Comment by ben_w
2 days ago
> And I rather disagree that mathematics is language, when I did maths there was a distinct difference from understanding a thing and then writing it down.
It is generally the case that there's a difference between "understanding a thing" and "writing it down", as demonstrated by every student who studies for the exam, the Chinese Room thought experiment, and Business Bullshit Bingo.
For example, I can copy the next sentence of yours, but I have no idea what:
> And modalities that don’t include “where is this body in space” or “I am lonely” don’t seem to capture some essential elements of sensory experience. It is a mistake to separate the interior from the exterior in the analysis of how our thinking works.
means, can you rephrase that by as much as possible? Preferably without a double negative?
Agree regarding sanity issues of AI. Extremely unlikely we make something "stable" so early in our attempts.
Our sensory experience as wired into our brains include notions of our own body, both physically “where is the leg now and where is it going” and as a sort of monitor of our brain/body state “hunger” “restlessness” “lonely” “need to talk this torrent of ideas out with someone”.
I was arguing that in:
> With multimodal models, at this point tokens are closer to units of sensory experience.
The tokens are inherently missing some extremely vital pieces of sensory experience, namely the ones that establish the narrative of a self.
Thanks :)
> The tokens are inherently missing some extremely vital pieces of sensory experience, namely the ones that establish the narrative of a self.
Hmm.
While I agree LLMs are missing many pieces of sensory experience, it is unclear to me which pieces are necessary and sufficient for a narrative of self.
Clinical dissociation (and, at least to the approximation of public stereotypes, Buddhism) come to mind as an example where the presence of usual sensory input is insufficient for a sense of self: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/dissociative-...
More broadly: while I agree that LLMs are not like us*, I am unclear why this matters in this context?
The behaviour of tokens in a transformer seem to me to behave like sensory input, just not human-like sensory input. The closest human analogy would be if the entire context window was a retina, each rod and cone one of the tokens in that context, and the output was filling in the blind spot (but of course, even this is a very loose analogy).
* even if the engineering teams were trying to do that, which they are not, it would be unlikely to converge on us so soon
> as demonstrated by every (...) the Chinese Room thought experiment
Wait, did I miss the Chinese Room suddenly becoming sensible, or relevant? Last I checked it was a failure to accept that the system of "human + room" can in fact understand Chinese, even if the components individually don't.
My point here is that regardless of how you view the entire system of [human + room + books], the human themselves in that system are still just a cog. The human themselves doesn't know Chinese, they are literally writing down Chinese without understanding it, by design of the thought experiment.
"Is the Chinese Room intelligent/conscious?" is a scissor question*, i.e. people strongly disagree about what it shows.
Myself, I'm with you: the system collectively is intelligent, despite the human in the loop being reduced to a cog in that system. The biological analogy to "the human does not understand Chinese therefore the system is not conscious" would be "no individual cell in a human body knows what the human is doing therefore humans are not conscious".
* https://www.lesswrong.com/w/scissors-statements