Comment by digitaltrees
13 hours ago
Neural networks can have senses. Hook an LLM up to a thermometer and it will respond to temperature changes.
13 hours ago
Neural networks can have senses. Hook an LLM up to a thermometer and it will respond to temperature changes.
No, it will respond to tokens telling it about a temperature change. It has no sense of warmth. It cannot be burned.
Conflating senses with cognitive awareness of sensory input is a mistake.
The human Brain is a neural network. Your sense of “knowing what warmth is” reduces down to the weights of connections between neurons in an analog of LLMs. What is different about the human brain that warrants saying that the same emergent characteristics for one network are inaccessible to another?
I’m not sure I fully understand the distinction you’re making, or if I do I’m not sure I agree. Concretely, I agree that these are very different mechanisms. Abstractly… I agree that an LLM cannot be burned. I’m not sure I agree, though, that there is a significant conceptual difference between thermoreceptors in the skin causing action potentials to make their way up the spinal cord to the brain is all that different than reading a temperature sensor over I2C and turning it into input tokens.
Edit: what they don’t have, obviously, is a hard-coded twitch response, where the brain itself is largely bypassed and muscles react to massive temperature differentials independently of conscious thought. But I don’t think that defines consciousness either. Ants instinctively run away from flames too.