Are humans not also mixing a bag of experiences and coming up with a response? What's different?
A lot. Like an incredible amount. A description of a thing is not the thing.
There is sensory input, qualia, pleasure & pain.
There is taste and judgement, disliking a character, being moved to tears by music.
There are personal relationships, being a part of a community, bonding through shared experience.
There is curiosity and openeness.
There is being thrown into the world, your attitude towards life.
Looking at your thoughts and realizing you were wrong.
Smelling a smell that resurfaces a memory you forgot you had.
I would say the language completion part is only a small part of being human.
Just because it’s not persistent doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Like, I’m sort of inclined to agree with you, but it doesn’t seem like it’s something uniquely human. It’s just a matter of degree.
Living creatures have fundamental impetus to grow and reproduce that LLMS and AIS simply do not have currently. Not only that but animals have a highly integrated neurology that has billions of years of being tune to that impetus. For example the ways that sex interacts with mammalian neurology is pervasive. Same with need for food, etc. That creates very different neural patterns than training LLMS does.
Eventually we may be able to re-create that balance of impetus, or will, or whatever we call it, to make sapience. I suspect we're fairly far from that, if only because the way LLMs we create LLMs are so fundamentally different.
You can't prove humans do either. You can see how many times actual people with understanding something that's written for them. In many ways, you can actually prove that LLMs are superior to humans right now when it comes to understanding text.
Emphasis mine.
No, I don't think you can, without making "understanding" a term so broad as to be useless.
You can do this trick as well. Haven't you ever been to a class that you didn't really understand, but you can give correct answers?
I've had this somewhat unsettling experience several times. Someone asks you a question, words come out of your mouth, the other person accepts your answer.
But you don't know why.
Here's a question you probably know the answer to, but don't know why:
- I'm having steak. What type of red wine should I have?
I don't know shit about Malbec, I don't know where it's from, I don't know why it's good for steak, I don't know who makes it, how it's made.
But if I'm sitting at a restaurant and someone asks me about wine, I know the answer.
You said nothing meaningful that couldn't also have been spat out by an LLM. So? What IS then the secret sauce? Yes, you're a never resting stream of words, that took decades not years to train, and has a bunch of sensors and other, more useless, crap attached. It's technically better but, how does that matter? It's all the same.
For a LLM, language is their whole world, they have no body to care for, just stories about people with bodies to care for. For them, as opposed to us, language is first class and the rest is second class.
There is also a difference in scale. LLMs have been fed the entirety of human knowledge, essentially. Their "database" is so big for the limited task of text generation that there is not much left for creativity. We, on the other hand are much more limited in knowledge, so more "unknowns" so more creativity needed.
intention is what exactly? It's the set of options you imagine you have based on your belief system, and ultimately you make a choice from there. That can also be replicated in LLMs with a well described system prompt. Sure, I will admit that humans are more complex than the context of a system prompt, but the idea is not too far.
It is a duck of quacks like a duck.
Humans with their tiny amount of data and "special sauce" can produce much more consistent results even though they may be giving the objectively wrong answer. They can also tell you when they don't know about a certain topic, rather than lying compulsively (unless that person has a disorder to lie compulsively...).
More and more researches are showing via brain scans that we don’t have free will. Our subconscious makes the decision before our “conscious” brain makes the choice. We think we have free will but the decision to do something was made before you “make” the choice.
We are just products of what we have experienced. What we have been trained on.
Maybe yours isn't, but mine certainly is. Intelligence is an emergent property of systems that get good at prediction.