edited- It really depends on your definition of 'thinking' or 'intelligence'. These are umbrella terms for the biology and physics that we don't understand yet. We don't know how we think, or how cats think or how unicellular bacterias think. We just know that we do, and we have a very loose understanding of it. As a human, you have the freedom to juxtapose that loose understanding on non-living things. In my mind, you are just anthropomorphizing, machines are not thinking.
The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
811–820 of 1001 posts
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#812Earlier 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.
> But a simulated mind is not a mind. This was already debated years ago with the aid of the Chinese Room thought experiment.
Yes, debated and refuted. There are many well known and accepted rebuttals of the Chinese Room. The Chinese Room as a whole does understand Chinese.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#813Earlier quoted context omitted.
how do you definitely know that?
Because I gave them a unique problem I had and it came up with an answer it definitely didn't see in the training data. Specifically I wanted to know how I could interface two electronic components, one of which is niche, recent, handmade and doesn't have any public documentation so there's no way it could have known about it before.
one of which is niche, recent, handmade and doesn't have any public documentation
I still see 2 possibilities: you asked it something similar enough that it came up with a fairly standard answer which just happened to be correct, or you gave it enough info.
- for example you created a new line of MCUs called FrobnicatorV2, and asked is 'how do I connect a power supply X to FrobnicatorV2' and it gave an answer like 'connect red wire to VCC and black to GND'. That's not exactly special.
- or, you did desribe that component in some way. And you did do that using standard electronics lingo so essentially in terms of other existing components which it definitely did know (unless you invented something completely new not using any currently know physics). As such it's irrelevant that your particular new component wasn't known because you gave away the answer by describing it? E.g. you aksed it 'how do I connect a power supply X to an MCU with power pins Y and Z'. Again nothing special.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#814Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. You seem to be on purpose comparing apples and oranges here: for an AI, we're supposed to include the entire training set in the definition of its input, but for a human we don't include the entirety of that human's experience and only look at the prompt?
> but for a human we don't include the entirety of that human's experience and only look at the prompt?
When did I say that? Of course you look at a human's experience when you judge the quality of their output. And you also judge their output based on the context they did their work in. Newton wouldn't be Newton if he was the 14th guy to claim that the universe is governed by three laws of motion. Extending the example I used above, I would be more impressed if an art student aced a tough calc test than a math student, given that a math student probably has spent much more time with the material.
"Intelligence and "thinking" are abstract concepts, and I'm simply putting forward a way that I think about them. It works very much outside the context of AI too. The "smartest" colleagues I've worked with are somehow able to solve a problem with less information or time than I need. Its usually not because they have more "training data" than me.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#815Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
I don't like it for a permanent solution, but "synthetic thought" might make a good enough placeholder until we figure this out. It feels most important to differentiate because I believe some parties have a personal interest in purposely confusing human thought with whatever LLMs are doing right now.
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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#816Having 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 get why you would say that. it's just auto-completing. It cannot reason. It won't solve an original problem for which it has no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with. you can give it more context and more data,but you're just helping it complete better. it does not derive an original state machine or algorithm to solve problems for which there are no obvious solutions. it instead approxima…
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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#817Personal take: LLMs are probably part of the answer (to AGI?) but are hugely handicapped by their current architecture: the only time that long-term memories are formed is during training, and everything after that (once they're being interacted with) sits only in their context window, which is the equivalent of fungible, fallible, lossy short-term memory. [0] I suspect that many things they currently struggle with c…
Yeah because when you open that door, you can simply overwhelm the models with whatever conclusion you want through sheer volume of inputs. This is the fundamental limitation. The obvious way around this is to pre-program it with rationalization... rules that limit the conclusions it can reach... and now you're not very far removed from propaganda generators. We see this constantly with Musk and Grok whenever Grok re…
Its almost like you have to experience the world in order to know what to believe.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#818Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The whole point of this experiment was to show that if we don't know whether something is a mind, we shouldn't assume it is and that our intuition in this regard is weak.
I know I am a mind inside a body, but I'm not sure about anyone else. The easiest explanation is that most of the people are like that as well, considering we're the same species and I'm not special. You'll have to take my word on that, as my only proof for this is that I refuse to be seen as anything else.
In any case LLMs most likely are not minds due to the simple fact that most of their internal state is static. What looks like thoughtful replies is just the statistically most likely combination of words looking like language based on a function with a huge number of parameters. There's no way for this construct to grow as well as to wither - something we know minds definitely do. All they know is a sequence of symbols they've received and how that maps to an output. It cannot develop itself in any way and is taught using a wholly separate process.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#819edited- It really depends on your definition of 'thinking' or 'intelligence'. These are umbrella terms for the biology and physics that we don't understand yet. We don't know how we think, or how cats think or how unicellular bacterias think. We just know that we do, and we have a very loose understanding of it. As a human, you have the freedom to juxtapose that loose understanding on non-living things. In my mind, y…
Sorry for the nitpicking, but that should be "loose". I've seen that mistake/typo often in the opposite direction, as they both have a /u/ sound that is more natural with the "oo" spelling, but I've never seen it in this direction.
Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking
#820Having 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…
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…
yeah it’s just processing, calling it thinking is the same as saying my intel core 2 duo or M4 Pro is thinking, sure if you want to anthropomorphize it you could say it’s thinking, but why are we trying to say a computer is a person in the first place? seems kind of forced