5 ms·

> Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different? How about this one: Humans experience time. Humans have agency. Humans can use both in their reply. If

> Do tell— how can you prove humans are any different? How about this one: Humans experience time. Humans have agency. Humans can use both in their reply. If I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, I feel a lot like a GTP. But I can also choose to pause and think about my response. If I do I might say something different, something hard to quantify but which would be more “intelligent”. That is the biggest difference to me; it seems that GTP can only do the first response. (what Kahneman calls System I vs System II thinking.) But there’s more - I can choose to ask clarifying questions or gather more information before I respond (ChatGTP with plugins is getting closer to that tho). I can choose to say “I don’t know”. I can choose to wait and let the question percolate in my mind as I experience time and other inputs. I can choose to not even respond at all. In its current form GTP cannot do those things. Does it need some level or simulation of agency and experience of time to do so? I don’t know

PartiallyTyped 4y ago
> Humans experience time And? So what? > Humans have agency. Which is what exactly? You are living in a physical universe bound by physical laws. For any other system we somehow accept that it will obey physical laws and there will not be a spontaneous change, so why are we holding humans to different standards? If we grow up and accept that free will does not actually exist, then all agency is is our brain trying to coordinate the cacophony of all different circuits arguing (cf Cognitive Dissonance). Once the cacophony is over, the ensemble has "made" a decision. >But I can also choose to pause and think about my response. Today ChatGPT 3.5 asked me to elaborate. This is already more than a non insignificant segment of the population is capable. ChatGPT 4.0 has been doing this for a while. What you describe as pausing and thinking is exactly letting your circuits run for longer - which again - is a decision made by said circuits who then informed your internal time keeper that "you" made said decision. > I can choose to say “I don’t know”. So does ChatGPT 4.0, and ChatGPT3.5. I have experienced it multiple times at this point. > I can choose to wait and let the question percolate in my mind as I experience time and other inputs. So do proposed models. In fact, many of the "issues" are resolved if we allow the model to issue multiple subsequent responses, effectively increasing its context, just as you are. So what's the difference?
- xur17 4y ago
  > What you describe as pausing and thinking is exactly letting your circuits run for longer - which again - is a decision made by said circuits who then informed your internal time keeper that "you" made said decision. Yup, and it feels like ChatGPT might be able to approximate this by giving the model a "think longer" output that feeds the output back into itself. I'm actually curious if immediately prompting the model "are you sure" or something else a few times could get you a similar effect right now.
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    I will try that and a couple other ideas and report back!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  Anyone care to explain why -N downvotes without any actual discussion or justification? Are dissenting opinions prohibited in this new iteration of HN?
- joshuahedlund 4y ago
  Fair points. Thanks for letting me refine and discard hypotheses. While I think about those, how about this? Language is not a complete representation of thinking. We use language to describe symbols, not even very precisely, and we can convert imprecise language to more precise symbols in our brain, manipulate them as symbols, and only then turn them back into language. That’s why you often cannot perfectly translate something between two languages. That’s why nine year olds, who have been trained on far less text, can learn to do math that ChatGTP never could without an API. (They don’t have to generate their output linearly - they can add the one’s column first) When Newton invented calculus he wasn’t predictively generating words by token; he performed logical manipulation of symbols in his brain first. That’s why LLMs can’t tell you where they got a specific piece of their own output from, while a human can. This matters because LLMs can’t convert it into a symbol and think about it directly and deduce new conclusions from it, while a human can. If fundamentally human thinking was just “LLM” we would have never generated the words to train ourselves on in the first place! And neither would any new idea that gradually built the library of human knowledge that eventually trained ChatGTP. The language is just the interface; it’s not the full essence of the thinking itself.

PartiallyTyped 4y ago

> Humans experience time And? So what? > Humans have agency. Which is what exactly? You are living in a physical universe bound by physical laws. For any other system we somehow accept that it will obey physical laws and there will not be a spontaneous change, so why are we holding humans to different standards? If we grow up and accept that free will does not actually exist, then all agency is is our brain trying to coordinate the cacophony of all different circuits arguing (cf Cognitive Dissonance). Once the cacophony is over, the ensemble has "made" a decision. >But I can also choose to pause and think about my response. Today ChatGPT 3.5 asked me to elaborate. This is already more than a non insignificant segment of the population is capable. ChatGPT 4.0 has been doing this for a while. What you describe as pausing and thinking is exactly letting your circuits run for longer - which again - is a decision made by said circuits who then informed your internal time keeper that "you" made said decision. > I can choose to say “I don’t know”. So does ChatGPT 4.0, and ChatGPT3.5. I have experienced it multiple times at this point. > I can choose to wait and let the question percolate in my mind as I experience time and other inputs. So do proposed models. In fact, many of the "issues" are resolved if we allow the model to issue multiple subsequent responses, effectively increasing its context, just as you are. So what's the difference?

xur17 4y ago
> What you describe as pausing and thinking is exactly letting your circuits run for longer - which again - is a decision made by said circuits who then informed your internal time keeper that "you" made said decision. Yup, and it feels like ChatGPT might be able to approximate this by giving the model a "think longer" output that feeds the output back into itself. I'm actually curious if immediately prompting the model "are you sure" or something else a few times could get you a similar effect right now.
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  I will try that and a couple other ideas and report back!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
Anyone care to explain why -N downvotes without any actual discussion or justification? Are dissenting opinions prohibited in this new iteration of HN?
joshuahedlund 4y ago
Fair points. Thanks for letting me refine and discard hypotheses. While I think about those, how about this? Language is not a complete representation of thinking. We use language to describe symbols, not even very precisely, and we can convert imprecise language to more precise symbols in our brain, manipulate them as symbols, and only then turn them back into language. That’s why you often cannot perfectly translate something between two languages. That’s why nine year olds, who have been trained on far less text, can learn to do math that ChatGTP never could without an API. (They don’t have to generate their output linearly - they can add the one’s column first) When Newton invented calculus he wasn’t predictively generating words by token; he performed logical manipulation of symbols in his brain first. That’s why LLMs can’t tell you where they got a specific piece of their own output from, while a human can. This matters because LLMs can’t convert it into a symbol and think about it directly and deduce new conclusions from it, while a human can. If fundamentally human thinking was just “LLM” we would have never generated the words to train ourselves on in the first place! And neither would any new idea that gradually built the library of human knowledge that eventually trained ChatGTP. The language is just the interface; it’s not the full essence of the thinking itself.