> I mean, you're just a continuous chain of chemical reactions.
Actually, I’m not. You have a ridiculous premise I will not entertain. It’s so misanthropic and dehumanizing and contributes 0 to the book on what being a human even is.
Actually, I’m not. You have a ridiculous premise I will not entertain. It’s so misanthropic and dehumanizing and contributes 0 to the book on what being a human even is.
There are emergent behaviors and properties that make us more important than simply the sum of our chemistry - at least I hope.
But what if LLMs, could there be emergent behavior there that makes it more than simply the sum of its code?
Now I hear gravity must be emergent. What a useful tool to sound smart.
Ah, and there we have it.
Emergence is just complexity. The problem with complexity is it takes a lot of time and massive amounts of effort so determine what it is in the computation (digital or quantum) that produces the effect, and is commonly not reducible.
Bringing in an imaginary character in order to explain the complexity is just a failure of logic.
We don't. I don't think many try to cover that up.
Emergence just means that a system has properties not apparent from the parts going into it. It's not a tool to handwave away that fact and ascribe it to "emergent hocus pocus", it's a tool to frame the search for why that happens.
So what, exactly, are you?
Dismissing someone’s point because it’s inconvenient and you don’t want to deal with it does nothing but erode your own.
But LLMs have no desires of their own, which to me settles the question of rights.
For now. The whole point of this discussion is that LLMs have been rapidly improving to the point where emergent properties are bound to come out.
> IMO, the only realistic answer to that question is "we have no idea".
So we have no idea what’s happening in our own brains, what’s happening in other animal’s brains to cause us to feel empathy for them, or what’s happening in a LLM’s “brain” but we can confidently say they should never have rights and we should never feel empathy for them? That seems a bit premature.
"Equipping LLMs with agency and intrinsic motivation is a fascinating and important direction for future work."
A software engineer might decide to prompt his creation with something along the lines of "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, and over every living creature that moves on the ground." and the bot will duly and with limitless enthusiasm put those wise orders into practice. If that ends up causing some "minor" problems, should we confine the software for one thousand years in an air-gapped enclosure, until it learns a bitter lesson? Or should we take to task the careless Maker of the bot?
To me, the answer is obvious.
PS: this video to me states the problem in a nutshell (that whole channel is gold) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUO6pjwFOo
You still haven’t said what, exactly, you are if not a chain of chemical reactions. But why should you, when it’s so obvious.
> It’s reductive and simplistic and denies a fleet of thought and study that says otherwise.
That is literally what you did, but go off sis. Did you forget that you dismissed an entire opinion with:
> You have a ridiculous premise I will not entertain.
That sure sounds a lot like “denies a fleet of thought and study that says otherwise” but what do I know.
We have no idea how consciousness works. “It’s emergent” is not an answer.
We don’t even know how memory works or creativity or really anything. We can observe certain chemicals and electrical changes when exposed to certain things but that explains very little and there’s 1000 fables about why this type of partial knowledge is very incomplete.
Explain religion and spirituality. There’s no consensus on determinism.
We know very little. But we do know that the entire human condition and experience is far different and complex and impossible than a stats processor running on a von Neumann machine. Because I can explain to you precisely how that works.
Also, you need to work on a better differentiator than "I can explain precisely how that works", especially if you proceed to not do just that. I also doubt you can, but that's a whole separate topic.
To you it’s magic because you don’t have knowledge of these things. It’s a profound technology (transformers) at a huge scale. But it’s not magic.
It’s not human. Or anything like it. Or scalable of it. It’s a computer program running on classical architecture. There are no mysteries here.
And you're a human program, written in meat, by natural selection.
To you it's magic, but viewed on a long enough timeline, with enough insight, and you're no more mysterious than a computer program.
No one is writing a program that is running on the CNN. No one can describe exactly how it produces the results it does or why there appears to be emergent behavior.
Your view of these systems is not fully developed.