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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#851

Post by pmarreck »

N7lo4nl34akaoSN wrote: post #815
skeeter2020 wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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that's too clunky. in fact, "clunky thinking" is what gave me the idea of "thunking"

you guys would have called lightsabers "laser swords" like Lucas originally did before Alec Guinness corrected him

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#852

Post by solumunus »

_heimdall wrote: post #738
keiferski wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you on the need for definitions. We spent decades slowly working towards this most recent sprint towards AI without ever landing on definitions of intelligence, consciousness, or sentience. More importantly, we never agreed on a way to recognize those concepts. I also see those definitions as impossible to nail down though. At best we can approach it like disease - list a number of measurable traits or s…

Even if AI becomes indistinguishable from human output, there will be a fringe group arguing that AI is not technically thinking. Frankly it’s just a silly philosophical argument that changes nothing. Expect this group to get smaller every year.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#853

Post by solumunus »

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…

Our output is quite literally the sum of our hardware (genetics) and input (immediate environment and history). For anyone who agrees that free will is nonsense, the debate is already over, we’re nothing more than output generating biological machines.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#855

Post by fragmede »

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…

There are plenty of humans that will never "get" calculus, despite numerous attempts at the class and countless hours of 1:1 tutoring. Are those people not intelligent? Do they not think? We could say yes they aren't, but by the metric of making money, plenty of people are smart enough to be rich, while college math professors aren't. And while that's a facile way of measuring someone's worth or their contribution to society (some might even say "bad"), it remains that even if someone cant understand calculus, some of them are intelligent enough to understand humans enough to be rich through some fashion that wasn't simply handed to them.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#857

Post by camgunz »

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…

Then the only thing I have to ask you is: what do you think this means in terms of how we treat LLMs? If they think, that is, they have cognition (which of course means they're self aware and sentient, how can you think and refer to yourself and not be these things), that puts them in a very exclusive club. What rights do you think we should be affording LLMs?

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#858

Post by burnte »

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!).

> You're just assuming that mimicry of a thing is not equivalent to the thing itself.

I'm not assuming that, that's literally the definition of mimicry: to imitate closely.

You might say I'm assuming that it is mimicking and not actually thinking, but there's no evidence it's actually thinking, and we know exactly what is IS doing because we created the code that we used to build the model. They're not thinking, it's doing math, mathematical transformations of data.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#859

Post by naasking »

Tade0 wrote: post #842
naasking wrote: post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sugg…

> and their internal state is no longer static and deterministic (and they become Turing complete!). But it's not the LLM that makes modifications in those databases - it just retrieves data which is already there. > Why would you travelling through time suddenly erases all other minds in reality? I'm not following you here. > they are active minds while they are processing a prompt. Problem is that this process does…

> But it's not the LLM that makes modifications in those databases - it just retrieves data which is already there.

So what?

> I'm not following you here.

If you're time travelling, you're resetting the state of the world to some previous well-defined, static state. An LLM also starts from some well-defined static state. You claim this static configuration means there's no mind, so this entails that the ability to time travel means that every person who is not time travelling has no mind.

> Problem is that this process doesn't affect the LLM in the slightest. It just regurgitates what it's been taught. An active mind is makes itself.

People who are incapable forming new memories thus don't have minds?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#860

Post by naasking »

burnte wrote: post #858
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!).

> You're just assuming that mimicry of a thing is not equivalent to the thing itself. I'm not assuming that, that's literally the definition of mimicry: to imitate closely. You might say I'm assuming that it is mimicking and not actually thinking, but there's no evidence it's actually thinking, and we know exactly what is IS doing because we created the code that we used to build the model. They're not thinking, it's…

> They're not thinking, it's doing math, mathematical transformations of data

Whatever thinking fundamentally is, it also has an equivalence as a mathematical transformation of data. You're assuming the conclusion by saying that the two mathematical transformations of data are not isomorphic.

A simulation of information processing is still information processing, just like running Windows in a QEMU VM is still running Windows.

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