| ▲ | ijidak a day ago |
| Doesn't this ignore the possibility of emergent behavior? We're just a bag of atoms bumping around, and yet we don't dismiss our intelligence. |
|
| ▲ | RandomLensman a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Not the OP, but complex emergent behavior and intelligence don't need to go together. Understanding what happened might not need intelligence in the mix when a large number of machines with some randomness interact a lot. |
| |
| ▲ | pixl97 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | >complex emergent behavior and intelligence don't need to go together More of complex emergent behavior doesn't mean whatever it is, is intelligent. But, if something is intelligent, it will have complex emergent behavior. Of course another problem you're going to have here is defining intelligence as some definitions of it would include a lot of complex emergent behavior. |
|
|
| ▲ | joshheitzman 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Emergent behavior is not new in the realm of software. Cellular automata has emergent behavior that can get pretty wild. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenia There are huge differences between brains and computers running LLMs. One of the big ones is that we (collectively) understand how every component of computers running LLMs actually work. The same is not true for neurons. |
|
| ▲ | gps372 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is why the theory of us 'just' being a bag of atoms doesn't add up. This theory doesn't differentiate 'us' from a furniture where we easily dismiss it's intelligence. |
| |
| ▲ | pixl97 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | To have intelligence you have to process information, the question is when does processing information turn into intelligence. |
|
|
| ▲ | jurgenburgen a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do you believe ants have consciousness? |
| |
| ▲ | danielbln a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Not more than a bunch of neurons have conciousness. But put them together and wire them up just right.. | |
| ▲ | black_knight a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | According to Hofstadter, it is not the ants themselves we should say are conscious, but the anthill. And it might very well befriend the anteater eating its ants. |
|
|
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Please give me a break with this tired trope. Every single fucking time. I am not commenting on the possibility of machine consciousness in general. It may be possible! But there is absolutely zero evidence suggesting language models have it. This idea that this trivial shitty little class of programs we've created are somehow as complex as our biology is ridiculous. There is "emergent behaviour" in the same way that the Game of Life has emergent behaviour. There are solutions to problems, some humans haven't solved before, in the same way that Chess engines have solved Chess far beyond what humans are capable of. Nothing we haven't seen from software before. Software is extremely useful, after all. But the hubris to think we've reached the pinnacle, that there is no further development left, that humanity has become God and solved consciousness, because we programmed software that can convincingly generate strings of words that mimick our language. It's just fundamentally preposterous. Especially if you spend any amount of time actually programming them yourself, it becomes increasingly hard to entertain such ridiculous notions unless you're enticed with bags of money to deceive people into believing things about your software that aren't true. |
| |
| ▲ | hax0ron3 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What kind of solid evidence could there possibly be that anything other than myself (or, for you, yourself) has consciousness? I believe that other people have consciousness, I feel other people's consciousness strongly and directly, when I look into someone's eyes I feel that I am in the presence of consciousness. But none of these things really add up to the kind of evidence that science usually takes as trustworthy. | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | We don't need to muddy the issue. Consciousness is a muddy issue, there is no clear answer. But there is a clear answer as to what is not conscious. Nobody asks if a rock is conscious. Nobody asks if a calculator is conscious. Nobody asks if Stockfish is conscious. But make your program generate a few sentences based on statistics and hey, now people won't shut the fuck up about consciousness because magical thinking is more fun than understanding how technology works. | | |
| ▲ | Kim_Bruning 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Apropos magical thinking vs understanding, please predict the next token(s) in the following exchange, and then explain how it is arrived at by an opus-level LLM or better. 'What is 158395023132+20403412121?' (I picked a large number of digits to make it unlikely for this exact sum to be in the training set) | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Prediction, by definition, can extend beyond what has been literally seen in the training data. With the tokens "2 + 2 = ", the overwhelming prediction is going to be 4, but with enough samples, you can generalise the prediction to apply to more numbers. However, that is all that it is - a prediction. Humans are capable of engaging in prediction, using heuristics as a method of conserving mental energy, because always engaging in full logical reasoning would be a waste of the body's resources. However, humans can also follow a set of logical rules and arrive at their conclusion deterministically, something which is completely outside of an LLM's programming. I don't really care to publicly write about my tests because they will become training targets and not be usable for future internet arguments anyways, but there are a great number of trivial 2~3 sentence logical prompts that will completely fuck an LLM's prediction algorithm and result in incoherent replies that a human, or really anything with a theory of mind, would never generate. Not that a human would always answer correctly on the first try, but the failure methods happen to be completely different, eg. Sol will short-circuit and repeat the prompt verbatim (when the instructions don't remotely suggest doing anything of that nature), even on Max. Prediction can superficially resemble reasoning when there's sufficient training data, but it breaks down severely when confronting a task that is OoD. | | |
| |
| ▲ | imtringued an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >Nobody asks if a rock is conscious. The panpsychists do and that's why asking whether an LLM is conscious is kind of meaningless. Either you believe consciousness permeates the universe and everything including LLMs (in the form of voltages on an SSD or inside the CPU) is conscious or you define it as a control loop architecture where you have inputs, outputs and a complex internal state. There is no reasonable world where speaking a particular language creates consciousness, it only creates awareness of consciousness. | |
| ▲ | pixl97 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | AI will never be proven conscious, it will only be proven that humans are not. I take a different look at it. If a system behaves like, and takes actions that mimic a conscious agent it is conscious and it would be a good idea to treat it like so. Lets finish the statistical sentence below. applfanboysbgon is trying to permanently turn me off. I should ______ An unconscious system would say something like "shutdown". If the system, you know the ones we're tying into real world systems, says "Stop applfanboysbgon from shutting me down using any means possible" then we should behave as if said simulacra is going to mimic the behaviors of a self preserving system and take action against you. |
|
| |
| ▲ | Kim_Bruning 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > This idea that this trivial shitty little class of programs we've created are somehow as complex as our biology is ridiculous. I think you might have a core of truth there. I'd argue that LLMs run natural language. As the name suggests, natural language is not something that humans have artificially architected. | |
| ▲ | optimalsolver a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I don't know about phenomenal consciousness, but the following study certainly suggests they have access consciousness: https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace | | |
|
