Re:Inductive or Deductive? Rethinking the Fundamental Reason...
by mistermann on Monday September 02, 2024 @10:33AM
(#41425663)
> So the fallacy of...
The text from this point on seems to have lost contextual awareness of what preceded it (which was excellent imho).
Re:Inductive or Deductive? Rethinking the Fundamental Reason...
by godelski on Monday September 02, 2024 @05:55PM
(#41429103)
> One simple argument is that language is NOT a magical reasoning substance in itself, but a communication medium.
I'm wildly impressed by how many people think language is thinking. My best guess is they're conflating inner speech with thinking. But if you can't figure out that the words you vocalize aren't an isomorphic representation of the things you try to convey, well... It's hard for me to believe you've spent enough time thinking about what it means to think. Miscommunication is quite common and so there's sufficient feedback to learn this without being explicitly taught. Then again, there are people in the world that I fear...
So the fallacy of the whole LLM field is the belief that language has some intrinsic meaning. Or if you mix the artifacts of language in some very smart way, the meaning will emerge. But it doesn't work if meaning occurs before the word. The text in books has no reasoning, it was authors. The machine shuffling the text fragments does not have a meaningful thought. The engineer which devised a shuffling machine had some meaningful thought, the users of the machine have same thoughts, but not the machine itself. To put it another way, if there was an artificial system capable of producing meaningful thoughts, it is not a presence of language which produces a proof, it's communication. Communication requires an agent (as in "agency") and an intent. We have neither in LLM. As to the argument that we ourselves are mere stochastic parrots - of course we can produce word salads, or fake mimics of coherent text, it is not a proof that LLM IS the way our minds work. It is just a witness to the fact language is a flexible medium for the meanings behind - it can just as well be used for cheating, pretending, etc.