Comment by Certhas
6 hours ago
Videos and LLMs are not deterministic in the same sense at all.
LLMs are deterministic in the same sense as biological processes. And a faithful simulation of a brain would have all the properties you note.
6 hours ago
Videos and LLMs are not deterministic in the same sense at all.
LLMs are deterministic in the same sense as biological processes. And a faithful simulation of a brain would have all the properties you note.
No, that is not at all something we can just state as a fact. Whether the brain is deterministic is an open question that just inherits the good old, probably unsolvable determinism debate.
The LLM pseudo-randomness from above is engineered by us humans and fully understood, much like an algorithm playing a video frame sequence.
You could theoretically record a full register of all states of an LLM setup with all the possible inputs and environment parameters, and it would fully describe everything you would ever get from a given LLM setup. It would be a very large, convoluted book.
I understand that Anthropics PR department wants to see truth or reason behind every "I'm alive" the LLM generates. Even the term "self-report" is anthropomorphizing, as an LLM does not do anything on its own at all. (It also does not hack any company on its own.) That is just one of the narratives they spin probably at least until the IPO.
Nonsense. There was one proposal for relevant quantum effects in brain dynamics, and that turned out to be not relevant. Even if they were, you could substitute all quantum randomness with pseudo randomness and obtain an absolutely indistinguishable object.
But even if this were a debate, its absolutely absurd to claim that the question of determinism in the brain has any bearing on our moral standing. If we discover tomorrow that quantum collapse is deterministic and can be derived from an underlying theory, and thus all of physics is deterministic in the good old fashioned Newtonian sense, this would not affect our moral standing in the least.
You seem to have conceded the "is it deterministic" argument only to sidestep by declaring determinism irrelevant. Your original claim was that LLMs are deterministic "in the same sense" as brains.
We can write down an LLMs full register, and that register/book contains the whole output universe of the text generator. That book does not act, it is morally neutral. That the brain has such a register at all is just restating the determinism axiom, which you treat as fact.
A text is not conscious, and we can not wish it into consciousness, no matter how many human-like patterns we find in the book / the generated text. What has not been shown is that running the text adds anything over the text written out. Researchers are super motivated to find machine consciousness but cannot find it, while a company months from its IPO keeps pitching shadows of consciousness all day. It really is a PR strategy.