from questions like this that if LLMs have consciousness, it's nothing like ours. If there is an experience of being an LLM, it's nothing like being a human, even if conversationally we can communicate with each other rather easily. There are further twists to your questions, like does the experience change if the KV is cached or not? Without trying to micro-analyze the issue I will continue to point back to my foundation of: where is the self awareness located, and how does feedback occur.

A. Negated, I don't agree with your answer to 1. B. Agreed, I would speculate that if there is an LLM conscious experience, it is fragmented unlike ours. But I would disagree that this necessarily disproves the concept of LLM consciousness.

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