Comment by atleastoptimal
4 hours ago
I really want to know what people specifically mean when they allude to some "higher" level of cognition that humans have above LLM's when it comes to useful outputs. I don't mean the nature of consciousness or internal experience (which is unfalsifiable), I mean the essence of cognitive labor as a tool: writing is about relating concepts, drawing comparisons, aggregating elements of reality into a fictive but believable narrative.
All these processes can be reduced to mathematics and computation. The human brain is just a tool, like any other organ. Do we deny this reality because it shields us from existential horror?
Humans don't seem to have much problem sharing the world with other species, whether they are dogs or LLMs. This is unrelated.
“ All these processes can be reduced to mathematics and computation” may or may not be a true statement.
We don’t know yet, and maybe it’s unknowable.
Believing everything can be explained that way is itself just another ideology followed blindly
LLMs don't have the connection to reality that humans have. LLMs only have text. That's the difference.
> I don't mean the nature of consciousness or internal experience (which is unfalsifiable)
The way I've been thinking about it is not that internal experience is unfalsifiable, along with the modern science connotation that everything that is unfalsifiable is automatically irrelevant (which would be quite absurd, as everything that is dear and meaningful to humans are all simply cognitive phenomena in the end!). It's that it is externally, naively and a-priori unfalsifiable. That is, you can't externally measure or prove it, without having an a-priori theory of what it is and how it happens in the first place. But it is internally falsifiable, in the sense that if we have it, then we know we have it. Note that it's not that "If I have it, then I say I have it", or that "I one has it, he says he has it"; those are all communication to the external world, and for example machines can clearly say they have it without having it, or you can have it before even learning the words that represent it. But if you have it, you can know you do. This actually creates some potential for expanding this knowledge, maybe, in the future, to allow for external verification. We can internally investigate properties associated with consciousness, and from those properties (along with scientific knowledge), maybe one day we will know more about the objective basis which affords consciousness/sentience manifesting or emerging. So I see it like an experimental field where the component of self-assessment or self-experimentation or self-measurement is essential (again along with more conventional scientific notions).
I have been thinking the same way about all properties of life/consciousness, in particular if we think of ethics as a property of (even if you consider the ethics or ideals only pertaining to how it would be ideal to lead your own life) the mind, or of sentience in general. I think of ethics as an inherent property of existence: it stems from the fact that internal experiences/internal life/sentience/etc. are the only thing that could have value, that in fact sentience is experimentally (again taking the point of view of experimental sentience) the only thing that truly matters or has value. If we are minds, we know that only the content of minds can matter; it cannot matter, for example, that a lone rock in some place no one can know about has this or that fate, because there is no mind to interact or perceive and be affected in any way by it. So all of ethics can probably be founded or based upon this kind of observation, and the act of experimental self-observation of consciousness. And I think it's quite important that we collectively recognize those values and what matters to make our lives better (better yet, as good as it can be!) :)
Going further, all of those are currently under the umbrella of metaphysics, which is again a kind of prejudiced-against (often taken as irrelevant, when it contains some of, and in fact many of, the most important things in life) field of science/knowledge. I think metaphysics should just be seen for what it is as a more indirect kind of science. In a way all of science is varying degrees of indirect, we use all sorts of instruments and need to make all kinds of assumptions (that conceivably, but unlikely, could indeed be false) to be able to do any kind of science or assume any kind of validity to results. We need to assume (although indeed many of those assumptions we don't even need to consider, i.e. they're implicit) there aren't any "gremlins" of whatever kind interfering with our measurements. We do our best to cross-verify whatever experiments we have to increase our confidence. Likewise, metaphysics to me is simply about inferring facts and properties with more indirect methods. One of them is what I referred to above, i.e. observations from within your own mind, and proposing properties of cognition from first hand experience. A second (very close to actual physics) is conjecturing what other universes are out there of if there is some larger mechanism our own universe (or all universes) are part of. Another is judging other properties of existence, for example, are our minds completely separate or are we all ultimately part of the "same thing", somehow? How did I come about living as the person I am currently living, am I perhaps a random sample, with some particular distribution, of all living beings? How do those facts influences how we should live together? (I think they all strongly support the notion of valuing everyone, and discredit any absolute notion of primacy of yourself in ethics, i.e. egotism).
>The human brain is just a tool, like any other organ.
sorry the brain is a tool to who exactly in this ostensibly reductive worldview?