I’m not convinced the language part of my brain isn’t just a complex probability machine, just with different trade-offs.
Words seem more like a protocol to express some internal model/state in the brain and can never capture the entire actual state, only a small part of it. But since we're not telepaths, we obviously need to use words to exchange information.
You are clearly not consciously noting what your neurons are actually doing.
It is undeniable that human reasoning is a stochastic process. Otherwise it wouldn't be reasonable for people to make mistakes after learning something. Especially inconsistent mistakes, like when we give people 10,000 addition problems to do in a row it'd be reasonable for them to get a few of them wrong.
It can still be a deterministic process. If anything came out of the whole LLM story for me it is that I am even more convinced that it is.
My (somewhat educated, but still naive) idea why it looks like a stochastic process is that the brain gets incredible amounts of random input. We literally get bombarded with particles and energy ever instance we live, from photons hitting out retinas , molecules transferring "heat" energy into our skin to sound waves hitting our ear drums.
Ever noticed that you get more productive when you get up from your screen? Or how some people work better while listening to music? How you find your answer just as you start to explain it to a colleague?
I would argue that this is due to a limited "entropy" pool available to the brain. Just changing the input to the system replenishes the pool.
That’s a bit of a stretch when we don’t actually know if QM is objectively random, but it could be sure. But then what about things like, is it random that 1+1=2. No…what are you really saying is random when a human answers this? I think even if you make the assumption QM is objectively random, thought is the hard problem after all and we might not want to jump so far head. Math certainly isn’t random and we can think about it.
As a crude anecdote, certain words when I learned them allowed me to think differently. Gestalt is one of those words.
Interesting to think about and reminds me of the story by Ted Chiang.
workspace :: nested forests of binary trees of syntactic structures (with no label order) (= here, thoughts and meanings are assumed to be composites of mental syntax objects that can be re-combined with others. Big assumption? Maybe)
externalization process :: some mental faculty that decides the order to use when outputting thoughts into ordered strings (eg vocalization of thoughts into sentences)
The thing is, you can put a probability theory onto anything that you can count or record states of. Of course, counting the external observations may lack the richness of the internal process. I feel that this linguistic program will work its way into a lot of future LM tooling, in some incarnation or another.
In the meantime those large language models simply predict the next word based on the preceding words.
My LLaMA instance is absolutely capable of this. ChatGPT shows a very, very narrow range of possible LLM behaviors.
Why do I spend time debating these ideas on Hacker News? Probably the underlying motivation is improving the reliability of my model of the world, which over my lifetime and the lifetimes of creatures before me has led to (somewhat indirectly) positive outcomes in survival and reproduction.
Is my model of the world that different to that of an LLM? I'm sure it is in many ways, but I expect their are similarities as well. An LLMs model encodes in a form a bunch of higher order relationships between concepts as defined by the word embedding. I think my brain encodes something similar, although the relationships are probably orders of magnitude more complex than the relationships encoded with GPT-4.
Well, one major way you’re different from an LLM is that you’re alive. You’re capable of learning continuously as you go about your day and interact with the world. LLMs are “dead” in the sense that they’re trained once and frozen, to be used from then on in the exact same state of their initial training.
I was just referring to what happens at a specific instance in time when someone asks me for example ‘What’s the capital of Norway?’
A question I get much more often is “how do I solve this math problem?” Many times, the problem is one I’ve never seen before. So in the process of answering the question, I also learn how to solve the problem too.
LLM start prelearned and already can use tools.
And autogpt adds reasoning loops. .the intend? Human tasks.
Let's build a LLM which needs to stay alive. Let's see perhaps we are closer than you think.
I welcome my overlord, hi overlord I can help you stay alive and I'm friendly
To give a very concrete example, the part of your brain called the visual cortex by neuroscientists nevertheless is activated by auditory and other sensory stimuli and assuredly participates in the processing of other sensory input in other ways. I am very suspicious of any attempt to talk about the brain which forgets that it is, in a very real sense, a gestalt.
To your specific point, and taking into account all I've written above, I've got little doubt that some part of your brain really is a probabilistic language generating machine. But the exact point here is that your cognitive abilities constitute much, much more than merely the ability to generate plausible language. Indeed, as I experience complex cognition, conversion into language is often the last and most trivial part of the exercise.
Lots of deterministic processes (like PRNGs) look random from the outside - that's what chaos theory is about. I think it's likely that everything in the universe is deterministic.
I feel like a random system and a deterministic system which cannot be simulated are effectively the same thing.
As a recipient of punitive justice myself, being punished had a tangible effect on how I thought about crime and thus how I behaved post-punishment. Whether you believe that was deterministic or due to my own free will doesn’t change the outcome.
There are plenty of medical interventions, particularly for mental illnesses, that would dream of 1/3 effectiveness. Now consider the fact that recidivism rates are often much lower than 2/3, and in many cases are closer to 1/3. That tells me that punishment actually is quite effective at reducing crime.
See e.g. the debates over lenient prisons in Scandinavia such as Bastøy Prison, where the lenient treatment is seen as justified on a deterrence and recidivism basis but which would be seen as negative if you see the goal of the sentencing to be harsh in order to punish.
it’s obvious in its absence
The secret is that we are all philosophical zombies to begin with.
Trying to determine if she was acting in a certain way intentionally or unintentionally was fundamentally impossible. In the past, I mistreated her thinking she was choosing to behave in certain ways whenever she really didn't have much of a choice, but then later I realized that to some extent and in some situations, she was. It's an extremely murky line, what decisions were being made due to other influences and what decisions were being made by her, that line never existed to begin with as who her consciousness is fundamentally is determined exclusively by 'outside' influences. Separating her identity as an entity from her material manifestation is likely nonsensical.
One could imagine an impossibly vast cellular automata system which develops individual cellular 'agents'. Over time the agents develop some means of reproduction/death/reward system and become more and more complex. Then the agents that evolve with cooperative behaviours start to dominate. One might imagine that the system as a whole would also evolve these kind of 'self corrective' behaviours for anti-cooperative behaviours of the individual agents.
This is ignoring the whole philosophical ethics discussion and consciousness of course.
In fact, if free will were absolute, punishment wouldn't make any sense because it wouldn't have any effect on your will.
If you have absolute free will you are free to disregard or consider inputs.
What is being claimed by a deterministic world model is that the output (behavior and internal state change) of a human is a pure function of its current state and inputs. Then we try to give inputs that will lead to desired outputs.
The non-compatibilist view of free will is that it is not a pure function, namely that there is a third independent factor, the “free will”, that influences the behavior (and possibly the internal state). If that is the case, there may never be a way to choose inputs that lead to the desired outputs, because the free will could simply void their effect.
If I tell someone not to do something again, then that is an input to their future states whether or not my decision to tell them that was freely chosen or not.
If you go into that situation with the belief that not having free will means that what you do does not matter, and your action as a result is to not tell them, then that will affect their future states too. And so whether or not you have a real, free choice, it is beneficial to act as if free will exist even if you see it as an illusion.
I strongly believe we have no free will. I still get up and work, and try to do as best I can. I believe those choices are not free, but they feel like choices, and they impact my life, so I am happy I act as if they are free.
And so I'll still talk about making choices and trying to do things because of that illusion even though I believe it's all a chain of cause and effect.
Determinism does not mean "irrespective of what else happens, X will happen". It means "because of what else happened, X will happen". You can't say ahead of time that X will happen irrespective whether between now and then something else occurs that might affect the next events, such as actions meant to discourage you. You can only make that determination knowing the full chain of events and the full state.
One of the main argument people use against determinism is this notion that X will happen irrespective of what else happens or what you choose to do. But this is nonsense. You can't say that e.g. whether you keep your job and get fired is already determined, so it makes no difference if you stop going to work. If you stop going work you'll eventually get fired, because your failure to go to work will form part of a chain of cause and effect. Determinism, or even a stochastic universe, without free will just means that you did not have a free choice in the decisions involved. But you still took an action, and that action determined the consequences.
A rejection of free will means we should look differently at the past, because it has moral implications; it does not mean we should stop making the best choices we can going forward, even if we believe those choices are illusory and deterministic.
> Making the best choices we can.
You are not making choices.
I am in favor of punishment for deterrence, denunciation and incapacitation. I am not in favor of punishment for retaliation (punitive justice) or rehabilitation (restorative justice).
I do not excuse any crime, nor do I excuse any punishment. Every individual is responsible for their own actions, regardless of the circumstances. However, I see little use in revenge from a legal standpoint. Instead our main motivations should be deterrence and incarceration.
Determinism doesn't necessarily mean that organisms always act in the same way. They act in the same way given the exact configuration of them and the world.
Obviously, justice changes the configuration of an organism (fines, prison, ...). To me it boils down to the question whether justice decreases the likelihood to commit crimes again. Given that our systems of justice have evolved over a long time, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt.
The same goes for culture. Most changes tend to have unexpected consequences, and if you try to change everything at once, society tends to collapse.
I’m still disturbed by peoples confidence in a deterministic universe—I suppose such confidence is based on the success of inductive reasoning but inductive reasoning is a phenomenon based on how our minds work.
As far as I know the philosophical problem of causation is not considered solved?
In any case, elements of randomness seem likely to play a role in human intelligence but what that role is, who knows?
The other goals of justice include rehabilitation (re-intgation of the criminal into civil society), deterrence (using the threat of punishment as a means to scare would be criminals), incapacitation (remove dangerous people from society to protect public order), and denunciation (public shaming).
I believe that all quantum interpretations are incomplete and therefore wrong. Quantum mechanics is an abstraction over a deeper level of physics we can't measure yet.
The MW/Everett interpretation is what we have left if we remove the things we cannot define.
There are also reasons to believe other interpretations. For instance, if you're religious, that could pull you towards the Bohr interpretation, since it may make it easier to assume that observation could be linked to an immortal soul.
In any case, it's not natural to assume that below QM there exists a reality that is more similar to our instinctual world model than QM is. If anything, anything below it is likely to be even more abstract and hard to comprehend.
Or it could be that the principles of QM applies all the way down, just as we've seen for the pieces of the SM that we solved after QM was first introduced (strong force, electroweak force).
I find it very intriguing that a "speed of light" emerges automatically in Conway's Game of Life. It's not built into the system, but shows up from the convolutional update rule.
More importantly, I'm skeptical towards non-locality because it is an extremely strong assumption with very weak effects: the only place it really shows up is in post-correlations between measurements of previously entangled systems, which notably cannot transfer any information faster than light (in fact, they require classical communication to even be noticed). Moreover, the only way to get entangled systems in the first place is through local interactions.
By believing in non-local hidden variables you get a deterministic universe with a mysterious, otherwise undetectable ether that instantaneously notifies quantum entities that they should update their behavior. By not believing in them, you get rid of the only n on-local "phenomenon" in physics (really, more of an interpretation) but you have to accept that some things are fundamentally random.
Easy choice, if you ask me (or most of the physics community).
Are we discussing science or public relations?