9 ms·
I’m not convinced the language part of my brain isn’t just a complex probability machine, just with different trade-offs.
by bemmu 3y ago
I’m not convinced the language part of my brain isn’t just a complex probability machine, just with different trade-offs.
- thereare5lights 3y agoThere's no evidence for nondeterminism in the human brain
- anikan_vader 3y agoThere is plenty of evidence for non-determinism in matter, which the brain is notably made out of.
- Legend2440 3y agoNot necessarily. Everything is deterministic above the quantum level, and it's possible that quantum non-determinism is the result of deterministic processes we can't see. Lots of deterministic processes (like PRNGs) look random from the outside - that's what chaos theory is about. I think it's likely that everything in the universe is deterministic.
- kedean 3y agoIf it's not actually possible to simulate a system within the confines of physics, does it being deterministic actually matter outside of thought experiments? I feel like a random system and a deterministic system which cannot be simulated are effectively the same thing.
- zappchance 3y agoIt only matters in matters of free will and ethics. One actual scenario where it's relavant would be the discussion around the criminal justice system. If the universe is deterministic, how can punitive justice be justified?
- brutusborn 3y agoIt can be justified in a deterministic universe because it makes criminals less likely to commit crime in future. As a recipient of punitive justice myself, being punished had a tangible effect on how I thought about crime and thus how I behaved post-punishment. Whether you believe that was deterministic or due to my own free will doesn’t change the outcome.
- tchaffee 3y agoPunishment is not effective for most people in reducing crime. One thing that is effective is increasing the perceived risk of getting caught. People rarely commit crimes when they are sure they will be caught.
- murderfs 3y agoFor the sake of argument, let's assume that punishment has absolutely no effect on whether someone will commit a crime. Even so, there's still a benefit to imprisonment: it separates criminals from society for a period of time, during which they won't be committing crimes against it.
- tchaffee 3y agoSure but separation can be a harsh punishment or a caring and comfortable place. Some countries do the latter and have lower recidivism rates.
- chongli 3y agoEven in the worst case, recidivism rates only reach around 2/3. That means punishment (incarceration) reforms criminals 1/3 the time. When you consider all of the problems with prisons in the U.S., and all of the hurdles offenders have to pass in order to successfully reintegrate into society, it’s quite remarkable that so many manage to do so. There are plenty of medical interventions, particularly for mental illnesses, that would dream of 1/3 effectiveness. Now consider the fact that recidivism rates are often much lower than 2/3, and in many cases are closer to 1/3. That tells me that punishment actually is quite effective at reducing crime.
- aoeusnth1 3y agoAnd how is a seeded RNG that an LLM uses any logically different from a deterministic brain? I’m not sure why any of this physics would be relevant to the functional behavior of the brain vs an LLM.
- goatlover 3y agoOr the Many Worlds Interpretation is the correct understanding of quantum mechanics. The MWI people will say that indeterminism comes from the Copenhagen idea of there being a random collapse. But since measuring devices and human brains are also quantum systems, there's no reason to propose a collapse. Decoherence would be the reason we only see one result.
- Legend2440 3y agoMaybe, but there's no data to support one interpretation over another. I believe that all quantum interpretations are incomplete and therefore wrong. Quantum mechanics is an abstraction over a deeper level of physics we can't measure yet.
- trashtester 3y agoActually, there is a reason to support one interpretation over another. Specifically that it's really hard to define what an "observer" is in the Copenhagen interpretation. The MW/Everett interpretation is what we have left if we remove the things we cannot define. There are also reasons to believe other interpretations. For instance, if you're religious, that could pull you towards the Bohr interpretation, since it may make it easier to assume that observation could be linked to an immortal soul. In any case, it's not natural to assume that below QM there exists a reality that is more similar to our instinctual world model than QM is. If anything, anything below it is likely to be even more abstract and hard to comprehend. Or it could be that the principles of QM applies all the way down, just as we've seen for the pieces of the SM that we solved after QM was first introduced (strong force, electroweak force).
- layer8 3y agoObjective-collapse theories can actually be experimentally tested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-collapse_theory#Tests_of_collapse_models https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-collapse_theory#Test...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phreeza 3y agoThe problem is that any hidden variable resolving quantum indeterminacy would have to be non -local, i.e. able to propagate itself faster than light, which would also violate our understanding of the world quite a bit.
- llaolleh 3y agoIt won't be the first time our understanding is flipped upside down if such a framework of thought arises.
- phreeza 3y agoYea I don't disagree, just wanted to point out that the hidden variable would not mean that matter actually behaves like a classical mechanics machine.
- Legend2440 3y agoLocality may also be an abstraction. I find it very intriguing that a "speed of light" emerges automatically in Conway's Game of Life. It's not built into the system, but shows up from the convolutional update rule.
- dgfl 3y agoYour comparison with Conway's Game of Life is interesting, since that's inherently local. More importantly, I'm skeptical towards non-locality because it is an extremely strong assumption with very weak effects: the only place it really shows up is in post-correlations between measurements of previously entangled systems, which notably cannot transfer any information faster than light (in fact, they require classical communication to even be noticed). Moreover, the only way to get entangled systems in the first place is through local interactions. By believing in non-local hidden variables you get a deterministic universe with a mysterious, otherwise undetectable ether that instantaneously notifies quantum entities that they should update their behavior. By not believing in them, you get rid of the only n on-local "phenomenon" in physics (really, more of an interpretation) but you have to accept that some things are fundamentally random. Easy choice, if you ask me (or most of the physics community).
- adrianN 3y agoIn most systems, if you simulate them for sufficiently long, macroscopic behavior depends on quantum effects. For example, if you simulate simple newtonian gravity on three bodies, your numeric precision quickly grows such that you need to know the position of the objects more accurately than Heisenberg allows.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoNot necessarily. As you fine grain the simulation enough, eventually you run out of energy in the universe to compute even a second of simulated output.
- ignoramous 3y agoA recent discussion: People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36367147
- wzdd 3y agoTo expand on this, healthy human brains seem to be made of many interacting systems which function in different ways. It may be that in the future we view the search for one simple formula for "intelligence" / "understanding" / "consciousness" (pick your poorly-defined poison) the same way biologists view the concept of elan vital.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoYes. But modeling language doesn’t mean you’ve made a good model of anything else. Now, I think LLMs have incidentally modeled a ton of small simple systems very well. But those systems, and the ones LLMs haven’t mastered, would be better off modeled with models built for those systems specifically.
- bemmu 3y agoYup, while an LLM might know a cat in language contexts, I know what petting a cat feels like, both physically and emotionally. Can run little physics or visual simulations in my head etc., and have needs and drives which are obviously all still missing.
- chaosjevil 3y agoNah. Human utterances convey purpose on a discursive level; including your comment or mine. We say stuff because we want to do something, like showing [dis]agreement or inform another speaker or change the actions of the other speaker. This is not just probabilistic - it's a way to handle the world. In the meantime those large language models simply predict the next word based on the preceding words.
- flangola7 3y ago> We say stuff because we want to do something, like showing [dis]agreement or inform another speaker or change the actions of the other speaker. My LLaMA instance is absolutely capable of this. ChatGPT shows a very, very narrow range of possible LLM behaviors.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MrScruff 3y agoWe're able to do something analogous to reinforcement learning (take on new example data to update our 'weights'). Why do I spend time debating these ideas on Hacker News? Probably the underlying motivation is improving the reliability of my model of the world, which over my lifetime and the lifetimes of creatures before me has led to (somewhat indirectly) positive outcomes in survival and reproduction. Is my model of the world that different to that of an LLM? I'm sure it is in many ways, but I expect their are similarities as well. An LLMs model encodes in a form a bunch of higher order relationships between concepts as defined by the word embedding. I think my brain encodes something similar, although the relationships are probably orders of magnitude more complex than the relationships encoded with GPT-4.
- chongli 3y agoIs my model of the world that different to that of an LLM? Well, one major way you’re different from an LLM is that you’re alive. You’re capable of learning continuously as you go about your day and interact with the world. LLMs are “dead” in the sense that they’re trained once and frozen, to be used from then on in the exact same state of their initial training.
- indigoabstract 3y agoI am pretty sure that my understanding of something (or lack of) is not encoded into words and probabilities. It's more like a feeling of "I got this figured out" or "I haven't grasped this". Words seem more like a protocol to express some internal model/state in the brain and can never capture the entire actual state, only a small part of it. But since we're not telepaths, we obviously need to use words to exchange information.
- Tenoke 3y agoThe feelings are just how the underlying probabilities are presented to the conscious part of your thinking. You are clearly not consciously noting what your neurons are actually doing.
- bemmu 3y agoA feeling is an embedding?
- roenxi 3y agoIf brains aren't a complex probability machine, how is it possible that people get the same sort of math problems right and wrong in an inconsistent manner? Or mis-speak? It is undeniable that human reasoning is a stochastic process. Otherwise it wouldn't be reasonable for people to make mistakes after learning something. Especially inconsistent mistakes, like when we give people 10,000 addition problems to do in a row it'd be reasonable for them to get a few of them wrong.
- williamtrask 3y agoFood for thought: randomness is in the eye of the beholder. It’s only random to you if you don’t know how to predict it. So can a mind ever truly be stochastic? Perhaps to the minds of others, but never to itself.
- thfuran 3y agoNo, it's random if it can't be perfectly predicted with perfect knowledge.
- asddubs 3y agomaybe, but the language part of your brain isn't the only part of your brain
- mrjin 3y agoNope, LLM is and that's all he meant.
- jasmer 3y ago[dead]
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThat just means you don't believe in free will, which is fine. This also means you had no choice to make this comment otherwise :)
- nathan_compton 3y agoThere isn't really, properly, a "language part" of your brain. There are certainly areas of the brain that are more active or participatory in language generation, but the division of the brain into functional areas is much more conventional than, for example, the division of a computer into a mother board, a processor, a GPU, etc. In a much more rigorous sense, these computer parts constitute discrete units. Your brain is a bag of cells for which functional divisions are, in a very real sense, incidental. To give a very concrete example, the part of your brain called the visual cortex by neuroscientists nevertheless is activated by auditory and other sensory stimuli and assuredly participates in the processing of other sensory input in other ways. I am very suspicious of any attempt to talk about the brain which forgets that it is, in a very real sense, a gestalt. To your specific point, and taking into account all I've written above, I've got little doubt that some part of your brain really is a probabilistic language generating machine. But the exact point here is that your cognitive abilities constitute much, much more than merely the ability to generate plausible language. Indeed, as I experience complex cognition, conversion into language is often the last and most trivial part of the exercise.