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Comment by micromacrofoot | Hacker News Reader

I'm not disagreeing, but what is thought?

If I write something down, read it, and write more words about those words... did I think about it? How would you prove that I did or did not?

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Thought is a derivative of sensory processing. LLM does not have a physical body to interact with the world, nor does it develop itself and learn anything by experiencing the world, it has no subjective experience or subjective feeling, it has no qualia, it's symbols are not grounded in physical reality and it's "thoughts" is a mere simulacrum. Anyone personifying an LLM is just derealised by convincing outputs, not realising that manipulating symbols according to rules does not imply understanding

You can go into things like the Chinese Room argument, but I'm not sure it leads anywhere.

I mean, there are still philosophers metaphorically fist fighting about this stuff. Last time I stepped into the fray on this topic I got clapped back by someone from an area of philosophy of mind from after I graduated. It was an interesting perspective that was unaware of, but I studied language, not mind:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47497757#47511217

I honestly never thought having a philosophy degree would be so relevant.

If you randomly sample letters from the alphabet and those letters make up actual words, then actual sentences. Did you think about it? Probably not

It's not sampling randomly though.

"it" is also not "thinking". It is still randomly (though not all words are equal probabilities) sampling from a distribution of words that have been stolen and it been trained on

If "randomly sampling from a trained distribution" can't produce useful, meaningful output, then deterministic computation is even more suspect. After all, it's a strict subset. You're sampling with temperature zero from a handcrafted distribution.

(this post directionality ok, but there's many a devil in the details)

> you randomly sample letters from the alphabet and those letters make up actual words, then actual sentences

That sounds like a decently apt description of how I (a human) communicate. The only thing is that I suppose you implied a uniform distribution, while my sampling approach is significantly more complicated and path-dependent.

But yes, to the extent that I have some introspective visibility into my cognitive processes, it does seem like I'm asking myself "which of the possible next letters/words I could choose would be appropriate grammatically, fit with my previous words, and help advance my goals" and then I sample from these with some non-zero temperature, to avoid being too boring/predictable.

How do we know we're not doing that based on our memories and reaction to external stimuli though?

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