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If I talk to Alice about my day, and then Bob reads the transcript and I ask him about our conversation, and he has no idea that he wasn’t Alice, Bob does not h
by fauxpause_ 3y ago
If I talk to Alice about my day, and then Bob reads the transcript and I ask him about our conversation, and he has no idea that he wasn’t Alice, Bob does not have internal state. He can continue the conversation. There is a brief moment of constructing some state to construct the answer. But there is literally nothing persisting and Bob wouldn’t flinch at all if we change details in the conversation history on the next response.
This is explicitly a stateless function.
- jackmott42 3y agojust zoom out and consider the text box you are typing in part of the system, and then that text box is the state.
- fauxpause_ 3y agoThat is at best an internal state representation of the text, not of the entity on the other end.
- FeepingCreature 3y agoThis is a misleading analogy because Bob "reads the transcript"; we generally view "reading" as separate from our conscious narrative. However, consider the alternate scenario where Bob "replays the stream of consciousness" from Alice. In that case, we may argue that Bob has conscious continuity from Alice. The argument would then be that the context window is functionally closer to "replaying a stream of consciousness" than "reading a transcript".
- fauxpause_ 3y agoIt’s literally the text. It is not a stream of consciousness. There is no carryover of “consciousness” state. It is the raw text without even the embedding information, not that we should consider the embedding representation to be an internal state, because it is not. That difference is the whole point. There is nothing to transfer.
- FeepingCreature 3y agoHumans verbalize their conscious state. What little consciousness GPT has, ie. CoT and the like, it picked up by imitating human verbalization of conscious interiority. (I don't think layer state qualifies as consciousness.) As such, I believe two things: 1. the generated text is, if at all, very weak conscious state; 2. if there is any, it is there.
- fauxpause_ 3y agoAny definition that tries to claim your response here is consciousness is wrong and uninteresting to me. It is subjective either way.
- grantcas 3y ago[dead]