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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#631

Post by rolisz »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #548
lukebuehler wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If cannot the say they are "thinking", "intelligent" while we do not have a good definition--or, even more difficult, unanimous agreement on a definition--then the discussion just becomes about output. They are doing useful stuff, saving time, etc, which can be measured. Thus also the defintion of AGI has largely become: "can produce or surpass the economic output of a human knowledge worker". But I think this detrac…

Heres a definition. How impressive is the output relative to the input. And by input, I don't just mean the prompt, but all the training data itself. Do you think someone who has only ever studied pre-calc would be able to work through a calculus book if they had sufficient time? how about a multi-variable calc book? How about grad level mathematics? IMO intelligence and thinking is strictly about this ratio; what ca…

Is the millions of years of evolution part of the training data for humans?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#632

Post by isaacremuant »

gkbrk wrote: post #584
emodendroket wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To borrow a line from Dijkstra, the claim seems a bit like saying that a submarine is swimming.

I think most people would agree that submarines are swimming.

No. Cars don't walk. Submarines don't swim. You can call it navigation if you want but words have meaning.

> to move through water by moving the body or parts of the body.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#633

Post by f4uCL9dNSnQm »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #134

> Meanwhile, the A.I. tools that most people currently interact with on a day-to-day basis are reminiscent of Clippy Can’t take the article seriously after this.

Do we count Google's search AI overview? Because it is shoved in face of million, every day, and it really is only slight improvement over Clippy.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#634

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

slightwinder wrote: post #586
simulator5g wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having seen photocopiers so many times produce coherent, sensible, and valid chains of words on a page, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking.

Photocopiers are the opposite of thinking. What goes in, goes out, no transformation or creating of new data at all. Any change is just an accident, or an artifact of the technical process.

That's not actually true - try photocopying a banknote with the security pattern on it.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#635

Post by pmarreck »

keiferski wrote: post #537
tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

I don’t see how being critical of this is a knee jerk response. Thinking , like intelligence and many other words designating complex things, isn’t a simple topic. The word and concept developed in a world where it referred to human beings, and in a lesser sense, to animals. To simply disregard that entire conceptual history and say, “well it’s doing a thing that looks like thinking, ergo it’s thinking” is the lazy m…

So it seems to be a semantics argument. We don't have a name for a thing that is "useful in many of the same ways 'thinking' is, except not actually consciously thinking"

I propose calling it "thunking"

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#636

Post by Earw0rm »

popalchemist wrote: post #553
ako wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most AI tooling is shipped with a feedback loop around the LLM. The quality of Claude Code for example lies in the feedback loop it provides on your code. Maybe the LLM itself isn't thinking, but the Agent which ships an LLM plus feedback loop definitely shows thinking qualities. Just now in an debugging session with claude code: * let me read this file... * let me read this file... * I think there's a caching issue…

without getting into theory of mind it's a bit difficult to elaborate, and I don't have the time or the will for that. But the short version is that thinking is interconnected with BEING as well as will, and the Agent has neither, in a philosophically formal sense. The agent is deterministically bound. So it is a fancy Rube Goldberg machine that outputs letters in a way that creates the impression of thought, but it…

It seems pretty clear to me though that being good at intellectual tasks / the sort of usefulness we ascribe to LLMs doesn't strongly correlate with awareness.

Even just within humans - many of the least intellectually capable humans seem to have a richer supply of the traits associated with awareness/being than some of the allegedly highest-functioning.

On average you're far more likely to get a sincere hug from someone with Down's syndrome than from a multi-millionaire.

But I'm more interested in this when it comes to the animal kingdom, because while ChatGPT is certainly more useful than my cat, I'm also pretty certain that it's a lot less aware. Meaningful awareness - feelings - seems to be an evolutionary adaptation possessed by k-strategy reproducing vertebrates. Having a small number of kids and being biologically wired to care for them has huge implications for your motivation as an animal, and it's reasonable to think that a lot of our higher emotions are built on hardware originally evolved for that purpose.

(Albeit the evolutionary origins of that are somewhat murky - to what extent mammals/birds reuse capabilities that were developed by a much earlier common ancestor, or whether it's entirely parallel evolution, isn't known afaik - but birds seem to exhibit a similar set of emotional states to mammals, that much is true).

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#637

Post by noirscape »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #269
XorNot wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hardly an unreasonable supposition: the one definitely conscious entities we know of are also the apex intelligence of the planet. To put it another way: lots of things are conscious, but humans are definitely the most conscious beings on Earth.

I can understand what less cognizant or self aware means, but "less conscious" is confusing. What are you implying here? Are their qualia lower resolution?

Pretty much. Most animals are both smarter than you expect, but also tend to be more limited in what they can reason about.

It's why anyone who's ever taken care of a needy pet will inevitably reach the comparison that taking care of a pet is similar to taking care of a very young child; it's needy, it experiences emotions but it can't quite figure out on its own how to adapt to an environment besides what it grew up around/it's own instincts. They experience some sort of qualia (a lot of animals are pretty family-minded), but good luck teaching a monkey to read. The closest we've gotten is teaching them that if they press the right button, they get food, but they take basically their entire lifespan to understand a couple hundred words, while humans easily surpass that.

IIRC some of the smartest animals in the world are actually rats. They experience a qualia very close to humans to the point that psychology experiments are often easily observable in rats.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#638

Post by myrmidon »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #625
antonvs wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Panpsychism doesn’t explain anything, it just asserts that consciousness doesn’t have an explanation, that it just “is”. It’s not impossible that something like panpsychism could be true, but knowing that wouldn’t get us any closer to understanding consciousness. It also raises more questions than it answers, such as how an integrated consciousness arises within a brain/mind, whereas it presumably doesn’t in, say, a…

Those questions you mentioned apply across the board, just in nuanced variants. Do you really think that postulating a non-physical system that we can't describe in physical terms (red is not a wavelength), somehow magically creates a new dimension of "feeling" when the bits are arranged in the "right order" is less complex than the hypothesis consciousness forms arranges itself into "structures" in much the same way…

I honestly don't see what the whole framework gets you. Red (or all qualia) is just the reaction of your nervous system to a stimulus. Since that reaction is shaped by common context/associations, the "subjective experience" is quite comparable between similarly raised humans.

I think the whole philosophy of mind/subjective experience field is one of the few remaining anti-reductionist hold-outs, but I simply don't see a good enough motivation to stick with that view, especially given the abysmal historical track record for anti-reductionism (just consider early chemistry/alchemy, early biology, astronomy, ...).

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#639

Post by spragl »

ivraatiems wrote: post #18

The author searches for a midpoint between "AIs are useless and do not actually think" and "AIs think like humans," but to me it seems almost trivially true that both are possible. What I mean by that is that I think there is a good chance that LLMs are similar to a subsystem of human thinking. They are great at pattern recognition and prediction, which is a huge part of cognition. What they are not is conscious, or…

This is how I see LLMs as well.

The main problem with the article is that it is meandering around in ill-conceived concepts, like thinking, smart, intelligence, understanding... Even AI. What they mean to the author is not what they mean to me, and still different to they mean to the other readers. There are all these comments from different people throughout the article, all having their own thoughts on those concepts. No wonder it all seem so confusing.

It will be interesting when the dust settles, and a clear picture of LLMs can emerge that all can agree upon. Maybe it can even help us define some of those ill-defined concepts.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#640

Post by techblueberry »

tkz1312 wrote: post #274

Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. Consciousness or self awareness is of course a different question, and ones whose answer seems less clear right now. Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because you find it unbelievable that we c…

Isn’t anthropomorphizing LLMs rather than understanding their unique presence in the world a “ lack of imagination and flexibility of thought”? It’s not that I can’t imagine applying the concept “thinking” to the output on the screen, I just don’t think it’s an accurate description.
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