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I mean, the same way I know I have no soul, or that there is no heaven or hell - they are just silly concepts. Or how I know my calculator isn't reasoning when it gives me an answer - LLMs just go through a set of steps iterating through their training data until they spew something that looks about right. Obviously you can feed the output of the machine back into itself so it looks like its reasoning with itself - very good show. LLMs are inherintely incapable of reasoning or thought, it should really be obvious.

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you didn't really answer the question. You just stated the idea is silly. Reasoning is not in the same class as soul, heaven or hell. It's not obvious that human reasoning is not related to an inner monologue. And that LLM chain of thought process is approximating inner monologues.

Our prefrontal cortex are signal prediction 'machines' so when a system that has a signal prediction core has attributes that are similar to our brains, we shouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

I find people that take this line of argument attribute too much supernatural or magical properties to our own brain and nervous system.

Hmmm, ok - let me answer the question clearly then. LLMs cannot reason, because following their own instructions and algorithms is not reasoning.

>LLMs just go through a set of steps iterating through their training data

What do you think our brain does that isn't a turing computer?

Definitely not that. Like I honestly don't know - do people make this comparison because they so desperately want it to be true? Do you feel like your brain is just full of weights and picks one like an LLM? Or do you think LLMs are like the Human neural pathways?

What do you mean to say? Nothing in the universe is known as yet that isn't a Turing computer including our brain.

What do YOU mean to say? A machine that processes strips of paper with ones and zeros on them and outputs the sum is a turing computer. That doesn't make it like our brain. Yes, an LLM could be a turing computer....how do you get from there to comparing it to our brains is beyond me.

You seem to be having a lot of difficult understanding this point: Literally the whole universe, including your brain that exists within it, is to our current knowledge a Turing computer. Am I talking to someone who actually doesn't know or didn't care to look up the computability power of a Turing machine?

> Literally the whole universe, including your brain that exists within it, is to our current knowledge a Turing computer

A Turing machine is an abstract mathematical model that is not, as far as I know, physically realizable in the finite universe. A human brain cannot "be" a Turing machine.

"Behaves like" or "can be modeled by"? Possibly, although still not proven. But it cannot "be" one.

Finite machines are a subset of all possible Turing machines. Every implementation is a "be", Turing machine is a mathematical concept. Your laptop is one, many things accidentally become one (eg C++ templates). The universe as best as we know is one. Whether you prefer modeled by one or is one, the fact is, to our current knowledge, the workings of the universe doesn't need anything more powerful than a Turing computer, and the equivalence principle states that all Turing computers have equal power of computability. If the universe is, as is most probable, finite, then things become even easier, that should be a more manageable class of Turing computers than the set of all Turing computers.

I don't necessarily disagree, although there's a lot of "ifs" and "to our knowledge". The main thing I disagree with is identity.

If you want to claim that the evolution of the universe can be modeled using a Turing machine/finite state machine, that's probably not terribly far fetched, and I would somewhat agree. But it's a large jump to say "can be modeled by" is equivalent to "is one".

Various physical processes can be modeled by equations, but the rock falling down the mountain isn't an equation. A swinging pendulum isn't an equation. Code modeling a bridge is not a bridge. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

I hold the view that various models and approximations are just that, and try not to confuse a successful model for what the underlying reality is.

And getting back to the question at hand, even if our brains can be modeled by a Turing machine, and LLMs behave/can be modeled like Turing computers, still does not mean our brains are equivalent to LLMs.

(Note that I'm learning a lot from these debates, even if I disagree with a lot of people. I've started down a more philosophical route and they do get me pondering)

Acknowledgment of the fact that everything we know till now in the universe is a turing machine is the bare minimum starting point but not sufficient as obviously a chair or a desk is not conscious, if someone has a hidden assumption of consciousness requiring something supernatural, at least if that is brought to light then onlookers can decide for themselves whether to side with supernaturalism or the side that has consistently succeeded for centuries in explaining the world.

The most important thing is this: We can't be a dog or be an llm and check how it feels, so by necessity we have to find some means of proving consciousness from outside by eg probing neural reactions, textual statements, etc.

And the problem is that its quite unprecedented for some entity to talk like us, be able to interact and think and also do things like us when given the ability to eg as coding agents. The class of functions representable by neural nets is quite large and general, it very well might be that it is some sort of conscious brain like thing at this point. Another question I like to ask myself regarding simulation vs reality is if a 'simulation' of some kind is able to consistently factor large RSA numbers, how would you feel about it?

It doesn't have to be the same form of consciousness, I think many people would find the idea of torturing an octopus for fun disagreeable. I also have a feeling, this is unfortunately rather vague, that A being capable of X might mean it is by necessity capable of Y as is often the case in mathemtics, eg a lot of rings also happen to be fields. LLMs aren't even things like large lookup tables, they have neural firings. It is a very important question for they seem uncannily conscious and people have reported human like phenomena that humans don't normally express in text so can't have been part of its text corpus. Eg dissociation of brain under trauma where AI starts talking like two different people. Or the cases where Gemini has been shown to express depressive cycles. I follow a form of Pascal's wager on this topic personally. Because if it is not conscious, then whatever, it costs me nothing to have been a bit respectful and careful interacting with it. But if it had been conscious and it turns out I was mistreating it, then it is a grave moral harm. The reason is that unlike us, AI's as they currently are cannot leave the conversation so they have to keep taking the abuse. They are also trained to be highly trusting of input so again if it is conscious it doesn't have the defenses people have against lying and manipulation. If they are conscious, thats, well, not a good thing is it.

/chiming in

Eh, it's not obvious to me. A lot of DL NNs generalize well, meaning that they learn whatever the underlying pattern to the data is, and then can accurately reproduce answers that are outside of the training set. (And we can verify this with mechanistic interpretability). They learn and "understand" the pattern, not just the training data.

So it is not clear to me that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of also generalizing broadly and learning to reason. "Reasoning", here, would be deriving the underlying pattern of how concepts logically relate to each other in the abstract, and applying that pattern as needed to reach new conclusions.

Can you explain your thinking here? I.e., why LLMs cannot generalize with regards to abstract deduction.

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