| ▲ | esikich 21 hours ago |
| It seems like you are talking about Kant's "thing-in-itself". We can't know any more about an apple than an LLM can. We experience it through our faulty senses. We do not experience the actual apple. This is still open and debatable and is philosophy 101 stuff. I really dislike the confidence on this site, philosophically, that things are just obviously so. The philosophy of mind is massively open for interpretation and if you can certainly say we experience an apple differently than an LLM I'd love to read your paper on it. This stuff isn't as simple as you'd like it to be. |
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| ▲ | solid_fuel 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| No, the other comments pointing out that LLMs do not have senses and because of that they do not "experience" an apple at all are correct. When given a sequence of tokens e.g. "an apple tastes " an LLM performs a mathematical transformation that modifies the input tokens using the stored weights within the model to predict the most statistically likely next token(s) (which may be "sweet and crisp..."). It's important to understand how these things work - and how different they are from a human brain. Despite it being a common point of confusion, the architecture of a transformer is massively different from the neural architecture of a human brain - and the human brain isn't just neurons. Just as a start, if you ever look at some of the attempts to map synaptic networks in brains you will notice they are full of recurrent loops, while a transform is feed-forward only. There's also tons of mediating chemicals, several (known) distinct kinds of synapses, and other kinds of cells as well. Just one example of the consequences of these differences: LLMs stop "experiencing" anything once a stop token has been generated. Meanwhile, Humans in sensory deprivation tanks may hallucinate vividly - but keep thinking. This is pretty simple, CS101 stuff. |
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| ▲ | poetaster 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'll go so far as to propose that many brains, dog or cat, certainly display 'signs' of consciousness. They are nothing like LLMs either. Confusing some stream of language with consciousness is missing the a priori. | |
| ▲ | esikich 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tell me why only human brains are capable of whatever thought, conscious, or experience is (if you can define them) and I'll congratulate you on solving the hard problem of consciousness. |
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| ▲ | zarzavat 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > We can't know any more about an apple than an LLM can When I hold and taste an apple I know that the apple exists. Not an issue for apples, you might say, but there's plenty of real information that is not written down and is only derivable from our senses. Such as instructions for using car washes, apparently. Humans are naturally sceptical of descriptions, preferring first-hand experiences because descriptions can be unreliable, misreported, fabricated, etc. Because LLMs live in the world of descriptions, they lack the dynamic range of credibility that humans have available. LLMs can only distinguish between fictitious descriptions and factual descriptions. They must map all of their credibility into this range. Humans meanwhile can distinguish between fictitious descriptions, presumed-to-be-factual descriptions, and actually factual personal experiences. It's not intrinsic to LLMs being inorganic, it's intrinsic to LLMs being unembodied. |
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| ▲ | randomImmigrant 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yep. They also don't experience time. They can count compute steps. They can look at the wall clock and tell you the time. But give them a task at 11:59 PM, and if they get it done by 12 AM, they won't know just a minute has passed. Now, humans can count time fairly accurately if they focus, but we often lose focus. However, we have an internal subjective time that tracks the solar day excellently, and this LLMs lack entirely. Timeless, disembodied abstractions. Impressive ones, but they are far from actual experience and thus limited. |
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| ▲ | spankalee 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There is a significant difference between experiencing an apple through your own faulty senses and reading words from someone else who experienced an apple through their senses. |
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| ▲ | drekipus 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| LLMs don't experience because they are word generators. They don't have senses. Some things are allowed to be obvious. It's a series of bits and bytes. |
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| ▲ | esikich 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And our nerves are a series of electrochemical impulses. There are nerves that do optical processing before it hits the brain. It's not obvious, and that's what's frustrating around here. "Computers can't possibly experience things". I'd argue it's just as unlikely for meat to do it. Again, philosophy 101 stuff. | | |
| ▲ | crent 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m with you in this thread. I’m by no means well studied in philosophy but I enjoy the domain so I’ve learned enough to know how difficult nailing down some of these topics can be. I often find the egotistical viewpoint to be banal. I don’t mean egotistical in a demeaning way - I mean it just to frame the types of thinking that revolve around the self, inner world or “my individual experience”. It’s an obvious, but not provably correct, conclusion that the human experience, consciousness and reasoning are special because I’m experiencing it in the same way that the earth is the center of the universe because look around you. It frustrates me in these conversations to hear things like “it’s a text generator, it has no senses”. What even is a sense? For those of us who are software engineers, who live in the abstract, I do not understand why it’s so hard to take the leap to abstract over our own senses as inputs/outputs. Hell, we commonly understand that we have 5 senses but what do I make of the apple I’m visualizing in my brain or the full orchestra I can summon in my “minds eye”? Isn’t that an input just as much as an apple I see with my eyes? | | |
| ▲ | esikich 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | Even the 5 senses are arbitrary. Sensing where your body is positioned, where it's boundaries are, whatever tickling is, whatever itchy is, whatever sour is, whatever salty is, green, blue, etc. When we say 5, we are just saying where on the body they happen. Even though there are more axis on each and use different sensors. Warmth, cold, orgasm - is that really "touch" etc. Bunch of syscall enums maybe. |
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| ▲ | randomImmigrant 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's very obvious actually, because it isn't just nerves in the brain. There's an equal number of glial cells, which form a continuous network, or syncitium. Their activity is in the form of calcium waves, which are both responsive to and shape neuronal oscillations. What biologists find frustrating is folks looking at one kind of dancer in the field and ignoring the rest of the spectacle, and calling it done. | |
| ▲ | drekipus 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think you're trying to degrade the entire school of philosophy down to your "philosophy 101" understanding and then shoving it where it doesn't fit in order to feel like this is all complicated. Philosophy is a intrinsically human thing. It has to be. That is the whole point. There really is nothing else. Plants feel and experience things too. But there's no philosophy of the plant experience from the point of view of the plant, because why would there be? The fact that we have a pattern recognizing word generator print out the words "I am alive" does not lead to some broader philosophical point, except for hysteria and delusions, which probably fit more along sociology instead. | | |
| ▲ | esikich 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Philosophy is an intrinsically human thing. It has to be." What is philosophy? Thinking? Reasoning? Thinking about thinking? You're asserting that only a human brain can think and reason? Surely other animals can as well. Couldn't aliens as well? Why can't this crazy electronic box? Where do we draw the line? Do dolphins not have internal experiences? Dogs? Cats? Mice? Fish? Worms? Bugs? Amoebas? We don't even really know what thinking or experience is. You can train a caterpillar to do tricks. That's pattern recognition. You can train a human to spike their heart rate when you get a Teams notification. I mean, I'm watching an LLM run benchmarks on my caching strategy for a webpage right now. It's certainly doing something. | | |
| ▲ | drekipus 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | I suggest you print out this exchange and spend a week away from the computer, then re-read what was printed. I'm not trying to be rude but I gave you the answers. Alien philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not aliens. Tree philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not trees. Dolphin philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not dolphins, etc. Everything else you mentioned is "hallucinatory" and you need to probably have a break from screens for a while. As a legitimate exercise, go ponder the philosophy of a bash script. Think about philosophy of trees in a forest vs trees in a plantation. You'll find it and see how silly you're being | | |
| ▲ | gf000 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > irrelevant to us because we're not What an unnecessarily dismissive "argument". I'm certainly not a CPU, nor a painting, nor a bird, yet plenty of people find these topics and many others interesting. | |
| ▲ | crent 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’d respectfully disagree here. All phenomena are defined not just by what they are but also by what they are not. I can tell something is relatively tall because I can compare its size to something small. In a fully isolated environment with no reference points, the concept of a given object being small or tall is meaningless. If we apply that same thought process to philosophy and reason, how can you define it without creating boundaries of what it is not? |
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| ▲ | poetaster 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If by 101 you mean the decades long debate between Dennet and everyone else, I think you'll find the 101 gloss throws up more questions than answers. Presuming that language is necessary for consciousness is not a settled question, for instance. As you complain, it is a more complicated field of study than cs, philosophy, biology and chemistry combined. |
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