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Comment by semiquaver | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, and you’re just a next-word-sayer.

Chinese whispers, simulacra... I don't have the energy to argue after being name called, but you get the point. Yes LLMs are useful in building automatic telling machines, but ask it to do anything more substantial and all you are doing is burning tokens at the altar of Anthropic and hope. That just doesn't fly in regulated industries.

I love this argument. Not because it’s true but because it betrays the posters doubt in their own sentience.

It's impossible for someone to doubt their own sentience. The literal act of doubting is enough to dissipate all doubt. Solipsism is essentially the one certainty that every mind out there has.

Doubting the sentience of machines and even other humans is perfectly fine though. Only empathy allows people to make the leap and assume other humans have souls.

So you posit that humans are solipsistic by default, but some (most?) develop more and realize they’re not the only conscious being out there?

"Realize" is too strong a word. You're the only one who can verify that you're the soul who's staring out at the world through your eyes. For all you know, everyone else could be just biological automatons, golems.

Any leap beyond that is based on empathy. You have a soul, and you are human, therefore other humans could have souls too. It's a spiritual belief. Answers to questions that cannot be answered.

That's the standard Piagetian understanding of child development, yes. Humans do not start out with theory of mind, and are thus inherently solipsistic, but in most cases an understanding that there are other conscious beings with their own thoughts, goals and feelings develops between the ages of 2 and 7.

Developing theory of mind is one of the key milestones in child development.

    > It's impossible for someone to doubt their own sentience. The literal act of doubting is enough to dissipate all doubt.

i never found this convincing. just because you can loop does not mean you are sentient/conscious. what would it look like if you didn't exist and there was just a system that interrogated neural inputs and produced neural outputs in a loop? if anything, LLM's as an existence proof made this more likely to be the actual case.

> Solipsism is essentially the one certainty that every mind out there has.

Not I. I'm just a Boltzmann brain.

I’m not sure what sentience has to do with it.

This is wrong. Human thinking and speech isn't autoregressive like LLM inference.

while the how is different, the what has many parallels. E.g. both the brain and LLMs appear to learn distributions of representations, they both develop a hierarchy of those representations, both have early layers that process simple features, with later ones processing more abstract concepts, both predict missing information...

The post I responded to stated that the commenter was just a next-word-sayer, but that's wrong. The similarities you draw aren't really relevant to my reply.

no disrespect intended, however I think my response is relevant, because the broader topic here is whether LLMs and the human mind share similar functions. They both do in fact have a lot of overlapping features, and a fundamental one is predicting next-thing, be that a word, image, or otherwise.

It's not relevant. However, if you want to talk about a broader point, that's ok.

> LLMs appear to learn distributions of representations, they both develop a hierarchy of those representations, both have early layers that process simple features, with later ones processing more abstract concepts, both predict missing information.

This type of superficial comparison isn't very meaningful, it's trivial to liken anything to a human biology in this manner.

A plane and a bird both use wings to produce lift, it doesn't then follow that a bird and a plane are meaningfully similar.

> A plane and a bird both use wings to produce lift, it doesn't then follow that a bird and a plane are meaningfully similar.

The use of Bernoulli's principle to achieve lift is a fundamental and meaningfully similar function of both airplane and bird wings. That functional similarity is well known.

> This type of superficial comparison isn't very meaningful

The comparisons I provided are fundamental to both the human mind and LLMs.. that's pretty darn relevant.. and whether you find that trivial or not is a matter of opinion.

Do you not say your words one-at-a-time like everyone else? Otherwise I can’t see how my comment is “wrong”

Even if you could understand human cognition to the level required to say, confidently, that it’s done one word at a time, it’s likely not! Natural language is not a prerequisite for human intelligence, as evidenced by the fact that we went from primates to commenting on HN.

Natural language is, however, a prerequisite for the existence of LLMs. It’s more similar to methods for storing and retrieving information, like the printing press or a database, than it is to a sentient being.

That’s not to say that LLMs can’t do crazy things, because they already have. Our language can encode a whole lot of information, and it’s incredible that we’ve found a way to distill that so effectively.

Deepseek zero didn’t mix up all languages in something very efficient?

Interesting thought but I assume a lot of samples in the training corpus are examples of translation between languages and the same text in different languages.

Even if you could understand human cognition to the level required to say, confidently, that it’s done one word at a time, it’s likely not!

I think they’re not talking about cognition, but about output: regardless of what may be happening inside your brain, ultimately one word at a time comes out of your mouth, right? And you can’t then unsay it.

When you put it in those terms, LLMs are in exactly the same boat.

Only one word at a time!?! It's time you embrace the way of the diffusion model and hazily refine your entire thought until it's coherent.

> Do you not say your words one-at-a-time like everyone else

You're conflating being autoregressive with being sequential.

I mean, conversationally, of course we work a little more like that (I tend to think in whole sentence blocks before I say them but I suppose they assemble themselves largely word-by-word, or word-by-word with a bit of editing).

But right now I am trying to design something -— a physical mechanism with a particular enclosure — that I cannot clearly describe (this makes it hard to research). I designed a previous version without even knowing the words that do, in fact, describe that.

I have a theory about it, animated in my mind, that I can only test by making it.

If I want you to know about it, I can either show you it or work out words to describe it, which will be inadequate to describing it.

The idea for it came from seeing things nobody has ever put into words for me.

"Next-word sayer" doesn't describe any of this process, does it?

(This is also why text-to-CAD is a bullshit idea)

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