Comment by karn97
9 months ago
Try to come up with a way to prove humans aren't stochastic parrots then maybe people will atart taking you seriously. Just childish reddit angst rn nothing else.
9 months ago
Try to come up with a way to prove humans aren't stochastic parrots then maybe people will atart taking you seriously. Just childish reddit angst rn nothing else.
I hate to be the burden of proof guy, but in this case I'll say: the burden of proof is on you to prove that humans are stochastic parrots. For millenia, nobody thought to assert that the human brain was computational in nature, until people invented computers, and all of a sudden started asserting that many the human brain was just like a classical computer.
Of course, this turned out to be completely false, with advances in understanding of neural networks. Now, again with no evidence other than "we invented this thing that's, useful to us" people have been asserting that humans are just like this thing we invented. Why? What's the evidence? There never is any. It's high dorm room behavior. "What if we're all just machines, man???" And the argument is always that if I disagree with you when you assert this, then I am acting unscientifically and arguing for some kind of magic.
But there's no magic. The human brain just functions in a way different than the new shiny toys that humans have invented, in terms of ability to model an external world, in terms of the way emotions and sense experience are inseparable from our capacity to process information, in terms of consciousness. The hardware is entirely different, and we're functionally different.
The closest things to human minds are out there, and they've been out there for as long as we have: other animals. The real unscientific perspective is that to get high on your own supply and assert that some kind of fake, creepily ingratiating Spock we made up (who is far less charming than Leonard Nimony) is more like us than a chimp is.
> Try to come up with a way to prove humans aren't stochastic parrots
Look around you
Look at Skyscrapers. Rocket ships. Agriculture.
If you want to make a claim that humans are nothing more than stochastic parrots then you need to explain where all of this came from. What were we parroting?
Meanwhile all that LLMs do is parrot things that humans created
Skyscrapers: trees, mountains, cliffs, caves in mountainsides, termite mounds, humans knew things could go high, the Colosseum was built two thousand years ago as a huge multi-storey building.
Rocket ships: volcanic eruptions show heat and explosive outbursts can fling things high, gunpowder and cannons, bellows showing air moves things.
Agriculture: forests, plains, jungle, desert oases, humans knew plants grew from seeds, grew with rain, grew near water, and grew where animals trampled them into the ground.
We need a list of all atempted ideas, all inventions and patents that were ever tried or conceived, and then we see how inventions are the same random permutations on ideas with Darwinian style survivorship as everything else; there were steel boats with multiple levels in them before skyscrapers; is the idea of a tall steel building really so magical when there were over a billion people on Earth in 1800 who could have come up with it?
You’re likening actual rocketry to LLMs being mildly successful at describing Paul Newman’s alcohol use on average when they already have the entire internet handed to them.
> when there were over a billion people on Earth in 1800 who could have come up with it
My point is that humans did come up with it. Humans did not parrot it from someone or something else that showed it to us. We didn't "parrot" splitting the atom. We didn't learn how to build skyscrapers from looking at termite hills and we didn't learn to build rockets that can send a person to the moon from seeing a volcano
You are just speaking absolute drivel
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