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The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

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Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#921

Post by chipsrafferty »

nearbuy wrote: post #875
WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it mean? My stance is it's (obviously and only a fool would think otherwise) never going to be conscious because consciousness is a physical process based on particular material interactions, like everything else we've ever encountered. But I have no clear stance on what thinking means besides a sequence of deductions, which seems like something it's already doing in "thinking mode".

> My stance is it's (obviously and only a fool would think otherwise) never going to be conscious because consciousness is a physical process based on particular material interactions, like everything else we've ever encountered. Seems like you have that backwards. If consciousness is from a nonphysical process, like a soul that's only given to humans, then it follows that you can't build consciousness with physical…

It would conceivably be possible to have a lot of physical states. That doesn't mean that they are actually possible from our current state and rewrite rules. So it's not actually a given that it can be built just because it's physical.

Your very idea is also predicated on the idea that it's possible for a real object to exist that isn't physical, and I think most modern philosophers reject the idea of a spiritual particle.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#922

Post by lz400 »

theptip wrote: post #782
lz400 wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, _we_ probably can't think with our wetware on a read-only substrate. It doesn't establish it as essential, just that the only sure example in nature of thought doesn't work that way.

Do you have any particular brain systems in mind that are essential for consciousness and also require mutable state?

I'm not an expert but as far I understand, plasticity is central to most complex operations of the brain and is likely to be involved in anything more complex than instinctive reactions. I'm happy to be corrected but it is my understanding that if you're thinking for a while on the same problem and establishing chains of reasoning, you are creating new connections and to me that means it's fundamental in the process of thinking.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#923

Post by burnte »

naasking wrote: post #878
burnte wrote: post #874

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whatever thinking fundamentally is, it also has an equivalence as a mathematical transformation of data. Do not confuse the mathematical description of physical processes as the world being made of math. > You're assuming the conclusion by saying that the two mathematical transformations of data are not isomorphic. Correct. They're not isomorphic. One is simple math that runs on electrified sand, and one is an unkn…

> Do not confuse the mathematical description of physical processes as the world being made of math. Again, this doesn't apply to information. A simulation of a computation really is equivalent to that computation. > One is simple math that runs on electrified sand, and one is an unknown process that developed independently across a billion years. Right, so you admit that it's an unknown process, which means you lite…

> Right, so you admit that it's an unknown process, which means you literally cannot conclude that it is different to what LLMs are doing.

If you truly feel human thinking and LLMs share more than a cocktail napkin's worth of similarity, I don't know what to say. Just treating it like a black box I can prove in minutes it's not thinking. Come on. I really don't get why people are so emotionally involved in this stuff.

It's not thinking. It's ok that it's not thinking. Maybe someday we'll get there, but it's not today.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#924

Post by kaycey2022 »

I have less and less doubt that these models are intelligent by any definition of the word.

Maybe thinking, or intelligence are quite different from personality. Personality gives us agency, goals, self awareness, likes, dislikes, strengths and weaknesses.

Intelligence, otoh is just the 10000 hours thing, spent without context.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#925

Post by jlaternman »

keiferski wrote: post #547
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…

Personally I think that kind of discussion is fruitless, not much more than entertainment. If you’re asking big questions like “can a machine think?” Or “is an AI conscious?” without doing the work of clarifying your concepts, then you’re only going to get vague ideas, sci-fi cultural tropes, and a host of other things. I think the output question is also interesting enough on its own, because we can talk about the p…

I agree with almost all of this.

IMO the issue is we won't be able to adequately answer this question before we first clearly describe what we mean of conscious thinking applied to ourselves. First we'd need to clearly define our own consciousness and what we mean by our own "conscious thinking" in a much, much clearer way than we currently do.

If we ever reach that point, I think we'd be able to fruitfully apply it to AI, etc., to assess.

Unfortunately we haven't been obstructed from answering this question about ourselves for centuries or millennia, but have failed to do so, so it's unlikely to happen suddenly now. Unless we use AIs to first solve that problem of defining our own consciousness, before applying it back on them. Which would be a deeply problematic order, since nobody would trust a breakthrough in the understanding of consciousness that came from AI, that is then potentially used to put them in the same class and define them as either thinking things or conscious things.

Kind of a shame we didn't get our own consciousness worked out before AI came along. Then again, wasn't for the lack of trying… Philosophy commanded the attention of great thinkers for a long time.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#926

Post by kaycey2022 »

scarmig wrote: post #901
adamzwasserman wrote: post #893

I've written a full response to Somers' piece: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking: What The New Yorker Missed: https://emusings.substack.com/p/the-case-that-ai-is-thinking... The core argument: When you apply the same techniques (transformers, gradient descent, next-token prediction) to domains other than language, they fail to produce anything resembling "understanding." Vision had a 50+ year head start but LLMs leapfro…

The core objection I'd have to your argument: humans also don't have privileged access to the territory. Neurons don't have some metaphysical super power that let them reach into the True Reality; all there are are maps encoded in our neural circuitry by learning rules that evolution has developed because those learned maps lead to greater reproductive success. If direct access to reality is what's needed, then it's…

Maybe we aren't? :)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#927

Post by fellowniusmonk »

fragmede wrote: post #847
fellowniusmonk wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, worms think, let the computers have thinking too, the philosophers can still argue all they want about consciousness. Humans are special, we emit meaning the way stars emit photons, we are rare in the universe as far as empirical observation has revealed. Even with AGI the existence of each complex meaning generator will be a cosmic rarity. For some people that seems to be not enough, due to their factually wron…

Are we that special? We may be the only species left on Earth that's built civilization, but there are other species on Earth that we've deemed sentient, even if they don't have smartphones. (That may argue that they're smarter than us though.) If octopodes can dream, if elephants get depressed when their spouse dies, then I'd we're not so totally alone on our own planet, then it seems, despite no evidence, that we c…

Empirically? Observationally? Yes.

Until we have empirical evidence to the contrary we need to preserve our species.

If we discover other smarter species or never do, either way I don't care, it's immaterial to the precautionary principle.

We are fucking awesome and rare, and any other species with our amount of meaning generation or even capability for meaning generation is also fucking awesome.

I would 100% grant that ceatacenas and octopuses have human or higher level intelligence, I don't care, I don't need to put other species capabilities down to highlight my species accomplishment, the simple fact is that we have written more facts about the universe, discovered more, done more, gone further than any species we have empirically observed.

I mean it's incontrovertibly true, maybe dolphins have crazy libraries I'm not aware of, but until we verify that fact we need to preserve ourselves (and afterwards too), and we should preserve them too.

Even with other species, aliens, etc, they all need to be preserved because we can't ex ante predict which entities within a species will be part of the causal chain that solves entropy (if it's even possible.)

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#928

Post by nearbuy »

chipsrafferty wrote: post #921
nearbuy wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My stance is it's (obviously and only a fool would think otherwise) never going to be conscious because consciousness is a physical process based on particular material interactions, like everything else we've ever encountered. Seems like you have that backwards. If consciousness is from a nonphysical process, like a soul that's only given to humans, then it follows that you can't build consciousness with physical…

It would conceivably be possible to have a lot of physical states. That doesn't mean that they are actually possible from our current state and rewrite rules. So it's not actually a given that it can be built just because it's physical. Your very idea is also predicated on the idea that it's possible for a real object to exist that isn't physical, and I think most modern philosophers reject the idea of a spiritual pa…

I'm not saying that souls or non-physical things exist, nor that everything physical is feasible for us to build. I was replying to the opinion that AI is never going to be conscious because consciousness is a physical process. I just don't see how that follows.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#929

Post by naasking »

burnte wrote: post #923
naasking wrote: post #878

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do not confuse the mathematical description of physical processes as the world being made of math. Again, this doesn't apply to information. A simulation of a computation really is equivalent to that computation. > One is simple math that runs on electrified sand, and one is an unknown process that developed independently across a billion years. Right, so you admit that it's an unknown process, which means you lite…

> Right, so you admit that it's an unknown process, which means you literally cannot conclude that it is different to what LLMs are doing. If you truly feel human thinking and LLMs share more than a cocktail napkin's worth of similarity, I don't know what to say. Just treating it like a black box I can prove in minutes it's not thinking. Come on. I really don't get why people are so emotionally involved in this stuff…

No you can't. You're just not proving what you think you're proving.

Re: The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

#930

Post by naasking »

pennomi wrote: post #904
naasking wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 move. What’s really needed is an analysis of what thinking actually means, as a word. Unfortunately everyone is loathe to argue about definitions, even when that is fundamentally what this is all about. This exact argument applies to "free will", and that definition has been…

The problem with adding definitions to words like “thinking” and “free will” is that doing so means humans can no longer pretend they are special. Even in this thread, the number of people claiming some mystical power separating humans from all the rest of nature is quite noticeable.

I get it, but it's not trivial to be precise enough at this point to avoid all false positives and false negatives.
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