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A witness to a crime thinks that there were 6 shots fired; in fact there were only 2. They remember correctly the gender of the criminal, the color of their jac

A witness to a crime thinks that there were 6 shots fired; in fact there were only 2. They remember correctly the gender of the criminal, the color of their jacket, the street corner where it happened, and the time. There is no difference in their mind between the true memories and the false memory. I write six pieces of code that I believe have no bugs. One has an off-by-one error. I didn't have any different experience writing the buggy code than I did writing the functional code, and I must execute the code to understand that anything different occurred. Shall I conclude that myself and the witness were hallucinating when we got the right answers? That intelligence is not the thing that got us there?

sangnoir 2y ago
People who are consistently unable to distinguish fiction from reality make terribly witnesses; if an obviously high crackhead would fare better than an LLM on the witness stand.
Gormo 2y ago
> Shall I conclude that myself and the witness were hallucinating when we got the right answers? If you were recalling stored memories of experiences that were actual interactions with external reality, and some of those memories were subsequently corrupted, then no, you were not hallucinating. If you were engaging in a completely endogenous stochastic process to generate information independently of any interaction with external reality, then yes, you were hallucinating. > That intelligence is not the thing that got us there? It's not. In both cases, the information you are recalling is stored data generated by external input. The storage medium happens to be imperfect, however, and occasionally flips bits, so later reads might not exactly match what was written. But in neither case was the original data generated via a procedural algorithm independently of external input.

sangnoir 2y ago

People who are consistently unable to distinguish fiction from reality make terribly witnesses; if an obviously high crackhead would fare better than an LLM on the witness stand.

Gormo 2y ago

> Shall I conclude that myself and the witness were hallucinating when we got the right answers? If you were recalling stored memories of experiences that were actual interactions with external reality, and some of those memories were subsequently corrupted, then no, you were not hallucinating. If you were engaging in a completely endogenous stochastic process to generate information independently of any interaction with external reality, then yes, you were hallucinating. > That intelligence is not the thing that got us there? It's not. In both cases, the information you are recalling is stored data generated by external input. The storage medium happens to be imperfect, however, and occasionally flips bits, so later reads might not exactly match what was written. But in neither case was the original data generated via a procedural algorithm independently of external input.