Comment by almosthere

> It's not a living thing inside the computer, it's just the inference building text token by token using probabilities based on the pre-computed model.

Sure, and humans are just biochemical reactions moving muscles as their interface with the physical word.

I think the model of operation is not a good criticism, but please see my reply to the root comment in this thread where I detail my thoughts a bit.

You cannot say, 'we know it's not thinking because we wrote the code' when the inference 'code' we wrote amounts to, 'Hey, just do whatever you figured out during training okay'.

'Power over your computer', all that is orthogonal to the point. A human brain without a functioning body would still be thinking.

This is a bad take. We didn't write the model, we wrote an algorithm that searches the space of models that conform to some high level constraints as specified by the stacked transformer architecture. But stacked transformers are a very general computational paradigm. The training aspect converges the parameters to a specific model that well reproduces the training data. But the computational circuits the model picks out are discovered, not programmed. The emergent structures realize new computational dynamics that we are mostly blind to. We are not the programmers of these models, rather we are their incubators.

As far as sentience is concerned, we can't say they aren't sentient because we don't know the computational structures these models realize, nor do we know the computational structures required for sentience.

> It carries all of the biases us humans have and worse the biases that are present in the information we chose to explicitly share online

This is going to be a huge problem. Most people assume computers are unbiased and rational, and increasing use of AI will lead to more and larger decisions being made by AI.

I see this a lot in what LLMs know and promote in terms of software architecture.

All seem biased to recent buzzwords and approaches. Discussions will include the same hand-waving of DDD, event-sourcing and hexagonal services, i.e. the current fashion. Nothing of worth apparently preceded them.

I fear that we are condemned to a future where there is no new novel progress, but just a regurgitation of those current fashion and biases.

Game of life, PowerPoint, and a bunch of non-PL stuff are all Turing-complete. I don't mix up terms, I did use a slightly sloppy terminology but it is the correct concept - and my point is that we don't know of a computational model that can't be expressed by a Turing-machine, humans are a physical "machine", ergo we must also fall into that category.

Give my comment another read, but it was quite understandable from context. (Also, you may want to give a read to the Turing paper because being executable by a person as well was an important concept within)

The monkeys on typewriters saying is just a colorful way of saying that an infinite random sequence will contain all finite sequences somewhere within it. Which is true. But I don't see what infinite random sequences have to do with LLMs or human thinking.

> Do you see the difference

No? I'm not sure what you're getting at.

To be fair, we also trained the LLM on (among other things) shakespeare, and adjusted the weights so that generating shakespeare would be more likely after that training.

We don't claim a JPEG can paint great art, even though certain jpegs do.

I was going to use this analogy in the exact opposite way. We do have a very good understanding of how the human brain works. Saying we don't understand how the brain works is like saying we don't understand how the weather works.

If you put a million monkeys on typewriters you would eventually get shakespeare is exactly why LLM's will succeed and why humans have succeeded. If this weren't the case why didn't humans 30000 years ago create spacecraft if we were endowed with the same natural "gift".

> If you simulated a human brain by the atom,

That is what we don't know is possible. You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered. And from what we even know currently, atoms are too coarse to form the basis of such "cloning"

And, my viewpoint is that, even if this were possible, just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If it is the arrangement of matter that gives rise to consciousness, then would that new consciousness be the same person or not?

If you have a basis for answering that question, let's hear it.

> Imagine we assume that A.I. could be conscious. What would be the identity/scope of that consciousness

Well, first I would ask whether this question makes sense in the first place. Does consciousness have a scope? Does consciousness even exist? Or is that more of a name attributed to some pattern we recognize in our own way of thinking (but may not be universal)?

Also, would a person missing an arm, but having a robot arm they can control have their consciousness' "scope" extended to it? Given that people have phantom pains, does a physical body even needed to consider it your part?

This all sounds very irrelevant. Consciousness is clearly tied to specific parts of a substrate. My consciousness doesn't change when a hair falls off my head, nor when I cut my fingernails. But it does change in some way if you were to cut the tip of my finger, or if I take a hormone pill.

Similarly, if we can compute consciousness on a chip, then the chip obviously contains that consciousness. You can experimentally determine to what extent this is true: for example, you can experimentally check if increasing the clock frequency of said chip alters the consciousness that it is computing. Or if changing the thermal paste that attaches it to its cooler does so. I don't know what the results of these experiments would be, but they would be quite clearly determined.

Of course, there would certainly be some scale, and at some point it becomes semantics. The same is true with human consciousness: some aspects of the body are more tightly coupled to consciousness than others; if you cut my hand, my consciousness will change more than if you cut a small piece of my bowel, but less than if you cut out a large piece of my brain. At what point do you draw the line and say "consciousness exists in the brain but not the hands"? It's all arbitrary to some extent. Even worse, say I use a journal where I write down some of my most cherished thoughts, and say that I am quite forgetful and I often go through this journal to remind myself of various thoughts before taking a decision. Would it not then be fair to say that the journal itself contains a part of my consciousness? After all, if someone were to tamper with it in subtle enough ways, they would certainly be able to influence my thought process, more so than even cutting off one of my hands, wouldn't they?

I have no way of measuring whether or not you experience feelings and sensations, or are just regurgitating statements to convince me of that.

The only basis I have for assuming you are sentient according to that definition is trust in your self-reports.

I’d say it’s possible to experience mental anguish/worry without the body participating. Solely a cognitive pain from consternation.

How does a body know what's going on? Would you say it has any input devices?

We have examples of non sentience everywhere already with animals. And then an example of sentience with humans. So if you diff our brains the difference lies within a module in our prefrontal cortex. It’s a black box of logic but I can ‘understand’ or be willing to accept that it’s owed to ‘just’ more grey matter adding the self awareness to the rest of the system.

But to me the big mystery is how animals have sensation at all to begin with. What gives rise to that is a greater mystery to me personally.

There are examples of people who have no ability to feel pain yet are still able to think. Now I wonder if they ever experience mental anguish.