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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#721

Post by Workaccount2 »

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…

"To escape the paradox, we invoke what we call the “Homunculus Defense”: inside every human is a tiny non-stochastic homunculus that provides true understanding. This homunculus is definitionally not a stochastic parrot because:

1. It has subjective experience (unprovable but assumed)

2. It possesses free will (compatibilist definitions need not apply)

3. It has attended at least one philosophy seminar"[1]

[1]https://ai.vixra.org/pdf/2506.0065v1.pdf

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#722

Post by tengbretson »

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…

Too many people place their identity in their own thoughts/intellect. Acknowledging what the LLMs are doing as thought would basically be calling them human to people of that perspective.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#723

Post by nickledave »

I'm not going to read this -- I don't need to. The replies here are embarrassing enough.

This is what happens when our entire culture revolves around the idea that computer programmers are the most special smartest boys.

If you even entertain even for a second the idea that a computer program that a human wrote is "thinking", then you don't understand basic facts about: (1) computers, (2) humans, and (3) thinking. Our educational system has failed to inoculate you against this laughable idea.

A statistical model of language will always be a statistical model of language, and nothing more.

A computer will never think, because thinking is something that humans do, because it helps them stay alive. Computers will never be alive. Unplug your computer, walk away for ten years, plug it back in. It's fine--the only reason it won't work is planned obsolescence.

No, I don't want to read your reply that one time you wrote a prompt that got ChatGPT to whisper the secrets of the universe into your ear. We've known at least since Joseph Weizenbaum coded up Eliza that humans will think a computer is alive if it talks to them. You are hard-wired to believe that anything that produces language is a human just like you. Seems like it's a bug, not a feature.

Stop commenting on Hacker News, turn off your phone, read this book, and tell all the other sicko freaks in your LessWrong cult to read it too: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262551328/a-drive-to-survive/ Then join a Buddhist monastery and spend a lifetime pondering how deeply wrong you were.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#724

Post by everdrive »

logicchains wrote: post #716
everdrive wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Plato had no grounding in biology, and so his work here was quite interesting but also quite wrong. More precisely, I mean that the average person and the common culture has not really needed to disambiguate these terms. Can you define consciousness vs. sentience? And if you can, do you really think that the average person would share your definition? ie, your definition could be the _best_ definition, but my arg…

>And Plato had no grounding in biology, and so his work here was quite interesting but also quite wrong. Defining what a word should mean doesn't require any understanding of biology unless you make the assumption that it's a biology-related word. Why should the definition of "thinking" have any reference to biology? If you assume it does, then you're basically baking in the assumption that machines can't think.

Because until recently (I'm talking last 150-40 years here depending on how we want to define thinking) the only things that could think were various animals. And so 100% of their systems for thinking were rooted in biology. If an LLM can think (and I'm partial to thinking that it can) it's going to different in a number of ways from how a person would think. They may be some overlap, but there will be all these human / biology / evolutionary psychology things which are really person-specific. Even just basic stuff such as seeing faces in the clouds, or falling prey to appeals of emotion. (ie, because our thinking is wrapped up in other processes such as status / ego / survival / etc.) Thinking has only been biological for a long, long time. Non-biological thinking is pretty new, even if you extend it back to the early days of computing.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#725

Post by lossyalgo »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #710
lossyalgo wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just ask it how many r's are in strawberry and you will realize there isn't a lot of reasoning going on here, it's just trickery on top of token generators.

This is akin to "Show a human an optical illusion that exploits their physiology". LLM's be like "The dumb humans can't even see the dots"[1] [1] https://compote.slate.com/images/bdbaa19e-2c8f-435e-95ca-a93...

haha that's a great analogy!

How about non-determinism (i.e. hallucinations)? Ask a human ANY question 3 times and they will give you the same answer, every time, unless you prod them or rephrase the question. Sure the answer might be wrong 3 times, but at least you have consistency. Then again, maybe that's a disadvantage for humans!

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#726

Post by _boffin_ »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #634
slightwinder wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That has a logic condition, no?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#727

Post by Workaccount2 »

bithead wrote: post #406
layer8 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes after a night’s sleep, we wake up with an insight on a topic or a solution to a problem we encountered the day before. Did we “think” in our sleep to come up with the insight or solution? For all we know, it’s an unconscious process. Would we call it “thinking”? The term “thinking” is rather ill-defined, too bound to how we perceive our own wakeful thinking. When conversing with LLMs, I never get the feelin…

Do LLMs ever ask for you to clarify something you said in a way a person who doesn't quite understand what you said will do?

Sometimes I think people leveraging criticisms of LLMs used ChatGPT 3 years ago and haven't touched one since, except for asking how many r's are in strawberry a year and a half ago.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#728

Post by amarcheschi »

nickledave wrote: post #723

I'm not going to read this -- I don't need to. The replies here are embarrassing enough. This is what happens when our entire culture revolves around the idea that computer programmers are the most special smartest boys. If you even entertain even for a second the idea that a computer program that a human wrote is "thinking", then you don't understand basic facts about: (1) computers, (2) humans, and (3) thinking. Ou…

Sometimes the comments on hn regarding Ai and thinking are... Well, something

The lw vibes are strong, I'm still waiting for Ai to escape and kill us (it will get stuck trying to import a library in python)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#729

Post by Workaccount2 »

dns_snek wrote: post #538
MrScruff wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we say "think" in this context, do we just mean generalize? LLMs clearly generalize (you can give one a problem that is not exactly in it's training data and it can solve it), but perhaps not to the extent a human can. But then we're talking about degrees. If it was able to generalize at a higher level of abstraction maybe more people would regard it as "thinking".

I meant it in the same way the previous commenter did: > Having seen LLMs so many times produce incoherent, nonsensical and invalid chains of reasoning... LLMs are little more than RNGs. They are the tea leaves and you read whatever you want into them. Of course LLMs are capable of generating solutions that aren't in their training data sets but they don't arrive at those solutions through any sort of rigorous reason…

I have been on a crusade now for about a year to get people to share chats where SOTA LLMs have failed spectacularly to produce coherent, good information. Anything with Heavy hallucinations and outright bad information.

So far, all I have gotten is data that is outside the knowledge cutoff (this is by far the most common) and technicality wrong information (Hawsmer House instead of Hosmer House) kind of fails.

I thought maybe I hit on something with the recent BBC study about not trusting LLM output, but they used 2nd shelf/old mid-tier models to do their tests. Top LLMs correctly answered their test prompts.

I'm still holding out for one of those totally off the rails Google AI overviews hallucinations showing up in a top shelf model.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#730

Post by JKCalhoun »

JPLeRouzic wrote: post #443

Citation: " These days, her favorite question to ask people is “What is the deepest insight you have gained from ChatGPT? ” “ My own answer,” she said, “is that I think it radically demystifies thinking ”

That is probably my big takeaway from LLMs as well.
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