Re:Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves pe...
by mjburgess on Sunday November 05, 2023 @01:31PM
(#38154050)
I regard concepts as being essentially sensory-motor techniques for regulating animals --- so to not have that system is to not really have concepts.
LLMs model concepts using patterns of text. For example, if I say, "I wonder what the weather will be like tomorrow?" i employ my imagination to simulate a scenario -- this simulation is made by taking my concepts of weather, the world outside my door, and so on and combining them to create a "pseudo-sensory-motor reconstruction" of what my experience would be.
This reconstruction has a cognitive dimension (ie., the structure of my raw pseudo-sensory-motor experience as a quasi-logical form) which can be communicated (ie., taking a quasi-logical structuring and making it linguistic) using words that have a symbolic representation.
LLMs, by imitating patterns within this symbolic representation (a distant side effect of thinking) it seems as-if it is thinking with concepts.
But all this shows it that patterns of text can be constructed without using concepts at all.
This is the engineer's trick -- the magic latern. It's important to realise the trick, because the LLM doesnt know what weather is, and is not imagining anything when asked to generate a pattern of text against the prompt, "imagine a scenario where weather..."
Rather it was the humans who wrote its training data that engaged in these acts -- it is their shadows which are replayed by LLMs
LLMs model concepts using patterns of text. For example, if I say, "I wonder what the weather will be like tomorrow?" i employ my imagination to simulate a scenario -- this simulation is made by taking my concepts of weather, the world outside my door, and so on and combining them to create a "pseudo-sensory-motor reconstruction" of what my experience would be.
This reconstruction has a cognitive dimension (ie., the structure of my raw pseudo-sensory-motor experience as a quasi-logical form) which can be communicated (ie., taking a quasi-logical structuring and making it linguistic) using words that have a symbolic representation.
LLMs, by imitating patterns within this symbolic representation (a distant side effect of thinking) it seems as-if it is thinking with concepts.
But all this shows it that patterns of text can be constructed without using concepts at all.
This is the engineer's trick -- the magic latern. It's important to realise the trick, because the LLM doesnt know what weather is, and is not imagining anything when asked to generate a pattern of text against the prompt, "imagine a scenario where weather..."
Rather it was the humans who wrote its training data that engaged in these acts -- it is their shadows which are replayed by LLMs