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Personally, I'm not convinced, in your hypothetical, that the participant does not "know" Thai at that point. Seeing a young child learn language, it's a lot mo

by ghayes 4y ago

Personally, I'm not convinced, in your hypothetical, that the participant does not "know" Thai at that point. Seeing a young child learn language, it's a lot more adaptive than I think we tend to see language learning, as we often think about learning language as a teenager and not a toddler. I agree the machine does not know what a pizza tastes like nor does it know what it is to _want_ pizza, but I'm not sure that is what is being contested here.

abeppu 4y ago
Maybe the participant "knows" something about the Thai language? But that's different from knowing anything about the things being discussed. The jumping off point for this, which motivated a question about what it is to know, was the comment: > What this article is not showing (but either irresponsibly or naively suggests) is that the LLM knows what a bag is, what a person is, what popcorn and chocolate are, and can then put itself in the shoes of someone experiencing this situation, and finally communicate its own theory of what is going on in that person's mind. That is just not in evidence. Knowing something about the patterns of word order in Thai is not the same as knowing about the world being discussed in Thai.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  Language doesn’t come first for humans. Experiencing the world does. Languages then become symbols to communicate experiencing the world through our senses and emotional/mental states. I’m not sure why people get hung up on language models not being the same thing when they start and end with language.
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    Indeed. Give a model some kind of autonomous sensors, make it stateful with memory and continuous retraining, make it possible for it to act and learn from its actions, maybe even model some kind of hormonal influence etc. and I'm pretty sure that at some point an actual Theory of Mind will actually emerge and we'll be debating what kind of legal rights such a model should possess. We're pretty clearly not at that point yet.
catach 4y ago
> I agree the machine does not know what a pizza tastes like nor does it know what it is to _want_ pizza It also does not "know" that a pizza is an object in a world, because none of the words its working with are attached to any experience or concepts.

by ghayes 4y ago

abeppu 4y ago

Maybe the participant "knows" something about the Thai language? But that's different from knowing anything about the things being discussed. The jumping off point for this, which motivated a question about what it is to know, was the comment: > What this article is not showing (but either irresponsibly or naively suggests) is that the LLM knows what a bag is, what a person is, what popcorn and chocolate are, and can then put itself in the shoes of someone experiencing this situation, and finally communicate its own theory of what is going on in that person's mind. That is just not in evidence. Knowing something about the patterns of word order in Thai is not the same as knowing about the world being discussed in Thai.

spacemadness 4y ago
Language doesn’t come first for humans. Experiencing the world does. Languages then become symbols to communicate experiencing the world through our senses and emotional/mental states. I’m not sure why people get hung up on language models not being the same thing when they start and end with language.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  Indeed. Give a model some kind of autonomous sensors, make it stateful with memory and continuous retraining, make it possible for it to act and learn from its actions, maybe even model some kind of hormonal influence etc. and I'm pretty sure that at some point an actual Theory of Mind will actually emerge and we'll be debating what kind of legal rights such a model should possess. We're pretty clearly not at that point yet.

catach 4y ago

> I agree the machine does not know what a pizza tastes like nor does it know what it is to _want_ pizza It also does not "know" that a pizza is an object in a world, because none of the words its working with are attached to any experience or concepts.