For humans, the notion of “self” is also an illusion. We’re just atoms dancing to physics. But that’s not the right level of abstraction from which to do psychology.
Is the notion of an LLM operating on a document useful for building an intuition about how the LLM operates? That’s the more interesting question.
Re:Agents Are Not Enough
by jdonaldson on Friday January 10, 2025 @11:06PM
(#42663200)
I’d say it is, although it’s not really a document but a stream of tokens. The intuition is that the model is able to build abstractions from that stream. Some of the abstractions are related to goal states of the training metric. However, it’s easy to imagine how some of the goal states pertain to the model’s survival in the “wild”, and part of the abstraction that the model captures for this goal is a reflection of itself.
You couldn't say that the model has a singular sense of self, but it certainly has been trained on data that allows it to mimic it in short spurts, and mimicry is what humans do to learn more complex/abstract tasks. The training goal is not to learn how to "be", but rather to learn how to "do" the parts necessary to continue existing.
"Fake it till you make it" is really all that's required to exist in the world.