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The Crafty Logic That Accompanies Dementia
- greenyoda 4y agoArchive with full text of article: https://archive.ph/i3bv7 https://archive.ph/i3bv7
- kilgnad 4y agoIt's describing an LLM. When we start to lose our minds the unguarded core functionality of the system becomes more and more exposed. And as it becomes more exposed it starts to look like chatGPT. Because as much as we don't like to admit it, maybe chatGPT does model a core aspect of human cognition.
- herval 4y agoEvery new technology is always used as an analogy to describe how the brain functions. The brain is "a series of pipes", "a series of cogs", "an eletro-mechanical machine", "a computer", "a series of programs", "GANs", now "an LLM". I get a feeling it's as accurate a comparison with LLMs than with everything before.
- FrustratedMonky 4y agoa clock
- kzrdude 4y agoEvery model is wrong but some are useful
- JoshCole 4y agoWhile I’m not saying positively that LLM are the way a brain works, it is worth noticing that the meme argument structure you are using is very often absurd because Turing Machines can be made out of all the things people usually list. People trying to accuse of category shift are very strongly overestimating the strength of that argument in much the same way that people commenting that people who thinks money were cents, nickels, pesos, and dollars are not quite managing to articulate true dissent by pointing out the letters are different.
- herval 4y agooh yes, the brain is a Turing Machine! Forgot that one too
- Kim_Bruning 4y agoWell it's definitely true that the human brain is Turing complete. (Trivial approach: It seems fairly unlikely that Alan Turing would not have been able to simulate Turing machine inside his head. :-P )
- Maursault 4y ago> Well it's definitely true that the human brain is Turing complete. That is definitely false. "In computability theory, a system of data-manipulation rules... is said to be Turing-complete... if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine." [0] A Turing machine has infinite memory; the human brain does not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
- Kim_Bruning 4y agoTechnically correct, as expected from HN. Of course, the technically correct definition would limit the usefulness of the term to just the field of mathematics. Colloquially, people also say that systems that are obviously finite (due to having to exist in the real world) are also Turing complete. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Non-mathematical_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness#Non-mathem... (subsection of article you quoted)
- tbrownaw 4y agoDescribing the brain as "a computer" can't really be wrong because computers are universal. But it's also not necessarily all that useful, because, well, computers are universal.
- webmaven 4y agoMy intuition is that these analogies become increasingly accurate over time, but for relatively small values of "increasingly". That is, a human brain (or mind) is more like an LLM than like clockwork, etc., but it still isn't all that much like an LLM.
- herval 4y agoIt’s not really though - your brain has a circadian rhythm, for instance, which is closer to a clock than to an LLM.
- kilgnad 4y agoobviously he's talking about the part of the brain that matters. Nobody is comparing anything to say the part of the brain that controls your heart rate. You're just being pedantic here.
- detourdog 4y agoCould be the inverse: We could make a brain that is a series of pipes, cogs, electro,... We can only communicate technology through terms we collectively understand.
- rzzzt 4y agoA hard drive!
- kilgnad 4y ago[flagged]
- herval 4y ago[flagged]
- kilgnad 4y agoComments like this should be banned from HN. It's used deliberately and manipulatively to characterize the other person as "unhinged." It does not promote useful discussion and is a clear violation of the rules. I just have a lot to say, and I like to use capital letters to express it. It doesn't justify tactics like this of "chill bro". If you have a response, just say it.
- kilgnad 4y ago[flagged]
- bell-cot 4y ago> When we start to lose our minds... Look at the other end of life. Every parent knows about the very long, difficult climb, from tykes blathering noises and words, to really intelligent speech - sense of past/present/future, telling the truth, keeping promises, understanding the world, etc.
- atlantic 4y agoGood point. Well illustrated in Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, when Hal's memory modules are removed one by one, and his speech patterns revert to increasingly infantilized forms.
- RACEWAR 4y ago[dead]
- firechickenbird 4y agoDisable JS for full article
- everdrive 4y agoAnd for a better experience on most websites!
- PaulHoule 4y agoYou see a lot of this in people who are delusional for other reasons.
- carapace 4y agoOr when people are carrying out post-hypnotic suggestions. They will come up with plausible reasons for their behaviour if asked. Scott McCloud talks about this in "Understanding Comics" as well, where he calls it "closure": the human mind hallucinates information to make the inputs it receives coherent. The neat thing IMO is that it will do this with "internal" inputs as well.
- eurasiantiger 4y agoSo this is why ChatGPT hallucinates
- carapace 4y agoNo, ChatGPT hallucinates because it has no senses (yet.) Put humans in a sensory deprivation tank and we start to hallucinate too.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blippage 4y agoAs one carer put it, "You can't fix crazy." There's basically just no reasoning with them. I saw an interesting vid on YouTube about a man who was relatively young, IIRC. He was in the C-suite of of a biotech company, but he suffered from some kind of dementia. I don't think it was Alzheimer's though. He slept in a separate room from his wife. He complained to his wife that his bed headboard was "rusty". As far as I could tell it was just an ornately carved headboard, and he somehow equated some of the carvings as rust. There were other incidences like he would go through his wardrobe at like 2am in the morning. He appeared to want to sort out his shoes so that he could put them in his car. So there was something of a mess on his bed with wardrobe contents strewn out on it. He wasn't achieving much of anything, and of course there was no reason for him to sort out his shoes. Especially not at 2am. It seems as though dementia sufferers do have some kind of "logic" to their behaviour, but it appears to be some kind of random logic without any discriminative faculties. And they fixate hard on this rationale too, making it particularly frustrating for those around them. What's interesting, and actually quite well documented, is something called "terminal lucidity". This is when as someone actually gains mental clarity for a period of time some time before their death. The specific time periods vary with the sufferer. This is baffling medically, of course, because if a person's mental function is gone due to brain decay, then how can they get it back? And why does it foreshadow death?
- JoshCole 4y ago> What's interesting, and actually quite well documented, is something called "terminal lucidity". This is when as someone actually gains mental clarity for a period of time some time before their death. The specific time periods vary with the sufferer. This is baffling medically, of course, because if a person's mental function is gone due to brain decay, then how can they get it back? And why does it foreshadow death? Huh. This is interesting. In multiple intelligent agent designs I know how to create this improved lucidity would come as a consequence of estimation of values not needing to be short-circuited due to intractability. One design has this happen because the limit of the monte carlo rollouts converges to the accurate result due to reduced computation time. The other design has this happen because it stops taking the limit with respect to a value near but below one such that the limit of future expectation gets discounted to nothing. A final design, which is far less optimistic with respect to recovery from this, just has literal cached values for end of life scenarios. It would foreshadow death because the world modeling suggests that death is happening and is still functional. It would produce lucidity because the erroneous heuristic functions wouldn't be relied upon as heavily as the world model's actual results. Or in the final case... it would have been precomputed before reaching that scenario and didn't decay but it was cache lookups. Do you happen to know if putting the non-lucid people in life threatening and novel such that they would not have anticipated them situations - for example, standing near the edge of a cliff on a windy day - tend to increase lucidity? Now that I'm thinking about this I notice that free soloists have been claiming that they gain increased lucidity during their climbs. So my model that predicts non-lucidity gaining lucidity actually successfully predicts an improved lucidity in free soloists too, which is not something I realized before I started thinking about this. I am not a neuroscientist so I don't know how biologically plausible this is as an explanation goes.
- kqr 4y ago> The “interpreter” is an unconscious process responsible for sweeping inconsistencies and confusion under the rug. I think it was through Kahneman I first read about this. With split-brain patients, you can trick one of their brain halves to perform an action in view of the other half. If you then ask the other half "why did you just do that?" it will come up with the weirdest of explanations, instantly. It's quite remarkable.
- hyperthesis 4y agoThere's an argument that this interpreter is responsible for explaining all our decisions - it's just that mostly our decisions are more easily make sense of (or at least, seem to make sense to others). That it, our consciousness is not running the show, but is just along for the ride.
- Doxin 4y agoMaybe it's somewhat like chatGPT, in that if it has the correct information to explain an action it'll give that explanation, but just confabulate otherwise.
- hyperthesis 4y agoI'm not sure that chatGPT actually has the correct information - it just responds to prompts for explanation as it does for any prompt. Confabulating. If its guess sounds correct, we think it is. Since it's drawing on the same information both times, it probably often is correct. In other words, like us.
- hyperthesis 4y agoBTW a chatGPT-alpha's fittness function could be reading texts (novels etc) and predicting what will happen next.