all conversations appear like mimicry no matter you are made up of carbon or silicon
Ultimately though, an LLM has no “ideas”, it’s purely language models.
for example?
There is also the concept of qualia, which are the subjective properties of conscious experience. There is no way, using language, to describe what it feels like for you to see the color red, for example.
There are millions of examples of usage of the word red - none of them communicate the subjective experience of seeing red.
The brain is purely physical, sure, there is a physical process that can be described in language when a person sees red. Explaining that process and every fact about the physics of light and color theory to a blind person won't make them understand what seeing red feels like. It can't be communicated in language, or if it can, there are no examples of it having ever been done.
> Relational representations don't need external reference systems.
What? This is irrelevant, I'm not saying that there is no such thing as subjective experience, I'm saying that communicating the essence of subjective experience is impossible. All semantics are relational, but not all relationships exist, not all sentences have meaning, and not all things that have meaning can necessarily be expressed using semantic relations.
This is pretty uncontroversial and common to most humans. If you've never experienced something and told someone, "You've got to see it yourself, no description can come close", then you need to get out more. If you have, then the existence of qualia is obvious, and the limitations of language in communicating our sense experience is clear.
The trick is that all of them provide perspectives and the model composes those perspectives in the embedding space. "Red" is related to apples but also to communism in its internal vector space. And it also related to all situations where humans used the word "red" and expressed emotions, encoding emotional valence as well.
I think confusion comes from how we expect models to represent things. People think models represent the thing in itself, but instead they represent how each thing relates to other things. Thus inputs are both content and reference, they have dual status, and are able to create this semantic space from themselves without external reference.
In a relational system you don't need access to the object in itself, just how its perception relates to other perceptions.
In your mind you may know what the color “green” is, but can you describe it without making analogies?
We humans attempt to describe those ideas, but we cant accurately describe color.
We know it when we see it.
I don't think I would put it in the way that LLM has no "ideas"; I would say it doesn't have generate ideas exactly as the same process as we do.