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How do you know you aren't just "simulating" understanding?
by ImHereToVote 3y ago
How do you know you aren't just "simulating" understanding?
- otikik 3y agoI don't need to fully understand my own thought process completely in order to understand (or - simulate to understand) that what the machine is doing is orders of magnitude less advanced. I say that the machine is "simulating it understands" because it does an obviously bad job at it. We only need to look at obvious cases of prompt attacks, or cases where AI gets off rails and produces garbage, or worse - answers that look plausible but are incorrect. The system is blatantly unsophisticated, when compared to regular human-level understanding. Those errors make it clear that we are dealing with "smoke and mirrors" - a relatively simple (compared to our mental process) matching algorithm. Once (if) it starts behaving like a human, admittedly, it will be much harder for me to not anthropomorphize it myself.
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago[flagged]
- GTP 3y agoYou definitely know when, while talking with a person, you just pretend to understand what this person is saying vs you actually understand. Is an experience that every human has in his/her life at least once.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoNo you cannot know this, because you might just be simulating that you understand. You cannot reliably observe a system from within itself. It's like running an antivirus on an infected system is inherently flawed, because there might be some malware running that knows every technique the antivirus uses to scan the system and can successfully manipulate every one of them to make the system appear clean. There is no good argument for why or how the human brain could not be entirely simulated by a computer/neural network/LLM.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoWonder if anybody has used Godel's Incompleteness to prove this for our inner perception. If our brain is a calculation, then from inside the calculation, we can't prove ourselves to be real, right?
- brabel 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
- johnisgood 3y agoSolipsism can be fun to think about, but it makes no practical difference unless you do "wake up" (in a pod, for example) at least once.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoAnd even then that could be part of the simulated experience
- GTP 3y agoBut we don't know for sure whether intelligence is computable or not.
- zeroonetwothree 3y agoIntelligence is obviously computable since the universe is computing it all the time.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoMaybe that is the point, we can't prove it one way or the other, for human or machine. Can't prove a machine is conscious, and also can't prove we are. Maybe Gödel's theory could be used that it can't be done by humans. A human can't prove itself conscious because inside the human as system, can't prove all facts of the system.
- rightbyte 3y agoThink stereotypical sales people talking about your tech and you talking about it.
- criley2 3y agoAll human understanding is simulated (built by each brain) and all are imperfect. Of course reality is simulated for each of us -- take a psychedelic and realize no one else's reality is changing! I find it interesting how discussions of language models are forcing us to think very deeply about our own natural systems and their limitations. It's also forcing us to challenge some of our egotistical notions about our own capabilities.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoYou can't come up with a difference between a person saying 'hello' and an mp3 player saying 'hello'?
- pixl97 3y agoGet back to me when the MP3 has a few billion words (songs?) it can choose from, and when you walk into the room with it and say 'howdy' it responds correctly with 'hello' back.
- nayuki 3y agoThe good ol' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room argument ... with audio files!
- ImHereToVote 3y agoExcept the chinese room creates a model that can create uniqe answers.