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Comment by dfdxdydz | Hacker News Reader

Humans mind is just neurotransmitters moving around in a big blob of flesh - that’s literally what they are: neurotransmitters factories that do what neurotransmitters generators are programmed to do through evolution and training (aka life experience). We shouldn’t anthropomorphise humans because it misleads people who don’t understand neurobiology and cognitive science very well.

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Are you suggesting you understand brains well enough to program one? Or that you believe any human alive is even remotely close to having this understanding? Or perhaps does your complete lack of understanding of the complexity of human programming lead you to believe a simple little token prediction program is equivalently complex?

The suggestion is, you don't know either whether out brains ain't just "probabilistic token generators" so insisting there is nothing when we don't know, is maybe also not the right strategy.

Is there any indication from our current understanding that brains are nothing more than probabilistic token generators? Not like we have no understanding of the brain.

There are strong indications that brains are prediction engines. Tokens are an implementation detail of LLMs and irrelevant to the discussion.

So we know that implementation doesn't matter as long as it is somehow making predictions (and predictions also on different things)?

Most living things are prediction engines in a way, why compare to the brain then to start with and not, e.g., bacteria?

Implementation does matter, my point is that different implementations can lead to the same result.

And why compare to the brain? Mostly because of complexity. I can't interface with a bacteria in any meaningful way, but I can interface with an LLM to a significant degree.

But we don't know - just saying it could isn't enough.

Bacteria are quite complex, btw.

"I can't interface with a bacteria in any meaningful way"

But you do. There are more bacterias in and on the body, than body cells. We are bacterias forming lasting bonds and we still interact with the free floating ones in various ways. Mainly in the gut and that has many effects, also on the brain, but also in various other ways we are beginning to understand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome

So no idea about a microbiome consciousness - but who am I to know.

This is getting incredibly stupid. The implementation defines the compute budget and the ability to learn continuously and consequently the ability to retain knowledge.

According to you, a model that can simply predict the entire future and then pre-record the answers would be considered intelligence simply because you're obsessed with the hypothetical power of prediction.

The truth is that the intelligence doesn't sit inside the model parameters, the model parameters are just the current state of the intelligence. The training process itself is the intelligence and the model parameters are just an artifact that can be copied around.

There are strong indications that brains use predictive encoding and that each individual neuron has an internal model of itself and its environment.

That's nothing like a neuron in a neural network and especially nothing like the current transformer based LLMs that do not use predictive coding at all.

The closest equivalent to the human nervous system is to think of LLMs as a single massive neuron.

Your strategy is wrong because you are assuming neuroscience has not made any discoveries about how the human brain works.

Worse false equivalence I've read on HN for a while.

We don't anthropomorphise humans.

Edit: quite literally not possible.

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