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Comment by yunwal | Hacker News Reader

Why? Are we not allowed to find meaning, beauty, in patterns? The fact that two people can share experiences that bond them together, allow them to deeply trust each other, share a sense of humor, etc, isn't not beautiful just because there's some extremely complex statistical calculations going on under the surface that we ourselves can't explain.

It's like saying it's concerning that human beings are ready to believe they're made up of combinations of atoms.

What would be an appropriate explanation for the concept of love? Or should we just never go beyond magic?

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The point is that love isn't just a linguistic phenomenon – it's some other internal phenomenon or experience that happens to cause linguistic expression (among other forms of expression or behavior modulation.)

Love is something we feel; words are evidence of it. We don't define love as a pattern that shows up in a series of conversations. There are many other ways of generating those same words.

Nobody's trying to reject materialism here. I myself happen to believe that love is nothing more than (or at least, can entirely be explained by) electrochemical processes in my brain. And I agree that that doesn't make love any less magical ^_^

I think by "correlating patterns", the person you're replying to meant "doing just enough processing to produce the salient performances". But it's possible to have additional "inner mental life" beyond the minimum that's necessary to give rise to an outward behavior. (In this case, the outward behavior is speech.) A single interface can have many different implementations, as it were.

> But it's possible to have additional "inner mental life" beyond the minimum that's necessary to give rise to an outward behavior.

NNs have inner layers, and some of the properties in those inner layers translate to real concepts. I understand that people assume computer=not-sentient, and I wouldn't classify chatGPT as achieving sentience yet obviously, but that doesn't mean the way it learns is fundamentally different from how sentient beings learn, or that if we scaled it up a lot, and gave it a more diverse set of data, it couldn't achieve something indistinguishable from consciousness.

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