Wrong. The same exact model can do both, depending on the circumstances.

> Humans don't require input to, say, decide to go for a walk.

Impossible to falsify since humans are continuously receiving inputs from both external and internal sensors.

> What's missing in the LLM is volition.

What's missing is embodiment, or, at least, a continuous loop feeding a wide variety of inputs about the state of world. Given that, and info about of set of tools by which it can act in the world, I have no doubt that current LLMs would exhibit some kind (possibly not desirable or coherent, from a human POV, at least without a whole lot of prompt engineering) of volitional-seeming action.

Our entire extistence and experience is nothing _but_ input.

Temperature changes, visual stimulus, auditory stimulus, body cues, random thoughts firing, etc.. Those are all going on all the time.

LLMs can absolutely generate output without input but we don’t have zero input. We don’t exist in a floating void with no light or sound or touch or heat or feelings from our own body.

But again this doesn’t see to be the same thing as thinking. If I could only reply to you when you send me a message but could reason through any problem we discuss just like “able to want a walk” me could, would that mean I no longer could think? I think these are different issues.

On that though, these see trivially solvable with loops and a bit of memory to write to and read from - would that really make the difference for you? A box setup to run continuously like this would be thinking?

It's as if a LLM is only one part of a brain, not the whole thing.

So of course it doesn't do everything a human does, but it still can do some aspects of mental processes.

Whether "thinking" means "everything a human brain does" or whether "thinking" means a specific cognitive process that we humans do, is a matter of definition.

I'd argue that defining "thinking" independently of "volition" is a useful definition because it allows us to break down things in parts and understand them

> Humans don't require input to, say, decide to go for a walk.

Very much a subject of contention.

How do you even know you're awake, without any input?

I would not say it is missing but thankfully absent.

As a researcher in these fields: this reasoning is tired, overblown, and just wrong. We have a lot of understanding of how the brain works overall. You don't. Go read the active inference book by Friston et. al. for some of the epistemological and behavioral mechanics (Yes, this applies to llms as well, they easily satisfy the requirements to be considered the mathematical object described as a markov blanket).

And, yes, if you could somehow freeze a human's current physical configuration at some time, you would absolutely, in principle, given what we know about the universe, be able to concretely map input to into actions. You cannot separate a human's representative configuration from their environment in this way, so, behavior appears much more non-deterministic.

Another paper by Friston et al (Path Integrals, particular kinds, and strange things) describes systems much like modern modeling and absolutely falls under the same action minimization requirements for the math to work given the kinds of data acquisition, loss functions, and training/post-training we're doing as a research society with these models.

I also recommend https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.04035, but, in short, transformer models have functions and emergent structures provably similar both empirically and mathematically to how we abstract and consider things. Along with https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.10077, these 4 sources, alone, together strongly rebuke any idea that they are somehow not capable of learning to act like and think like us, though there's many more.

> Yet we can ignore our biology, or act in ways that are the opposite of what our biology tells us.

I have Coeliac disease, in that specific case I'd really love to be able to ignore what "my biology" tells my body to do. I'd go eat all the things I know wouldn't be good for me to eat.

Yet I fear "my biology" has the upper hand :/

Good luck ignoring your biology’s impulse to breathe