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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#801

Post by Tade0 »

naasking wrote: post #791
burnte wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool. - Richard P. Feynman They're not thinking, we're just really good at seeing patterns and reading into things. Remember, we never evolved with non-living things that could "talk", we're not psychologically prepared for this level of mimicry yet. We're still at the stage of Photography when people didn't know about double ex…

You're just assuming that mimicry of a thing is not equivalent to the thing itself. This isn't true of physical systems (simulated water doesn't get you wet!) but it is true of information systems (simulated intelligence is intelligence!).

But a simulated mind is not a mind. This was already debated years ago with the aid of the Chinese Room thought experiment.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#802

Post by Edman274 »

bena wrote: post #678
Edman274 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Jean Luc Picard should've lost that court case. Obviously we as the audience want to have our heroes win against some super callous guy who wants to kill our hero (and audience stand in for anyone who is neurodivergent) Data, but the argument was pretty weak, because Data often acted in completely alien ways that jeopardized the safety of the crew, and the way that those issues came up was due to him doing thin…

First of all, Data never willingly jeopardized the crew. Second, they work alongside actual aliens. Being different is not a disqualification. And Maddox isn't callous, he just doesn't regard Data as anything more than "just a machine". A position he eventually changes over the series as he becomes one of Data's friends. Data is also not a stand in for the neurodivergent. He's the flip of Spock. Spock asks us what if…

> First of all, Data never willingly jeopardized the crew.

This presupposes that he has consciousness. He can only "willingly" do things if he is conscious. If the argument is that there was an external influence that changed his behavior thus making it not volitional then you have to distinguish why the external force makes his Lore behavior unwilling, but Soong's initial programming willing. If I set a thermostat to 85 degrees, would you say that the thermostat is "unwillingly" making people uncomfortable, but at the factory default of 70 degrees, it's helping people feel comfortable? It's difficult to distinguish what is willing and unwilling if consciousness is in question so this feels like begging the question.

> I also feel that equating data to someone who is neurodivergent is kind of insulting as neurodivergent people do have feelings and emotions.

I'm stating it as an aside / justification for why we want the story to go a certain direction because I see so many articles elevating Data as a heroic representation of neurodivergence. My goal wasntt to be offensive. There are a ton of episodes where Data is puzzled by people's behavior and then someone has to explain it to him almost as if someone is also explaining to the audience it as a morality tale. Remember when Data was struggling to understand how he was lied to? Or how he lost in that strategy game? Or how to be funny? We don't just see him struggle, someone explains to him exactly how he should learn from his experience. That appears to be for the benefit of the android and the people behind the fourth wall.

> A rock cannot express a desire.

It can if you carve a rock into the words "I want to live" and even though the rock didn't configure itself that way, it's expressing a desire. Noonien Soong built Data, so it's possible that he designed Data to state the desire to be human. Data does seem to have an interiority but he also seems to not have it based on the caprice of outside forces, which is problematic because the way that he is controlled is not very different from the way he is built.

On the Data question I'm not saying that Maddox should've won but that the fact that Picard won is more about it being narratively required rather than "prove that I am conscious" being a good argument.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#803

Post by terminalshort »

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…

But we don't have a more rigorous definition of "thinking" than "it looks like it's thinking." You are making the mistake of accepting that a human is thinking by this simple definition, but demanding a higher more rigorous one for LLMs.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#804

Post by rcxdude »

matthewkayin wrote: post #766
rcxdude wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are clearly getting to useful and meaningful results with at a rate significantly better than chance (for example, the fact that ChatGPT can play chess well even though it sometimes tries to make illegal moves shows that there is a lot more happening there than just picking moves uniformly at random). Demanding perfection here seems to be odd given that humans also can make bizarre errors in reasoning (of course…

The fact that a model trained on the internet, on which the correct rules of chess are written, is unable to determine what is and is not a legal move, seems like a sign that these models are not reasoning about the questions asked of them. They are just giving responses that look like (and often are) correct chess moves.

It's a sign that they are 'reasoning' imperfectly. If they were just giving responses that 'looked like' chess moves, they would be very bad at playing chess.

(And I would hazard a guess that they are a primarily learning chess from the many games that are posted, as opposed to working things out from the rules. Indeed, if you make up a game and tell chatGPT the rules, it tends to be even worse at following them, let alone figuring out optimal play. But again, it will do so significantly better than random chance, so it's doing something with the information you give it, even if it's not doing so very well. I think it's reasonable to call this thinking, or reasoning, but this mostly becomes an argument of semantics. either way they do it significantly better than random chance but still not tremendously well. If your expectation is that they cannot work with anything novel then you're going to be continually surprised, but if your expectation is that they're as good as a human that has 'learned' from all the material its been given, especially material that's in-context and not in the training data, then you're also going to be disappointed.)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#805

Post by Ajakks »

saberience wrote: post #648
hodgehog11 wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's compression. Although your later comments neglect the many years of physical experience that humans have as well as the billions of years of evolution. And yes, by this definition, LLMs pass with flying colours.

I hate when people bring up this “billions of years of evolution” idea. It’s completely wrong and deluded in my opinion. Firstly humans have not been evolving for “billions” of years. Homo sapiens have been around for maybe 300’000 years, and the “homo” genus has been 2/3 million years. Before that we were chimps etc and that’s 6/7 million years ago. If you want to look at the entire brain development, ie from mouse…

Im so confused as to how you think you can cut an endless chain at the mouse.

Were mammals the first thing? No. Earth was a ball of ice for a billion years - all life at that point existed solely around thermal vents at the bottom of the oceans... that's inside of you, too.

Evolution doesn't forget - everything that all life has ever been "taught" (violently had programmed into us over incredible timelines) all that has ever been learned in the chain of DNA from the single cell to human beings - its ALL still there.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#806

Post by [deleted] »

lossyalgo wrote: post #692
killerstorm wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Not true. People have been trying to analyze whether mechanical/formal processes can "think" since at least 18th century. E.g. Leibniz wrote: > if we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts as definitely and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometric analysis expresses lines, we could in all subjects in so far as they are amenable to reasoning accomplish what is done…

re #2: Do people call it thinking, or is it just clever marketing from AI companies, that whenever you ask a question and it repeatedly prints out "...thinking...", as well as offering various modes with the word "thinking" written somewhere. The AI companies obviously want the masses to just assume these are intelligent beings who think like humans and so we can just trust their output as being truthful. I have an i…

[deleted]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#807

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

jamincan wrote: post #750
lossyalgo wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furthermore regarding reasoning, just ask any LLM how many "r letters are in strawberry" - repeat maybe 3 times just to get a feeling for how much variance in answers you can get. And this "quirk" of the inability to get the right answer is something that after 2 years making fun of LLMs online on various forums is still an issue. The models aren't getting smarter, and definitely aren't thinking, they are still token…

For what it's worth, when I ask ChatGPT 5, it gets the correct answer every time. The response varies, but the answer is always three.

Now try a different language. My take is hard RL tuning to fix these "gotcha:s" since the underlying model can't do it on its own.

OpenAI is working on ChatGPT the application and ecosystem. They have transitioned from model building to software engineering with RL tuning and integration of various services to solve the problems the model can't do on its own. Make it feel smart rather than be smart.

This means that as soon as you find a problem where you step out of the guided experience you get the raw model again which fails when encountering these "gotchas".

Edit - Here's an example where we see a very tuned RL experience in English where a whole load of context is added on how to solve the problem while the Swedish prompt for the same word fails.

https://imgur.com/a/SlD84Ih

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#808

Post by bobro »

qntmfred wrote: post #745
utopiah wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We didn't really previously need to disambiguate thinking / intelligence / consciousness / sentience / ego / identity / etc. Eh... Plato would like a word with you. Philosophy has been specifically trying to disentangle all that for millennia. Is this a joke?

we didn't really previously NEED to, but we still tried bc it was an interesting question. today the NEED seems more urgent

Can you spell out more why we need it now?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#809

Post by ToucanLoucan »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #713
staticman2 wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> We also just brute force "autocompletion" Wouldn't be an A.I. discussion without a bizarre, untrue claim that the human brain works identically.

There are no true and untrue claims about how the brain works, because we have no idea how it works. The reason people give that humans are not auto-complete is "Obviously I am not an autocomplete" Meanwhile, people are just a black box process that output words into their head, which they then take credit for, and calling it cognition. We have no idea how that black box that serves up a word when I say "Think of a c…

> because we have no idea how it works

Flagrantly, ridiculously untrue. We don't know the precise nuts and bolts regarding the emergence of consciousness and the ability to reason, that's fair, but different structures of the brain have been directly linked to different functions and have been observed in operation on patients being stimulated in various ways with machinery attached to them reading levels of neuro-activity in the brain, and in specific regions. We know which parts handle our visual acuity and sense of hearing, and even cooler, we can watch those same regions light up when we use our "minds eye" to imagine things or engage in self-talk, completely silent speech that nevertheless engages our verbal center, which is also engaged by the act of handwriting and typing.

In short: no, we don't have the WHOLE answer. But to say that we have no idea is categorically ridiculous.

As to the notion of LLMs doing similarly: no. They are trained on millions of texts of various sources of humans doing thinking aloud, and that is what you're seeing: a probabilistic read of millions if not billions of documents, written by humans, selected by the machine to "minimize error." And crucially, it can't minimize it 100%. Whatever philosophical points you'd like to raise about intelligence or thinking, I don't think we would ever be willing to call someone intelligent if they just made something up in response to your query, because they think you really want it to be real, even when it isn't. Which points to the overall charade: it wants to LOOK intelligent, while not BEING intelligent, because that's what the engineers who built it wanted it to do.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#810

Post by dkural »

Tade0 wrote: post #801
naasking wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just assuming that mimicry of a thing is not equivalent to the thing itself. This isn't true of physical systems (simulated water doesn't get you wet!) but it is true of information systems (simulated intelligence is intelligence!).

But a simulated mind is not a mind. This was already debated years ago with the aid of the Chinese Room thought experiment.

The Chinese Room experiment applies equally well to our own brains - in which neuron does the "thinking" reside exactly? Searle's argument has been successfully argued against in many different ways. At the end of the day - you're either a closet dualist like Searle, or if you have a more scientific view and are a physicalist (i.e. brains are made of atoms etc. and brains are sufficient for consciousness / minds) you are in the same situation as the Chinese Room: things broken down into tissues, neurons, molecules, atoms. Which atom knows Chinese?
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