Re:We Found an Neuron in GPT-2
by Thorentis on Friday February 17, 2023 @12:06AM
(#34831015)
When you say "they have no idea about what they're about to say" you're talking about conscious thought. I think there is a difference between rational thought (thinking by going through a series of logically connected steps) and intuition, where you can arrive at a conclusion or knowledge of some fact or concept or knowing how to do something, without having gone through those conscious steps. Does one count as "thoughts" any less than the other? People are sometimes so quick to dismiss any subconscious thinking as being nothing more than a very complicated computer, but I couldn't disagree more.
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I tend to take the view that thoughts are very similar to sensory input. if you sit in silence for 60 seconds, you literally do not and can not predict what thoughts pop up in consciousness. You can actively focus attention on a thought, but if you try to find the source of the thought, it disapears. Thoughts just appear, just like sounds, sight, etc just appear.
Well I think that's the point. We know that our minds engage in a large amount of pattern matching/recognition/retrieval. Perhaps this hugely-powerful pattern-matching information-retrieval engine has learned to perform similarly to human minds, being trained exclusively on the output of human minds.
Intuition is another cognitive process honed by training and reinforcement of neurons through all sorts of sensories and feedback to our brain. I think parallel models not unlike additional cognitive processes in our brain assisting the NLG will eventually make it more similar to how our cognitive processes actually work.
Disclaimer: Uneducated opinion on my behalf, I'm a hobbyist only.