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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#621

Post by fragmede »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #598
runarberg wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don‘t see why you felt the need to insult me here. We are having a very common disagreement here, one which philosophers of science have been actively debating for several decades. My point with the SSRI is that we know that serotonin is a chemical which incites certain neurons, and we know that a lack of activity of neurons in that general area in the brain is correlated with depression, so scientists were able to…

It's not an insult to suggest one is out of the depth on a topic, especially when it isn't one's field of expertise. You are giving the pop science explanation of various things.

Why did you feel the need to add it though?

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: They’re made out of weights

#622

Post by [deleted] »

DangitBobby wrote: post #573
the_af wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: They’re made out of weights

#623

Post by cortesoft »

runarberg wrote: post #561
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don‘t see why you felt the need to insult me here. We are having a very common disagreement here, one which philosophers of science have been actively debating for several decades. My point with the SSRI is that we know that serotonin is a chemical which incites certain neurons, and we know that a lack of activity of neurons in that general area in the brain is correlated with depression, so scientists were able to…

> Just like Newton’s theory of gravity did not have to teach us about some deeper cosmological truth.

I would also argue that Newton's theory of gravity was not a pretty good understanding of gravity.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#624

Post by f_klem »

ACCount37 wrote: post #512
f_klem wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For just about every "failure mode that confirms they're not thinking", you see one of two things. The first is that a new LLM releases a few months after and the "fundamental" issue abruptly goes away. The second is that we take a good, long look at a human, and find that the human also fails like this - and thus, "not thinking". Often both! Always funny when it's both. The way machines 'don't think' or 'fail' is…

First, fix your formatting. It's a fucking mess. Second, what is the difference? Is it that one thing has an immortal soul, and thus Actual Intelligence and Actual Reasoning and Actual Learning, and the other has no soul, and a Pale Imitation of Intelligence, At Best? Because I've seen versions of this "it's not actually thinking" for actual fucking years, and the difference between "actually thinking" and "not actua…

Agreed, formatting was kind of f, but there is no need to be rude.

I wasn't saying there was any difference. All I'm saying is that the claimings the AI research field does are based on false assumptions. And from false assumptions, you cannot reach a proper conclusion.

Whether an AI system can reason and think like if it where a human being, or not, I don't care. I'm fine with either: it is just technological advance. But making claims based on false assumptions, and then being fooled by how 'wonderful' or 'spectacular' the results are, is, at least, naive.

> Nothing but human insecurity, in my eyes. There was never a principled difference. Just a way to operationalize some "I'm unique and special and better than a matrix math machine" vibes.

This is just something I don't get. People ignorant of technique are insecure and afraid. People that know how technology works, and thus investigate and know how it works fundamentally*, were never afraid or insecure.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#625

Post by phire »

kgwgk wrote: post #562
phire wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't use the word necessary. IMO, we are probably talking about a 6x slow down (for typical english). You would need to be absolutely stupid not to implement some kind of optimisation along these lines. Slower and maybe a little dumber; But it would work.

Not sure about “dumber” - it may be better than SOTA models at identifying which days of the week contain the letter “d”.

True, it would be better at some tasks.

My thinking is that for most tasks, a byte-orientated LLM still needs something like the wide "single activation per word" formatting that the tokeniser mostly provides. And it will likely waste its first and last few layers implementing a replacement tokeniser (and would probably do a much better job at it). It would also need to decode and encode unicode at the same time.

My estimate is that it might lose about 10% of its weights to these new tasks. Your 80B parameter model becomes as smart as a 72B parameter model - Measurably dumber, but not drastically so.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#626

Post by f_klem »

calepayson wrote: post #549
f_klem wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mach…

> 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. I'm not sure I understand this. Why not?

It has to do with words and how we evolve words throughout history and across geographic boundaries. The term 'machine' comes, after some modifications, from the greek word mekhanos, which was used to describe something ingenious or a device made in some clever way or operating in a clever way. From there it went on to describe things like devices, to end up being the actual definition of what we might call 'a device' (a machine). The idea of 'mechanistic' is also related.

Traditionally, things that are alive were described with different words and assigned a different set of properties and characteristics. Machine can break, living things die. And we still have those two semantic frames separated: A living thing: can be harmed, it breathes, it nourishes, it reproduces, etc A machine: can break, can be fixed, can be repurposed, etc.

But because of a specific tradition in western philosophy, we started applying and analogy between 'inner mechanism (clever thing), that moves or provides a function, and seems to work in a causal way' and living things.

So when we say 'a living cell is a wonderful, complex machine', we are not actually saying it is a machine, we are operating through an analogy. That's how far we can go.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#627

Post by runarberg »

xnfcxnr wrote: post #620
runarberg wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i know the sun shows up every day and i know if i go inside my basement i dont get a tan. do i understand the sun?

Some schools of the philosophy of science would argue that you do. However you are describing is a very different acquisition of knowledge then what scientists did when developing SSRI medicine. We had to:

1. take pictures of brain activity under different conditions to see which regions were active during different moods,

2. sacrifice a bunch of mice to see which neuro-chemical activated which neurons,

3. predict that inhibiting the re-uptake of a specific neuro-chemical would activate that region,

4. predict that activating that region would decrease the level of depression

In your solar example you would have discovered melanin and its relation to your skin tone, and you would have studied the effects ultra-violate radiation has on your melanin levels. Then you would have predicted that staying out of the sun will not give you a tan.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#628

Post by jazzypants »

beering wrote: post #447
jazzypants wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that parrots do not have sapience? How would one even measure such a thing?

Because by definition, sapience is something only humans have. Ergo, parrots are not sapient. More meta, all of the threads on this page are just people playing games with definitions. Eg, “qualia is something I have as a human but machines don’t have it. Therefore, LLMs do not have qualia.”

You're confused about the etymology. Homo Sapiens was coined in the 1800s. People have been saying "sapient" since the 1300s, and it is rooted from the Latin word "sapientem" which simply means "sensible; shrewd, knowing, discrete". Homo Sapiens just means "wise human", and we humbly bestowed the name upon ourselves.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/sapient

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Etymology_and_definition

Re: They’re made out of weights

#629

Post by runarberg »

cortesoft wrote: post #623
runarberg wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don‘t see why you felt the need to insult me here. We are having a very common disagreement here, one which philosophers of science have been actively debating for several decades. My point with the SSRI is that we know that serotonin is a chemical which incites certain neurons, and we know that a lack of activity of neurons in that general area in the brain is correlated with depression, so scientists were able to…

> Just like Newton’s theory of gravity did not have to teach us about some deeper cosmological truth. I would also argue that Newton's theory of gravity was not a pretty good understanding of gravity.

It was still a good theory, and importantly the fact that it failed explain the nature of Aether had no effect on the quality of the theory.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#630

Post by cortesoft »

runarberg wrote: post #603
pegasus wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is basically reductionism , or in the extreme atomism , and (as I understand it) it has largely fallen out of fashion both in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of mind, since it heyday in the 1970s. And I don’t see it coming back into fashion any time soon. I can definitely see why reductionism would appeal to an educated public. We learn about the periodic table; we are able to break sentences down…

Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory don't preclude reductionism, and I wouldn't say it has fallen out of favor as a whole. Certain types certainly have, but not the overall idea.

Also, nothing about the idea of the mind only being made up of physical processes means things have to be deterministic.

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