961–970 of 1001 posts
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I never said any of that, look at my comment again. Or is the LLM replying for you also?
You said they are only useful if you don't know what you're doing. Or do you have a goldfish memory?
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Your first example is someone without a cerebellum which is not like the others. The other examples are people with compressed neural tissue but that is not the same as never having the tissue. A being with only a cerebellum could not behave like a human.
You're right - I mixed up cerebellum/cerebrum/cortex terminology. My bad. The cases I'm referencing are hydrocephalus patients with severely compressed cerebral tissue who maintained normal cognitive function. The point about structural variation not precluding consciousness stands.
Hmm, I don't think it would be dogmatic to call hydrocephalus-induced changes 'structural variation.' Structural variation would be the thickness of subcortical bands or something like that - something where if you take 100 people, you'll see some sort of canonical distribution around a population mean.
Instead, you're describing a disease-induced change (structural yes, but not variation but instead pathology).
We're now in a different regime; we don't expect just any disease to reduce consciousness, so it stands to reason that hydrocephalus would not necessarily reduce consciousness.
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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…
So I guess I’d just clarify “read only” to be a little more specific - I think you could run multiple experiments where you vary the line of what’s modeled in volatile memory at runtime, and what’s immutable. I buy that you need to model STP for thought, but also suspect at this timescale you can keep everything slower immutable and keep the second-scale processes like thought working.
My original point still stands - your subjective experience in this scenario would be thought without long-term memory.
1: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscie...
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That has a logic condition, no?
Not sure what you mean - there's a pattern of dots (the EURion constellation) on the banknotes of a number of countries that photocopiers recognize and will refuse to copy.
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If a human uses their general knowledge of electronics to answer a specific question they haven't seen before that's obviously thinking. I don't see why LLMs are held to a different standard. It's obviously not repeating an existing answer verbatim because that doesn't exist in my case. You're saying it's nothing "special" but we're not discussing whether it's special, but whether it can be considered thinking.
it's obviously not repeating an existing answer verbatim Not verbatim in the sense that the words are different doesn't make it thinking. Also when we say 'humans think' that means a lot more than only 'new question generates correct answer' or 'smart autocompletion'. See a lot of other comments here for details. But again: I laid out 2 possibilities explaining why the question might in fact not be new, nor the data,…
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…
Until we have a testable, falsifiable thesis of how consciousness forms in meat, it is rash to exclude that consciousness could arise from linear algebra. Our study of the brain has revealed an enormous amount about how our anatomy processes information, but nothing of substance on the relationship between matter and consciousness. The software and data of an operating LLM is not purely abstract, it has a physical em…
That’s largely a different topic from the article. Many people perfectly agree that consciousness can arise from computation, but don’t believe that current AI is anywhere near that, and also don’t believe that “thinking” requires consciousness (though if a mind is conscious, that certainly will affect its thinking).
before i go any further, let me first reference The Dude:
- "this is just like, my opinion man."
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…
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That, and the article was a major disappointment. It made no case. It's a superficial piece of clueless fluff. I have had this conversation too many times on HN. What I find astounding is the simultaneous confidence and ignorance on the part of many who claim LLMs are intelligent. That, and the occultism surrounding them. Those who have strong philosophical reasons for thinking otherwise are called "knee-jerk". Ad ho…
If the LLM output is more effective than a human at problem solving, which I think we can all agree requires intelligence, how would one describe this? The LLM is just pretending to be more intelligent? At a certain point saying that will just seem incredibly silly. It’s either doing the thing or it’s not, and it’s already doing a lot.
Your premise is wrong.
Unless you want to claim that the distant cause by way of the training data is us, but that's exactly the conclusion you're trying to avoid. After all, we put the patterns in the training data, which means we already did the upfront intellectual work for the LLM.