At least you know I am human.
As for the rest, hard to say, because we really don’t know what puts the G in the I inside the coconut. Hard to measure internal thought and understanding. Hard for you to even prove I have it.
As for the rest, hard to say, because we really don’t know what puts the G in the I inside the coconut. Hard to measure internal thought and understanding. Hard for you to even prove I have it.
...we technically don't always assume that people we speak to on the internet identify human, since we don't ourselves, but we at least know that all host bodies (that we know of) are physically human. And we also know that all consciousnesses we've spoken with are "human" in nature as in "formed in a human brain".
> Hard to measure internal thought and understanding. Hard for you to even prove I have it.
Indeed, but brain scans exist to show mental activity in response to all sorts of things, including unprompted internal thought. You've heard of the EEG test for ADHD, right? You place someone in a room all by themselves, put some electrodes on their head, and leave them there for around 25 minutes. Then you measure brain activity to see if it looks... uhh, ADHD-y. I don't know what exactly they check for, but I'm pretty sure it's some certain type of uncontrollable mind wandering that people with ADHD suffer from.
With a language model, you are computing the mathematical transforms that result in its output. And there's no evidence to show that there is any sort of internal thought that occurs there, especially since the entire thing is re-run from scratch for every token. Any "thought" or "understanding" can at best be encoded by mathematical weights in the layers, or something, but it's definitely not the same sort of understanding that biological humans have, or even most animals. The way they run is just fundamentally different.
And obviously a mere product of consciousness such as an internet comment can be difficult to tell apart from the output of a hallucinating language model. :)
-Emily
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1z8YUs2FLc
What is this an analogy for?
-Emily
See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
When I think of AGI, I think of some sort of agent that can converse and interact in the same way that a human can, that has the same sort of curiosity, imagination, and internal thought that a human does. But, as it turns out, that's not actually required or even implied by the term "AGI" itself.
-Emily
And then again, maybe math is not all you need. Unknown unknowns, possibly unknowable.
No, for the same reason why asking ChatGPT what it is thinking or feeling does not indicate that it actually thinks or feels that way. ChatGPT is a language model designed to generate outputs that mimic its training data, therefore it will learn to mimic the expression and communication of understanding that it does not itself feel.
This is why language models are so convincing when they hallucinate, because hallucinating is actually their default state, and the hallucinations just tend to line up with some of the facts contained in the training data, but not always. Therefore they can state falsehoods just as convincingly as they can state facts.
> I’m not saying you are incorrect, just pointing out that we’re not exactly sure what we are looking at in those brain scans anyway. Is a thought a mathematical calculation being run on a wet computer?
Thought is sort of an ongoing electrochemical chain reaction, though beyond that I indeed don't have much I can say for sure. It's certainly not a mathematical calculation, though it could possibly be simulated by one.
-Emily