4 ms·
Well for a start the human mind involves a series of chemical reactions optimised by evolutionary wiring and physical world interaction towards self replication
by notahacker 4y ago
Well for a start the human mind involves a series of chemical reactions optimised by evolutionary wiring and physical world interaction towards self replication, so when a human says "I feel horny" there's a whole bunch of stuff going on in there that there's no reason to suspect is replicated in a neural network optimised for text transformation.
When a silicon based hardware computes that as a response, it isn't because a whole bunch of chemical reactions is making it desire particular sensations and hormonal responses, but because the limited amount of information on human horniness conveyed as text strings implies it's a high probability continuation to its input (probably because someone forgot to censor the training set...)
Insisting comparable outputs make the two are fundamentally the same isn't so much taking the human mind off a pedestal as putting a subset of i/o that pleases the human mind on a pedestal and arguing nothing else in the world makes any material difference.
- aqme28 4y ago“One is chemical and one is in silicon” doesn’t strike me as a very meaningful distinction. Why does that really matter?
- notahacker 4y agoA computer simulation of water can easily convince the human eye it's water, both in terms of pixel perfect representation and simulated behaviour in simulated environments. Until they try to put it in a bottle and drink it. Turns out that physics of what it actually is matters more than human observation that some of the pretty output patterns look identical or superior to the real thing. (And aside from being physically very dissimilar, stuff like even attempting to model human sex drive is entirely superfluous to an LLM's ability to mimic human sexy talk, so we can safely assume that it isn't actually horny just because it's successfully catfishing us!)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- teolandon 4y agoI've interacted with many people online, only through text, and my life has significantly changed because of many of those interactions. The effect on my life would have been the same whether the entities typing were made out of silicon or carbon.
- notahacker 4y agoSure, and I've been deeply affected by books, but I'm not going to start using that as a basis for an argument a book and a human think in exactly the same way
- teolandon 4y agoThis was in response to your comment about how you can tell that a water simulation is fake by trying to dip a water bottle in there. The distinction between chemical and silicon doesn't matter when the output is text. There's no physical test you can perform in the text, like dipping a water bottle in water, to see if it's chemical or silicon.
- notahacker 4y agoIf you test both on the same terms (i.e. only interaction via a remote terminal) then a decent simulation can entirely convince humans that a bottle has been dipped in it and water removed from it too. But it still doesn't have the essential properties of H20, it just looks like it in many ways to some imperfect observers. Testing is a moot point when my original argument was that it there is no reason to assume that a converts-to-ASCII subset of i/o as it is perceived by a [remote] human observer other is the only differences between two dissimilar physical processes (one of which we know results in sensory experiences, self awareness etc). Takes a lot more belief that the human mind is special to believe that sensory experience etc resides not in physics but whether human observation deduces the entity has sensory experience.
- web3-is-a-scam 4y agoThis kind of thought experiment always reminds me of Measure of a Man from Star Trek TNG.
- Xelynega 4y agoIt shouldn't really... Measure of a man was about social issues surrounding agi if we assume a perfect agi exists, but the only thing agi and language models have in common is a marketing department.