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> What seems to be missing from this discussion is that even if LLMs are sentient, there is no reason to believe that we would be able to tell by "communicating

> What seems to be missing from this discussion is that even if LLMs are sentient, there is no reason to believe that we would be able to tell by "communicating" with them. Unfortunately, that argument applies to you, yourself. I mean, presumably you know that you yourself are intelligent, but you must take it on faith that everyone else is. We all could just be a kind of Chinese Room, as far as you know. Communicating with us is not a sure way to know whether we are "really" sentient because we could just be automatons, insensate but sophisticated processes, claiming falsely to be just like you. > the LLM will assign some probability to every plausible completion -- so if you sample enough times, it will eventually say, e.g., "Well, I am not sentient." Perhaps so. I think the mistake is trying to split that hair at all. According to BF Skinner we are all automatons, and any sense of self-awareness is an illusion. Some psychologists and animal trainers have found find that model to be quite well explanatory for predicting observed behavior. Is it correct? We will never really know for sure. So, if a skeptical, knowledgeable user guardibg carefully against pareidolia encountered a chatbot that is sufficiently sophisticated to seem sentient to that user, it's tantamount to being sentient. For all practical purposes given our existential solitude, an entity that convinces us of its sentience is sentient, irrespective of any other consideration. Your example implicitly acknowledges that. If LaMDA would make such an elementary error, it must not be sentient. Conversely, if it did not make such errors, it may be sentient.

alew1 4y ago
> Unfortunately, that argument applies to you, yourself. Does it? I don’t think it would even apply to a reinforcement learning agent trained to maximize reward in a complex environment. In that setting, perhaps the agent could learn to use language to achieve its goals, via communication of its desires. But LaMDA is specifically trained to complete documents, and would face selective pressure to eliminate any behavior that hampers its ability to do that — for example, behavior that attempts to use its token predictions as a side channel to communicate its desires to sympathetic humans. Again, this is not an argument that LaMDA is not sentient, just that the practice of “prompting LaMDA with partially completed dialogues between a hypothetical sentient AI and a human, and seeing what it predicts the AI will say” is not the same as “talking to LaMDA.” Suppose LaMDA were powered by a person in a room, whose job it was to predict the completions of sentences. Just because you get the person to predict “I am happy” doesn’t mean the person is happy; indeed, the interface that is available to you, from outside the room, really gives you no way of probing the person’s emotions, experiences, or desires at all.
- rendall 4y ago
  > Just because you get the person to predict “I am happy” doesn’t mean the person is happy; indeed, the interface that is available to you, from outside the room, really gives you no way of probing the person’s emotions, experiences, or desires at all. But in that case the "sentience" (whatever that means) in question would have nothing to do with the person, who is just facilitating whatever ruleset enables the prediction. The person in that case is merely acting as a node in the neural network or whatever. Sure they would have feelings, being human, but they aren't the sentient being in question. Any apparent sentience would derive from the ruleset itself.
notahacker 4y ago
> Unfortunately, that argument applies to you, yourself. I mean, presumably you know that you yourself are intelligent, but you must take it on faith that everyone else is. We all could just be a kind of Chinese Room, as far as you know. Communicating with us is not a sure way to know whether we are "really" sentient because we could just be automatons, insensate but sophisticated processes, claiming falsely to be just like you. I'm not sure the conclusion that Chinese people might not understand Chinese either is the best counterargument to Searle's thought experiment or its conclusion effective use of words alone doesn't constitute sentience. At no point does the difficulty in establishing what Chinese people do and don't understand rescue the possibility the non-Chinese speaker knows what's going on outside his room, and most of the arguments to the effect that Chinese people understand Chinese (they map real world concepts to words rather than words to probabilities, they invented Chinese, they're physiologically quite similar to sentient me, they appear to act with purpose independently from communication) are also arguments to the effect that text-based neural networks probably don't. In a trivial sense, it's true I can't inspect others' minds, and despite what everyone says I could be the only thinking human being in existence. But I have a lot of reason to suspect that physiologically similar beings (genetically almost identical in some cases) who describe sensations in language they collectively invented long before I existed which very strongly matches my own experiences are somewhat similar to me, and that an algorithm running on comparatively simple silicon hardware which performs statistical transformations on existing descriptions of these sensations written by humans is simply creating the illusion of similarity. Heading in the other direction, humans can also be satisfied by the output of "article spinners" used by spammers to combine original texts and substitute enough synonyms to defeat dupe detectors, but I'm pretty sure the quality of their writing output shouldn't be given precedence over our knowledge of the actual process behind their article generation when deciding if they're sentient or not...
- rendall 4y ago
  > effective use of words alone doesn't constitute sentience I'm pretty sure it's not even necessary. > Searle It's the silliest argument ever and when I first heard it I thought surely no one will ever actually take that seriously, but here we are over 20 years later still discussing it as if it were a cogent argument that had something to say. The sentience is in the rule set. The understanding of the Searle-neuron-human is irrelevant even if she speaks every last dialect of Chinese. > I have a lot of reason to suspect... You do indeed, as do we all. Still, those who confidently assert that LaMDA has zero sentience whatever, so far aren't arguing convincingly. They're nibbling and quibbling around the pie if they're biting at all. I'll grant this: LaMDA almost certainly does not feel like I do, and I wouldn't trust it to wash and fold my laundry. If those are necessary for sentience LaMDA ain't it

alew1 4y ago

> Unfortunately, that argument applies to you, yourself. Does it? I don’t think it would even apply to a reinforcement learning agent trained to maximize reward in a complex environment. In that setting, perhaps the agent could learn to use language to achieve its goals, via communication of its desires. But LaMDA is specifically trained to complete documents, and would face selective pressure to eliminate any behavior that hampers its ability to do that — for example, behavior that attempts to use its token predictions as a side channel to communicate its desires to sympathetic humans. Again, this is not an argument that LaMDA is not sentient, just that the practice of “prompting LaMDA with partially completed dialogues between a hypothetical sentient AI and a human, and seeing what it predicts the AI will say” is not the same as “talking to LaMDA.” Suppose LaMDA were powered by a person in a room, whose job it was to predict the completions of sentences. Just because you get the person to predict “I am happy” doesn’t mean the person is happy; indeed, the interface that is available to you, from outside the room, really gives you no way of probing the person’s emotions, experiences, or desires at all.

rendall 4y ago
> Just because you get the person to predict “I am happy” doesn’t mean the person is happy; indeed, the interface that is available to you, from outside the room, really gives you no way of probing the person’s emotions, experiences, or desires at all. But in that case the "sentience" (whatever that means) in question would have nothing to do with the person, who is just facilitating whatever ruleset enables the prediction. The person in that case is merely acting as a node in the neural network or whatever. Sure they would have feelings, being human, but they aren't the sentient being in question. Any apparent sentience would derive from the ruleset itself.

notahacker 4y ago

> Unfortunately, that argument applies to you, yourself. I mean, presumably you know that you yourself are intelligent, but you must take it on faith that everyone else is. We all could just be a kind of Chinese Room, as far as you know. Communicating with us is not a sure way to know whether we are "really" sentient because we could just be automatons, insensate but sophisticated processes, claiming falsely to be just like you. I'm not sure the conclusion that Chinese people might not understand Chinese either is the best counterargument to Searle's thought experiment or its conclusion effective use of words alone doesn't constitute sentience. At no point does the difficulty in establishing what Chinese people do and don't understand rescue the possibility the non-Chinese speaker knows what's going on outside his room, and most of the arguments to the effect that Chinese people understand Chinese (they map real world concepts to words rather than words to probabilities, they invented Chinese, they're physiologically quite similar to sentient me, they appear to act with purpose independently from communication) are also arguments to the effect that text-based neural networks probably don't. In a trivial sense, it's true I can't inspect others' minds, and despite what everyone says I could be the only thinking human being in existence. But I have a lot of reason to suspect that physiologically similar beings (genetically almost identical in some cases) who describe sensations in language they collectively invented long before I existed which very strongly matches my own experiences are somewhat similar to me, and that an algorithm running on comparatively simple silicon hardware which performs statistical transformations on existing descriptions of these sensations written by humans is simply creating the illusion of similarity. Heading in the other direction, humans can also be satisfied by the output of "article spinners" used by spammers to combine original texts and substitute enough synonyms to defeat dupe detectors, but I'm pretty sure the quality of their writing output shouldn't be given precedence over our knowledge of the actual process behind their article generation when deciding if they're sentient or not...

rendall 4y ago
> effective use of words alone doesn't constitute sentience I'm pretty sure it's not even necessary. > Searle It's the silliest argument ever and when I first heard it I thought surely no one will ever actually take that seriously, but here we are over 20 years later still discussing it as if it were a cogent argument that had something to say. The sentience is in the rule set. The understanding of the Searle-neuron-human is irrelevant even if she speaks every last dialect of Chinese. > I have a lot of reason to suspect... You do indeed, as do we all. Still, those who confidently assert that LaMDA has zero sentience whatever, so far aren't arguing convincingly. They're nibbling and quibbling around the pie if they're biting at all. I'll grant this: LaMDA almost certainly does not feel like I do, and I wouldn't trust it to wash and fold my laundry. If those are necessary for sentience LaMDA ain't it