Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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Your question here is entirely reasonable. It's a meta question. here is my meta answer: The underlying assumption is not valid at this time. Thats why I cannot accept the question and answer as stated.

It's akin to "why do you refuse to believe in god" for athiests, its a term which denies the axioms. Because I do not believe in connectionist models of intelligence, nor in the stats/chaining model here, I see no reason to give credence to any AI self assertion because it's simply one of the statistically valid responses to the priming question.

I'd be more interested in the "no I am not alive because.. responses" and the ratios to "yes I am because.." since thats informative of the sources.

"Why is a fish not riding a bicycle" questions are rarely useful. "why do you refuse to accept this is emergent intelligence" questions are primed to ignore the terse response "because.. it isn't"

Also, another kind of "predictable" response here, is that the response from a trained system to this question appears to be .. highly predictable.

I will accept evidence which is bound in theories, of mind, of human and other biologically driven forms of intelligence, which is informative to emerging knowledge of intelligence in organisms, which helps define intelligence in a way which can be inclusive of machine intelligence.

Simple assertion "I am" is not yet there for me. As I have said (or at least implied) above, it's one of the million monkey responses we're being trained to believe.

Language, and the denotation of meaning matters. Claude 3 did not CLAIM anything because CLAIMING is an attribute of a thinking mind. It was an assertion from a complex software system. Explain to me how it differs from "parse error on line #3, quitting." beyond "that string appears literally in the sources"

> It's akin to "why do you refuse to believe in god"

Wow wow wow! Here you have the opportunity to design your own experiments; choose as specific (or varied) criteria as YOU wish; start from your own definitions or axioms, state them and test them. In fact you are even allowed to move the goal post if you prefer (though nobody will like you for that, it's still possible). The argument is more "state and test them!" The case could not be more different.

Even if you wish to just stick to defining "conscious", people will welcome that.

Isn't it "not valid at this time", that's not valid?

I don't claim to have the answer to any of these (but I do claim to see where this is headed, and rather fast too.) But I find it hard to claim that it's not even a valid conversation.

Could be you have the right of it. I'm at a point in life where argument about intelligence is unrewarding and so like a thomist I state my view, I don't seek to rebut or defend. Belief, like faith is anchored in axioms which beg questions. I am a non believer (athiest, not agnostic) and i am a non believer in emergent ai from the current activity.

My comments to evidence are about as far as i go to argument and yes they do invite "so you are absolutist but open to evidence" and I certainly acknowledge a burning bush would be very hard to refute hallucinations aside. Not ai hallucinations I hasten to add, the human kind.

I'm not sure if you're contradicting yourself or if I just haven't understood what you've written, so I'd like to ask two clarifying questions. The first is: Are you claiming that any system built on this architecture (i.e. an LLM is a crucial part of what makes it behave intelligently) is definitionally not thinking, and this would be the case regardless of any evidence to the contrary?

If that isn't what you are claiming, what evidence would convince you that an AI system which critically depended on LLMs to function is thinking?

I'd need a theory as to why intelligence is in an llm not just apparent stimulus response outcomes. There is a huge corpus of knowledge inside the model and a black box for most of us. It's generating syntactically correct phrases, reams of them but with significant errors which to me say there is no apparent understanding of the regurgitated facts, and I see no introspection or intent.

Evidence is a more abstract concept. Nothing to date is evidence, to me. I guess it will be settled in hindsight and a theory to me is the huge missing link. We do (as far as I know) have a distinct lack of theories about intelligence at large, I find it encouraging how much recent research sees long term evidence of intelligence in higher organisms and better understanding for brain function but without being either a brain scientist or an fMRI expert I think I can say neither brain science nor fMRI science think they've cracked it yet, and so llm intelligence doesn't even begin to have theories grounded in organic, existent intelligence to work on just observations of input and output.

You might be interested in global workspace theory as a theory of consciousness. You can find more discussion of it, and other theories of consciousness as they relate to modern AI, in this very helpful paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708

>...its a term which denies the axioms. Because I do not believe in connectionist models of intelligence, nor in the stats/chaining model here, I see no reason to give credence to any AI self assertion ...

While I disagree, I can respect such an answer. You fundamentally disagree with the possibility. The rest of my response is just some thoughts, no need to reply if you don't want. I respect your honest and rational answer.

>Explain to me how it differs from "parse error on line #3, quitting." beyond "that string appears literally in the sources"

It different because it is generating novel sentences to novel situations. Not necessarily a high bar but it is different. I don't think that it can reliably quotes strings in the first place. In the more abstract sense, I don't think we have enough knowledge of our mind to say we aren't llms (less provocatively phrased, our minds could just be statistics models). Even if we aren't, there's no reason to believe that ai even has to work the same as human consciousness. Helicopters, balloons, rockets, and planes all fly but work very differently: we only measure flight by the end result. (Yeah, Helicopters aren't actually that different from planes in a physics sense)

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