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They’re made out of weights

maxleiter.com

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#571

Post by gibspaulding »

simpaticoder wrote: post #481
mjg2 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your point. I don't understand why half these comments are taking this blog post seriously when it ends with "Weights helped me draft and proof this story." > Weights helped me draft and proof this story. Any HN reader here now, I encourage you to read the original ( https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s... ) in one sitting, go about your day, then read it again. Maybe make some n…

We humans tend to chauvinism in all things (e.g. we're special, the center of the Universe, God made the universe for us, etc), no less when it comes to judging intelligence. The original story about thinking meat was written to help us out of our chauvinism; this derived story was written about weights for the same reason. Which is quite valid. The actual counterpoint is demonstrated in _Blindsight_ Peter Watts. He…

Wait, did I grossly misunderstand Blindsight?? I definitely thought that the aliens were 100% conscious (or at least elements of some conscious entity) and that the humans interpretation of their interactions with the Rorschach were supposed to be read as a blot test (through a rather heavy handed metaphor) demonstrating that basically the humans were the monsters and were twisting logic into letting them justify destroying the scary alien ship.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#573

Post by DangitBobby »

the_af wrote: post #537
mjg2 wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your point. I don't understand why half these comments are taking this blog post seriously when it ends with "Weights helped me draft and proof this story." > Weights helped me draft and proof this story. Any HN reader here now, I encourage you to read the original ( https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s... ) in one sitting, go about your day, then read it again. Maybe make some n…

> I'm skeptical of AI sentience because we must do our due diligence, not because it's impossible. Skepticism is the only respectful approach because to grant sentience is a step away from granting rights. Thanks for saying this! It amazes me to witness so much pushback (in HN of all places!) for the call for skepticism and scientific rigor on claims made by business which have vested interests in hyping things up.

For my part, it is exactly when I perceive the reluctance to grant rights or relinquish our estimation of ourselves as unique as the _reason_ for skepticism that I push back on it. That's not good reasoning, those are motivations for you to come to a desired conclusion and fill in with reasoning that gets you there.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#574

Post by sanderjd »

mjg2 wrote: post #452
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…

Thank you for your point. I don't understand why half these comments are taking this blog post seriously when it ends with "Weights helped me draft and proof this story." > Weights helped me draft and proof this story. Any HN reader here now, I encourage you to read the original ( https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s... ) in one sitting, go about your day, then read it again. Maybe make some n…

What? It's just a clever homage.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#575

Post by andai »

YeahThisIsMe wrote: post #557
darepublic wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

Re: They’re made out of weights

#576

Post by DangitBobby »

maxbond wrote: post #477
keybored wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Much like Russel argued that the burden of proof of God's existence is on theists, the burden to establish this parallel is on you as the person forwarding the argument. I pointed out the parallel in both statements. I can't do more than that. > Russel isn't arguing that a teapot is as real as God in the same way it's disputed here that a toaster is as conscious as an LLM. The teapot isn't real and the toaster cons…

> I pointed out the parallel in both statements. I can't do more than that. You mean these statements? No one cares about teapots in space either (Russel). Teapots are not compelling. I guess you did but that's pretty much leaving me breadcrumbs and expecting me to make your argument for you. It seemed to me like you were talking about reductio ad absurdum with that argument as an illustrative example. Perhaps you ov…

I followed this thread all the way through and really enjoyed it.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#577

Post by andai »

noduerme wrote: post #162
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…

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…

>It's almost like people desperately want to give up their agency and creativity

Don't make me think!

Also don't make me take responsibility. (This seems to be the actual function of every organization.)

Re: They’re made out of weights

#578

Post by econ »

maxbond wrote: post #223
Planktonne wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could absolutely write a compelling story about a sentient toaster; it's been done before [1]. That is entirely separate to whether or not it would be a meaningful way to understand the world; a convincing story is not the same thing as one that is true. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Toaster

I never said you couldn't write any arbitrary compelling story about a toaster, I said that this specific hypothetical story, where you rewrite "They're made of meat!" to be about a toaster, would not be compelling. I am doing my best to communicate with you but to be honest you are not hearing me (across both responses), and I am out of words.

I read some stuff once where the author argued that almost everything takes in values, performs operation on them and gives output. Some things also store things. Then, if everything is doing logic operations there is no telling where intelligent "life" might be hiding. It also is really one giant system.

The toaster has hard coded or configurable weights. It makes a product from heat and time.

You could make toast by heating a brick on a campfire. It would be a clear sign of intelligence.

If we lift one weight out of your brain we wouldn't look at the number and say it is intelligence. It must exist in a chain or matrix multiplication to qualify.

The fun thing is that the timer and feedback mechanism do exist in a chain of events.

It's part of the system and it takes all steps to complete the task.

Our chain of thought that leads to making toast would be abandoned if it wasn't in working order.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#579

Post by pegasus »

cortesoft wrote: post #457
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…

> 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 funny, because I thought you were talking about humans here when you wrote this. We know some things about how our bodies encode information that is sent to the brain, and we know some things about…

There's definitely a sizable contingent of people who desperately want to believe consciousness is just electrical impulses in our brain. Because "what else could it be"? The fact is that we just don't know, and "abiding in the not-knowing" is for many the most uncomfortable thing ever. Especially for the curious- and rational-minded people this forum tends to attract. I'm one of them, too.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#580

Post by ForceBru »

overgard wrote: post #471
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…

This is a famous short story just rewritten sloppily by an AI. Although it does amusingly do what annoys critics of AI: take something good written by a person, steal it and slop it up while overall misunderstanding it.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't misunderstand the original. The original says that the aliens don't understand how meat (humans) can be conscious, have language and be basically like the aliens (thinking conscious beings). Their main idea is: humans are meat, meat can't be conscious, therefore humans can't be conscious, but they somehow act as if they are????

The "AI slop" here says that just like the aliens in the original, we humans don't believe that LLMs can be conscious because, in essence, WEIGHTS CAN'T BE CONSCIOUS. Original: "meat can't be conscious" (but we humans know it can). This version: "weights can't be conscious" (and we humans INSIST that this is true).

So the message here is: what if we're as mistaken about the consciousness of "weights" as the aliens are mistaken about the consciousness of "meat"?

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