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> Doesn't this also involve people not having another category aside from "cognition" to put natural language processing acts in? Yes, of course this might be

> Doesn't this also involve people not having another category aside from "cognition" to put natural language processing acts in? Yes, of course this might be an even more primary reason; do not attribute to malice what can be explained by laziness. However, AI researchers should be wary of their language, that point is hammered in most curricula I have seen. So at the least it is negligence. > I mean, there's a common counter argument to the "this is not cognition" position. That is: "you're just using 'cognition' as a placeholder for whatever these systems can't do". Very valid point, but we know current deep learning mechanisms do not mimick human learning, language understanding and production in any way. They are far too simplified and specific for that. Neural network activation functions are a far cry from neural spiking models and biological neural connectivity is far more complex than the networks used in deep learning. The attention mechanism that drives recent LLMs is also claimed to have some biological similarities, but upon closer inspection drawing strong analogies is not credible [1]. computer vs. human visual recognition tasks it falls apart and higher-level visual concepts. [2] 1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2020.00029/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2020.0002... 2. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08764 https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08764

sdenton4 4y ago
Why does nlp need to mimic human brain function to count as cognition? This seems overly reductive; I see no reason to believe that biomimicry is necessary for intelligence. The argument is overly reductive: only brains think, and this is not a brain, ergo it does not think. (To be clear, I don't think this system is an AGI; just making the point that better goal posts are needed...)
- gillesjacobs 4y ago
  I agree and focusing on biomimetics is indeed insufficient in discussions of what constitutes intelligence. The discussion on what constitutes intelligence and cognition is too vast and complex. The central point is that haphazard and unsubstantiated authromorphising language should be barred from scientific papers. We know that an LLM does not "know", "believe", "intent", or "feels" because they lack any form of integrated, general human-like intelligence. It is trivially correct to use different terms like "models", "predicts", "outputs emotive expressions" and avoid unevidenced claims of human behaviour. I also wanted to nuance my opening post: I file the "don't humanise ML models"-comment of peer review under "minor issues". This means that it is an issue with the paper that does not prevent publication. This is not a hill I am willing to let good research die on.
- eternalban 4y ago
  Even if matter other than brains were capable of thinking, that does not ipso facto bestow the title 'thinking thing' onto things which are not brains. All we can say is "well, it is certainly not a brain!". That is it. Also, computation is not cognition. We need to focus on what distinguishes cognition from computation, if indeed these are distinct. I feel we are using the wrong words and thus having unproductive conversations regarding this topic (in general).

sdenton4 4y ago

Why does nlp need to mimic human brain function to count as cognition? This seems overly reductive; I see no reason to believe that biomimicry is necessary for intelligence. The argument is overly reductive: only brains think, and this is not a brain, ergo it does not think. (To be clear, I don't think this system is an AGI; just making the point that better goal posts are needed...)

gillesjacobs 4y ago
I agree and focusing on biomimetics is indeed insufficient in discussions of what constitutes intelligence. The discussion on what constitutes intelligence and cognition is too vast and complex. The central point is that haphazard and unsubstantiated authromorphising language should be barred from scientific papers. We know that an LLM does not "know", "believe", "intent", or "feels" because they lack any form of integrated, general human-like intelligence. It is trivially correct to use different terms like "models", "predicts", "outputs emotive expressions" and avoid unevidenced claims of human behaviour. I also wanted to nuance my opening post: I file the "don't humanise ML models"-comment of peer review under "minor issues". This means that it is an issue with the paper that does not prevent publication. This is not a hill I am willing to let good research die on.
eternalban 4y ago
Even if matter other than brains were capable of thinking, that does not ipso facto bestow the title 'thinking thing' onto things which are not brains. All we can say is "well, it is certainly not a brain!". That is it. Also, computation is not cognition. We need to focus on what distinguishes cognition from computation, if indeed these are distinct. I feel we are using the wrong words and thus having unproductive conversations regarding this topic (in general).