Comment by lmm
2 months ago
> I didn't talk about subjective experience, just about internal state. There's no question about whether other people have internal states. I can show someone a piece of information in such a way that only they see it and then ask them to prove that they know it such that I can be certain to an arbitrarily high degree that their report is correct.
Well, sure, but that much is equally true for an LLM with a scratchpad or what have you. (I guess you could say that the user should have access to the LLM's scratchpad and therefore be just as able to understand the state as the LLM itself, but as we move towards the LLM using its own state vectors that's less and less true in practice). I agree that a human may have a mood or secret knowledge or what have you in a way that an LLM wouldn't, but if all you're positing is access to some inert but hidden state then that feels like a Toaster-Enhanced Turing Machine.
>if all you're positing is access to some inert but hidden state then that feels like a Toaster-Enhanced Turing Machine
I thought it was pretty clear, given the context. What I'm saying is that humans are capable of limited introspection in ways that LLMs are not. They can remember their thought processes and review them ex post facto to answer questions that LLMs cannot. An LLM fundamentally cannot truthfully answer questions such as "why did you do this?" because its entire working memory is held in the context window. It doesn't know to any greater degree than you because it has no more information than you do; just like they are for you, its internal workings are a mystery. I'm not saying LLMs conceptually could not be designed with capabilities similar to a human's in this regard, with some symbolic memory that's capable of some bookkeeping, I'm saying none of the current ones have them.
> I didn't talk about subjective experience, just about internal state. There's no question about whether other people have internal states. I can show someone a piece of information in such a way that only they see it and then ask them to prove that they know it such that I can be certain to an arbitrarily high degree that their report is correct.
> What I'm saying is that humans are capable of limited introspection in ways that LLMs are not. They can remember their thought processes and review them ex post facto to answer questions that LLMs cannot.
But now you're making a much stronger claim than merely saying that internal state exists. Humans are capable of telling you a story about what their thought process was (as are LLMs). But whether that story will be accurate, much less contain new insights, is much harder prove.
>But now you're making a much stronger claim than merely saying that internal state exists.
It's not a different claim, it's the same claim. The reason humans are able to introspect is because they have that internal state.
>Humans are capable of telling you a story about what their thought process was (as are LLMs)
No. Humans can tell a story that's informed by introspection, while LLMs can only tell a story without any introspection. Humans may also lie and fabricate, but they are at least capable of introspecting, while LLMs are not.
>But whether that story will be accurate, much less contain new insights, is much harder prove.
If you're going to doubt the explanation then what's the point of asking the question? Necessarily it's going to be information that exists only in that person's mind, so at best you can check it for consistency with the person's own behavior and with the report itself, but some things you'll just have to either accept or ignore. Like, fundamentally you're asking the person to describe features of their own mind such as "he gets bored easily", "he can only hold so many facts at once", "he makes worse decisions under pressure", etc. If for example you're asking the question to improve something in the future (such as documentation or some procedure), it doesn't even make sense to distrust such reports, unless you believe a person like the one being described by the explanation doesn't and can't exist.
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