Comment by koliber

11 days ago

If you tell me that trees are big, and trees are made of hard wood, I as a human am capable of asking whether trees feel pain. I don't think what you said is false and I am not familiar with computational theory to be able to debate it. People occasionally have novel creative insights that do not derive from past experience or knowledge, and that is what I think of when I think of creativity.

Humans created novel concepts like writing literally out of thin air. I like how the book "Guns, Steels, and Germs" describes that novel creative process and contrasts it via a disseminative derivation process.

> People occasionally have novel creative insights that do not derive from past experience or knowledge, and that is what I think of when I think of creativity.

If they are not derived from past experience or knowledge, then unless humans exceed the Turing computable, they would need to be the result of randomness in one form or other. There's absolutely no reason why an LLM can not do that. The only reason a far "dumber" pure random number generator based string generator "can't" do that is because it would take too long to chance on something coherent, but it most certainly would keep spitting out novel things. The only difference is how coherent the novel things are.

  • > If they are not derived from past experience or knowledge

    Every animal is born with intuition, you missed that part.

    • So knowledge encoded in the physical structure of the brain.

      You're missing the part where unless there is unknown physics going on in the brain that breaks maths as me know it, there is no mechanism for a brain to exceed the Turing computable, in which case any Turing complete system is comptationally equivalent to it.

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Wouldn't this insight derive from many past experiences of feeling pain yourself and the knowledge that others feel it too?