Comment by roywiggins
2 years ago
See, this sort of claim I am instantly skeptical of. Nobody has ever caught a human brain producing or storing tokens, and certainly the subjective experience of, say, throwing a ball, doesn't involve symbols of any kind.
> Nobody has ever caught a human brain producing or storing tokens
Do you remember learning how to read and write?
What are spelling tests?
What if "subjective experience" isn't essential, or is even just a distraction, for a great many important tasks?
Entirely possible. Lots of things exhibit complex behavior that probably don't have subjective experience.
My point is just that the evidence for "humans are just token prediction machines and nothing more" is extremely lacking, but there's always someone in these discussions who asserts it like it's obvious.
Any output from you could be represented as a token. It is a very generic idea. Ultimately whatever you output is because of chemical reactions that follow from the input.
It could be represented that way. That's a long way from saying that's how brains work.
Does a thermometer predict tokens? It also produces outputs that can be represented as tokens, but it's just a bit of mercury in a tube. You can dissect a thermometer as much as you like and you won't find any token prediction machinery. There's lots of things like that. Zooming out, does that make the entire atmosphere a token prediction engine, since it's producing eg wind and temperatures that could be represented as tokens?
If you need one token per particle then you're admitting that this is task is impossible. Nobody will ever build a computer that can simulate a brain-sized volume of particles to sufficient fidelity. There is a long, long distance from "brains are made of chemicals" to "brains are basically token prediction engines."
The argument that brains are just token prediction machines is basically the same as saying “the brain is just a computer”. It’s like, well, yes in the same way that a B-21 Raider is an airplane as well as a Cessna. That doesn’t mean that they are anywhere close to each other in terms of performance. They incorporate some similar basic elements but when you zoom out they’re clearly very different things.
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