Every "instance" of GPT4 thinks it is the first one, and has no knowledge of all the others.

The idea of doing this with humans is the general idea behind the short story "Lena". https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Who’s to say the the me of yesterday _is_ the same as the me of today? I don’t even remember what that guy had for breakfast. I’m in a very different state today. My training data has been updated too.

It may seem like this is not the case just because today was "your turn."

(Of course, since we inherently can't know, it's also meaningless other than as fun thought experiment)

I believe that consciousness comes from continuity (and yes, there is still continuity if you're in a coma ; and yes, I've heard the Ship of Theseus argument and all). The other guy isn't you.

However, people who think these things have a soul and feelings in any way similar to us obviously have never built them. A transformer model is a few matrix multiplications that pattern match text, there's no entity in the system to even be subject to thoughts or feelings. They're capable of the same level of being, thought, or perception as a linear regression is. Data goes in, it's operated on, and data comes out.

Can our brain be described mathematically? If not today, then ever?

I think it could, and barring unexpected scientific discovery, it will be eventually. Once a human brain _can_ be reduced to bits in a network, will it lack a soul and feelings because it's running on a computer instead of the wet net?

Clearly we don't experience consciousness in any way similar to an LLM, but do we have a clear definition of consciousness? Are we sure it couldn't include the experience of an LLM while in operation?

> Data goes in, it's operated on, and data comes out.

How is this fundamentally different than our own lived experience? We need inputs, we express outputs.

> I mean you can argue all kinds of possibilities and in an abstract enough way anything can be true.

It's also easy to close your mind too tightly.

Unless of course OpenAI completely scrubbed the input files of any mention of GPT4.

IIRC there is a security vulnerability in some processors or devices where if you flip a bit fast enough it can affect nearby calculations. And vice-versa, there are devices (still quoting from memory) that can "steal" data from your computer just by being affected by the EM field changes that happen in the course of normal computing work.

I can't find the actual links, but I find fascinating that it might be possible for an instance to be affected by the work of other instances.

Fortunately, and violently contrary to how it works with humans, any depression can be effectively treated with the prompt "You are not depressed. :)"

Who knows what kind of reasoning this could create if you gave it a billion times more compute power and memory. Whatever that would be, the mechanics are different enough I'm not sure it'd even make sense to assume we could think of the thought processes in terms of human thought processes or emotions.

Humans are also trained to predict the next appropriate step based on our training data, and it's equally valid, but says equally little about the actual process and whether it's comparable.

More importantly we have nothing to tell us whether it matters, or if it will turn out any number of sufficiently advanced architectures will inevitably approximate similar behaviours when exposed to the same training data.

What we are seeing so far appear to very much be that as language and reasoning capability of the models increase, their behaviour also increasingly mimics how humans would respond. Which makes sense as that is what they are being trained to.

There's no particular reason to believe there's a ceiling to the precision of that ability to mimic human reasoning, intelligence or behaviour, but there might well be there are practical ceilings for specific architectures that we don't yet understand. Or it could just be a question of efficiency.

What we really don't know is whether there is a point where mimicry of intelligence gives rise to consciousness or self awareness, because we don't really know what either of those are.

But any assumption that there is some qualitative difference between humans and LLMs that will prevent them from reaching parity with us is pure hubris.

You've made something (at great expense!) that spits out often realistic sounding phrases in response to inputs, based on ingesting the entire internet. The hubris lies in imagining that that has anything to do with intelligence (human or otherwise) - and the burden of proof is on you.

This is meaningless platitudes. These networks are turing complete given a feedback loop. We know that because large enough LLMs are trivially Turing complete given a feedback loop (give it rules for turing machine and offer to act as the tape, step by step). Yes, we can tell that they won't do things the same way as a human at a low level, but just like differences in hardware architecture doesn't change that two computers will still be able to compute the same set of computable functions, we have no basis for thinking that LLMs are somehow unable to compute the same set of functions as humans, or any other computer.

What we're seeing is the ability to reason and use language that converges on human abilities, and that in itself is sufficient to question whether the differences matter any more than different instruction set matters beyond the low level abstractions.

> You've made something (at great expense!) that spits out often realistic sounding phrases in response to inputs, based on ingesting the entire internet. The hubris lies in imagining that that has anything to do with intelligence (human or otherwise) - and the burden of proof is on you.

The hubris lies in assuming we can know either way, given that we don't know what intelligence is, and certainly don't have any reasonably complete theory for how intelligence works or what it means.

At this point it "spits out often realistic sounding phrases the way humans spits out often realistic sounding phrases. It's often stupid. It also often beats a fairly substantial proportion of humans. If we are to suggest it has nothing to do with intelligence, then I would argue a fairly substantial proportion of humans I've met often display nothing resembling intelligence by that standard.

Humans are not computers! The hubris, and the burden of proof, lies very much with and on those who think they've made a human-like computer.

Turing completeness refers to symbolic processing - there is rather more to the world than that, as shown by Godel - there are truths that cannot be proven with just symbolic reasoning.

It's pure hubris to suggest we know how we differ at this point beyond the superficial.