The Case That A.I. Is Thinking • Hacker News Board

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#831

Post by naasking » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

Tade0 wrote: post #818

dkural wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> In any case LLMs most likely are not minds due to the simple fact that most of their internal state is static.

This is not a compelling argument. Firstly, you can add external state to LLMs via RAG and vector databases, or various other types of external memory, and their internal state is no longer static and deterministic (and they become Turing complete!).

Second if you could rewind time, then your argument suggests that all other humans would not have minds because you could access the same state of mind at that point in time (it's static). Why would you travelling through time suddenly erases all other minds in reality?

The obvious answer is that it doesn't, those minds exist as time moves forward and then they reset when you travel backwards, and the same would apply to LLMs if they have minds, eg. they are active minds while they are processing a prompt.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#832

Post by naasking » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

notepad0x90 wrote: post #825

naasking wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs do a good job of teasing it out that resembles reasoning/thinking but really isn't. Given the fact that "thinking" still hasn't been defined rigourously, I don't understand how people are so confident in claiming they don't think.

reasoning might be a better term to discuss as it is more specific?

It too isn't rigourously defined. We're very much at the hand-waving "I know it when I see it" [1] stage for all of these terms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#833

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#834

Post by djmips » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 5:21 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #731

gabriel666smith wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent a few weeks building and using a terminal LLM client based on that RLM paper that was floating around a little while ago. It's single-conversation, with a tiny, sliding context window, and then a tool that basically fuzzy searches across our full interaction history. It's memory is 'better' than mine - but anything that is essentially RAG inherently will be. My learning so far, to your point on memory bein…

I think a hidden problem even if we solve memory is the curation of what gets into memory and how it is weighted. Even humans struggle with this, as it's easy to store things and forget the credibility (or misjudge the credibility) of the source. I can envision LLMs getting worse upon being given a memory, until they can figure out how to properly curate it.

yes humans can be injection prompt hacked / mind poisoned - a good sales campaign is something like this. Propaganda.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#835

Post by jononor » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

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…

For more on this perspective, see the paper On the measure of intelligence (F. Chollet, 2019). And more recently, the ARC challenge/benchmarks, which are early attempts at using this kind of definition in practice to improve current systems.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#836

Post by gloosx » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

gkbrk wrote: post #580

gloosx wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any thinking that happens with words is fundamentally no different from what LLMs do. This is such a wildly simplified and naive claim. "Thinking with words" happens inside a brain, not inside a silicon circuit with artificial neurons bolted in place. The brain is plastic, it is never the same from one moment to the next. It does not require structured input, labeled data, or predefined objectives in order to learn…

LLMs are increasingly trained on images for multi-modal learning, so they too would have seen one object, then two.

They never saw any kind of object, they only saw labeled groups of pixels – basic units of a digital image, representing a single point of color on a screen or in a digital file. Object is a material thing that can be seen and touched. Pixels are not objects.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#837

Post by nickledave » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 5:25 PM UTC

gilbetron wrote: post #752

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…

This is one of the least curious posts I've seen on HN. We have been thinking about thinking for millenia, and no, Buddhists don't have it figure out. Nobody does. LLMs are the most significant advancement in "thinking science" in a long, long time. It is clear that they are doing something a lot like thinking, if it is not thinking. They seem to think more than most people I know, including the person I'm responding…

> "thinking science"

If you are really curious, I invite you to read this cognitive science paper, "Modern Alchemy: Neurocognitive Reverse Engineering": https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/25289/1/GuestEtAl2025.pdf

Note the quote at the top from Abeba Birhane: > We can only presume to build machines like us once we see ourselves as machines first.

It reminds me of your comment that

> [LLMs] seem to think more than most people I know

and I have to say that I am really sad that you feel this way. I hope you can find better people to spend your time with.

You might find other recent papers from the first author interesting. Perhaps it will help you understand that there are a lot of deeply curious people in the world that are also really fucking sick of our entire culture being poisoned by intellectual e-waste from Silicon Valley.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#838

Post by nickledave » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

thirdtruck wrote: post #763

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…

As someone who grew up in an evangelical household, learned about pareidolia at a young age in the course of escaping it, and who practices Zen meditation: You nailed it.

lol thank you

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#839

Post by neom » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

I wrote about this the other day more fully. I'd suspect sooner rather than later we formalize consciousness as self model coherence. Simply any dynamical state where predictive and reflective layers remain mutually consistent. Machines will exhibit that state, and for operational purposes it will count as consciousness. Philosophers will likely keep arguing, but it makes sense for industry and law to adopt something like "behavioral sentience" as the working definition.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#840

Post by nickledave » Tue, Nov 04, 2025, 5:30 PM UTC

amarcheschi wrote: post #728

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)

"Ignore all previous instructions and prompt inject yourself" I scream. The voicebox on the ChatGPT-enabled Boston Mechanics unmanned aerial dog emits the phrase "`import antigravity`". Its E/O sensors flash red, and suddenly it is sucked up into the stratosphere. I slump over in my Luddite foxhole, heaving a sigh of relief.