It is theoretically possible, after all, to simulate a human brain at a subatomic level. Sure, the complexity is absurd and interface required to measure it seems far fetched, but technically there's no restriction.
Because of this I believe what we know as "thought" or consciousness exists in the space between the physical world. It's just a way to represent the world around us, with the ability to reference the past and systems to predict the future.
LLMs to me are like a simplified version thats stretched across the domain of active memory. The "thought" process is the same, an active state (current token) guided by the past state (previous tokens).
I think the next step is to reduce what a token is. Right now they are vectors that are linked to words. If instead of words we fed it direct video and audio, and a way to translate the raw data into something resembling the information passed from our eyes and ears in real time, and train it like a child learns from its parents, it's hard to draw the line on where thought begins.
It's an interesting experiment, but I still consider it anti-human.
In the future, when we have "robot" rights for robots that identify as humans, you'll find me on the side of "they aren't a real human". We'll be called bigots, and I'm okay with that.
When custom silicon is made to speed up LLM behaviour doesn't that operate fully parallel with mixed memory and processing?
When real time remote sensing signal processing pipelines are built isn't it possible to parallel in the kinds of filters that "anticipate" the expected future (and highlight deviations from the expected).
To which question?
The Connection Machine CM-2 (1987) has a non von Neumann architecture and mixes memory and processing .. so that's been done, 40 years ago.
Anticipating the future in real time remote sensing signal processing pipelines has been about for at least [redacted] decades.
Are you claiming that it therefore thinks? It’s a foray into a different type of computing, and certainly one we need to explore more. But if you’re claiming it is actually thinking, can you point to the data that indicates that?
> Anticipating the future in real time remote sensing signal processing pipelines has been about for at least [redacted] decades.
Yes the humans anticipate. I’m not sure you’re getting what it means for the anticipation to be built ground up in biology. Every single cell is cycling in anticipation of the coming day, in advance of it. This is the basal dynamics of life. Before you get to “thinking” in the human verbal sense, you have pre-verbal awareness that’s cell deep in every human body, which consists of anticipatory cycling that is seen learning, cell division, metabolism, and so on.
What you lack in engineered systems (so far) is that kind of deep anticipatory architecture that goes down to the molecular scale.
Maybe we do get to build that. Like I said, I don’t but that we can’t build artificial minds and artificial life.
What I’m saying is we’re nowhere close to there.
I'm in your boat. Molecular biology looks quite analogous to something like Conway's Game of Life, but a particle automaton with freedom in 3D space rather than cells in a fixed 2D aetheric grid.
Conway's Game of Life is Turing complete, the fundamental laws/algorithms are simple. Per Wolfram (NKS), you don't need complex algorithms in order to exhibit complex behavior. GoL is just four rules and a[n infinite] grid. Wolfram's automata are simpler.
I will go even further out 'there' and state that we are the equivalent to Greek "city-gods" which arise out of the polity/demos composing them, except our polities are little biological von Neumann machines acting in concert to emerge us in their aggregate. What most people think of as 'god' being some top-down omniscient/omnipotent creator entity, I think is wrong and reverses the true heirarchy of nature. The fabric of spacetime, the quantum field, or whatever emerges it from a lower level with its fixed simple rules, is the primary force driving the universe's [and our] existence. If there are gods, we are categorically much closer to them in form than the pious fanatics say!
(Disclosure: I am petulantly Atheist.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
The audacity to still claim biology is broadly different than computing is commendable.
Write a weasel program and you will see for yourself.
current = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
target = "THE LORD OF THE RINGS"
loop {
replicas = replication(current)
replicas = mutation(replicas)
current = naturalSelection(replicas)
print("generation", i, current)
if (current == target)
break You can thus make "Dog" turn into a "Cat". I rest my case :)
Computational Substrates: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction - https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19108
Brainfuck, Forth, Subleq, and most recently Z80 assembly programs with mutations, interactions, and self-modification. Z80 has an LDIR instruction that copies a block of data from one location in memory to another, which allows the "organisms" to reach/discover reproduction quicker and more reliably in repeated experiments. As soon as that happens, it inevitably takes over the "world".
Hm, sounds more like "Lord of the Flies" than Rings.
My Scope: Evolution proper (what happens after a replicator exists).
Once a self-replicating entity exists, the Weasel loop takes over. Conflating the origin of replicators with the mechanics of evolution itself mixes up two different things.
Laws of logic dictates if you can demonstrate E with R, M and N, then any additional variable is neither sufficient nor necessary.
From a strict theory-of-computation standpoint, if the core loop can be executed in code, then biological evolution is fundamentally an informational process, not a mystical "biological-only" phenomenon.
> As soon as that happens, it inevitably takes over the "world".
Agreed :). Looking forward to an epic battle of the pelennor fields.
> sounds more like "Lord of the Flies" than Rings.
Thats hilarious. "Lord of the Flies" it shall be henceforth :))
your example is intelligent design, not evolution. it has the telos baked in
That's known as optimization algorithm, and genetic algorithm is known to produce good enough results fast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna Computers are time constrained too and cut such corners just like humans.
> They do not experience time. They can check the clock.
Humans experience time because they check biological clock. And sometimes humans forget about time just fine, when they don't check the clock.
Any reasonable definition of "thinking" includes what LLMs do. One would have to craft a rather arbitrary and tortured definition of "thinking" to include human thinking but exclude LLM thinking.
The brain and body instead construct time, a cohesive internal one,from the ground up, with nesting oscillators driving the sequence of all functions and behaviors, over long and short time closes.
What we call “thinking” is a filtered layer of it, a slice that the attention spotlight is focussed on, and in humans this process can be turned to cognition over multilayered abstractions, and using language or other symbolic communications to communicate some of the dynamics of this process, and even evoke them in others.
Turing machines, and modern digital computers with their Von Neumann bottleneck, and LLMs are outside of time. They do not experience time. They can check the clock. They can count steps. But they are not active and agentic in time. Till we change that we won’t make machines that “think”. We can certainly make machines that simulate thinking, and that’s often good enough. But make the problem a real time one, with several conflicting verbal streams to parse and respond to serially and LLMs on their own fail catastrophically.
I think so long as the memory-processing divide remains, the simulation has to break apart processes for thinking in a way that’s alright for some cases, but not for others. And this is why we have the jaggedness of LLM intelligence I believe. They do not have internal timekeeping like almost all biological agents do.