4 ms·

I want you to find me a human who (a) has defined a loss function for social interaction and (b) consciously performs the statistical analysis involved in fitti

I want you to find me a human who (a) has defined a loss function for social interaction and (b) consciously performs the statistical analysis involved in fitting that loss function in social settings. LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think. They do not choose to obey the requirements of a loss function; it is simply how they work, like any machine. Humans do not work this way, and the difference is fundamental.

naasking 3y ago
> I want you to find me a human who (a) has defined a loss function for social interaction and (b) consciously performs the statistical analysis involved in fitting that loss function in social settings. Why would they have to do that consciously? Do you think LLMs do this "consciously", if that term even applies? I wouldn't think so. The loss function applies during training, that ultimately defines the weights which guide their "thinking process". Analogously, human experiences in childhood shape our ultimate neural weights which guide our thinking processes in social situations in adulthood. > LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think. You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have.
- DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
  > Why would they have to do that consciously? Do you think LLMs do this "consciously", if that term even applies? Because the only thing an LLM does is apply statistics to inputs to generate outputs. That's literally it. It's just a pile of statistics. To draw an analogy to humans requires that humans are similarly statistical. LLMs do not have cognitive processes, while humans do, so the analogy obviously requires making some kind of leap between the two if it is to have any merit whatsoever. My request lines up with this: if LLMs are "not so different" from humans, and if LLMs work only based on statistics, then this requires humans also work only based on statistics. I want to see evidence of this. > You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have. Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something? And therefore we can't know how they work, so we get to just make up wild claims about their capabilities, and then smarmily position ourselves as some kind of authority on the matter when other people talk about how they work? No, I don't think so. We do know how LLMs work, and the way they work is not thinking. They have no agency. Claims to the contrary are, frankly, absolutely absurd. They're just statistics. There's nothing magical about them. You should stop pretending there is.
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    > Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something? No, he's suggesting that the code behind the human brain is "ineffable or something". For all we know, human brains might be "just statistics", "nothing magical about them". You have no way of knowing that LLMs don't think, because we literally don't know what thinking is.
    - amazingman 3y ago
      By that standard we have no way of knowing whether rocks think, either.
      - bheadmaster 3y ago
        Exactly. The only reason we assume that rocks don't think is because they don't appear to be able to do things that would require thinking. LLMs, on the other hand...
    - DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
      > You have no way of knowing that LLMs don't think, because we literally don't know what thinking is. Except we do know enough to know that LLMs are not following the same processes as humans. Or, at least, I know enough, and experts in the field that I talk to know enough. I suppose I can't speak for you.
      - bheadmaster 3y ago
        > Or, at least, I know enough, and experts in the field that I talk to know enough. I suppose I can't speak for you. In other words, "trust me, bro". You claiming that you're an expert (or talk with experts, and therefore are something-like-an-expert) about something doesn't convince me of anything except that you're full of yourself. Any idiot (or LLM, for that matter) can write such a comment on the internet. Providing logical arguments and real information, however, would be much more effective at convincing me that LLMs cannot think. But that would require you to actually be an expert, wouldn't it?

naasking 3y ago

> I want you to find me a human who (a) has defined a loss function for social interaction and (b) consciously performs the statistical analysis involved in fitting that loss function in social settings. Why would they have to do that consciously? Do you think LLMs do this "consciously", if that term even applies? I wouldn't think so. The loss function applies during training, that ultimately defines the weights which guide their "thinking process". Analogously, human experiences in childhood shape our ultimate neural weights which guide our thinking processes in social situations in adulthood. > LLMs do not have cognitive processes. They do not think. You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have.

DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
> Why would they have to do that consciously? Do you think LLMs do this "consciously", if that term even applies? Because the only thing an LLM does is apply statistics to inputs to generate outputs. That's literally it. It's just a pile of statistics. To draw an analogy to humans requires that humans are similarly statistical. LLMs do not have cognitive processes, while humans do, so the analogy obviously requires making some kind of leap between the two if it is to have any merit whatsoever. My request lines up with this: if LLMs are "not so different" from humans, and if LLMs work only based on statistics, then this requires humans also work only based on statistics. I want to see evidence of this. > You don't know what thinking is mechanistically, so you can't make this claim. I don't know why people keep pretending we have knowledge that we do not in fact have. Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something? And therefore we can't know how they work, so we get to just make up wild claims about their capabilities, and then smarmily position ourselves as some kind of authority on the matter when other people talk about how they work? No, I don't think so. We do know how LLMs work, and the way they work is not thinking. They have no agency. Claims to the contrary are, frankly, absolutely absurd. They're just statistics. There's nothing magical about them. You should stop pretending there is.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  > Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something? No, he's suggesting that the code behind the human brain is "ineffable or something". For all we know, human brains might be "just statistics", "nothing magical about them". You have no way of knowing that LLMs don't think, because we literally don't know what thinking is.
  - amazingman 3y ago
    By that standard we have no way of knowing whether rocks think, either.
    - bheadmaster 3y ago
      Exactly. The only reason we assume that rocks don't think is because they don't appear to be able to do things that would require thinking. LLMs, on the other hand...
  - DonaldPShimoda 3y ago
    > You have no way of knowing that LLMs don't think, because we literally don't know what thinking is. Except we do know enough to know that LLMs are not following the same processes as humans. Or, at least, I know enough, and experts in the field that I talk to know enough. I suppose I can't speak for you.
    - bheadmaster 3y ago
      > Or, at least, I know enough, and experts in the field that I talk to know enough. I suppose I can't speak for you. In other words, "trust me, bro". You claiming that you're an expert (or talk with experts, and therefore are something-like-an-expert) about something doesn't convince me of anything except that you're full of yourself. Any idiot (or LLM, for that matter) can write such a comment on the internet. Providing logical arguments and real information, however, would be much more effective at convincing me that LLMs cannot think. But that would require you to actually be an expert, wouldn't it?