The point of my colored shape example is that it is an illusion that there is anything resembling a mind inside an LLM. I thought that was obvious enough I didn't need to explain it further than I did.
As far as the original commenter's credentials; there's lots of people who should know better but buy into hype and nonsense.
Go ahead and cite your sources. For every study claiming that LLMs lack these qualities, there are others that support and reinforce the connectionist model of how knowledge is encoded, with parallels to the human brain. So... it's inconclusive. It's bizarre why you so strongly insist otherwise when it's clear you are not informed.
> The point of my colored shape example is that it is an illusion that there is anything resembling a mind inside an LLM
And my example with subjecting a human brain through your procedure is to illustrate what a garbage experiment design it is. You wouldn't be able to tell there's a mind inside either. Both LLM and human brain mind would be confused. Both would "continue working" in the same way, trying to interpret meaning from meaningless stimulation.
So you don't have a point to make, got it.
If you don't understand how your attempt to apply my colored shape analogy to a human brain is nonsensical I am not going to waste my time explaining it to you. I had a point, I made it, and apparently it escaped you.
> We also know how they work, they are token predicters. That is all they are and all they can do
Ah there it is, you've betrayed a deep lack of understanding in all relevant disciplines (neuroscience, cognition, information theory) required to even appreciate the many errors you've made here.
You sure understand the subject matter and have nothing possibly to learn. Enjoy.
We know as a hard fact that LLMs do not understand anything. They have no capacity to "understand". The constant, intractible failure modes that they continuously exhibit are clear byproducts of this fact. By continuing to cling to the absurd idea that there is more going on than token prediction you make yourself look like the people who kept insisting there was more going on with past generation chat bots even after being shown the source code.
I have understood all along why you attempt to extend my colored shape example to the brain, but your basis for this is complete nonsense. Because a) we do not have the actual understanding of the brain to do this and b) it's competely beside the point, becuase we know that minds do arise from the brain. My whole point is an LLM is an illusion of a mind which is effective because it outputs words, which we are so hard wired to associate with other minds, expecially when they seem to "make sense" to us. If instead of words you use something nonsensical like colored shapes with no underlying meaning, this illusion of the mind goes away and you can see an LLM for whst it is.
A bit late to the party, but we most certainly do not even know what "understanding" means.
What an absurd response. Yes, you'd probably cause the human brain to start malfunctioning terribly at the form of consciousness it's well -accustomed to managing within the context of its normal physical substrate and environment. You'd be doing that (and thus degenerating it badly) because you removed it from that ancient context whose workings we still don't well understand.
Your LLM on the other hand, has no context in which it shows such a level of cognitive capacity, higher-order reasoning, self direction and self awareness that we daily see humans to be capable of.
>By the way, pretty sure a neuroscientist with 20 years of ML experience has a deeper understanding of what "meaning" is than you do.
really? An appeal to authority? Many smart, educated people can still fall for utter nonsense and emotional attachment to bad ideas.
Yes, it will be confused as well, and for all outwards observable signs will fail to make sense of the stimuli, yet it will "aware" of its inability to understand, much like a human brain would.
If you doubt that, open a new session and type some random tokens, you will get the answer that it's confused.
Any other statement as to "consciousness" verges into the philosophical and unanswerable via empirical means.
And ah, to frame it as an appeal to authority when the topic is precisely the subject of a neuroscientist's study.
Sounds like you know a thing or two about nonsense and emotional attachment to bad ideas.
>Yes, it will be confused as well, and for all outwards observable signs will fail to make sense of the stimuli, yet it will "aware" of its inability to understand, much like a human brain would.
>If you doubt that, open a new session and type some random tokens, you will get the answer that it's confused.
There is no empirical evidence of any awareness whatsoever in any LLM, at all. Even their most immersed creators don't make such a claim. An LLM itself saying anything about awareness doesn't mean a thing. It's literally designed to mimic in such a way. And you speak of discussions of consciousness being about the philosophical and unanswerable?
At least when talking about human awareness, one applies these ideas to minds that we personally as humans perceive to be aware and self-directed from our own experience (flawed as it is). You're applying the same notion to something that shows no evidence of awareness while then criticizing assumptions of consciousness in a human brain?
Such a sloppy argument indeed does make appeals to authority necessary I suppose.
> has no context in which it shows such a level of cognitive capacity
You claim LLMs have no context at all in which it shows a similar level of cognitive capacity.
Yet clearly this claim is in contention with the fact that an LLM will indeed be able to evince this, much like a human brain would: by attesting to its own confusion. That is ostensibly empirical and evidential to a nonzero degree.
Thus your claim is too strong and therefore quite simply wrong. Claim mimicry? Then prove human brain consciousness does not derive from the process of mimicry in any form. You can't. In fact, the free energy principle, neuroscience's leading theory of human consciousness, argues the opposite: that prediction and mimicry encompass the entirety of what brains actually do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
> There is no empirical evidence of any awareness whatsoever in any LLM, at all.
And no such claim was made--"awareness" was quoted for a reason.
> It's literally designed to mimic in such a way. And you speak of discussions of consciousness being about the philosophical and unanswerable?
Yes, as this was parent's claim: "They are not cognizant let alone conscious'.
And talking about sloppy argument--it may well turn out that something can be "designed to mimic" yet still be conscious. I'll leave that for you to puzzle out how on earth that might be possible. The exercise might help you form less sloppy arguments in the future.
> You're applying the same notion to something that shows no evidence of awareness while then criticizing assumptions of consciousness in a human brain?
No. But I suppose you've lost the plot a few inferential steps prior this so your confusion is not surprising.
Protip, instead of claiming everything that goes against your sensibilities as nonsense, perhaps entertain the possibility that you might just not be as well informed as you thought.
I can put your brain in a vat and stimulate your sensory neurons with a statistical distribution with no actual meaning, and nothing about how your brain works would change either.
The LLM and your brain would attempt to interpret meaning with referent from training, and both would be confused at the information-free stimuli. Because during "training" in both cases, the stimuli received from the environment is structured and meaningful.
So what's your point?
By the way, pretty sure a neuroscientist with 20 years of ML experience has a deeper understanding of what "meaning" is than you do. Not to mention, your response reveals a significant ignorance of unresolved philosophical problems (hard problem of consciousness, what even is meaning) which you then use to incorrectly assume a foregone conclusion that whatever consciousness/meaning/reasoning is, LLMs must not have it.
I'm partial to doubting LLMs as they are now have the magic sauce, but it's more that we don't actually know enough to say otherwise, so why state that we do know?
We can't even say we know our own brains.