4 ms·

Computability is of critical relevance. Our mental capacities can be patterns. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik

Computability is of critical relevance. Our mental capacities can be patterns. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding > There's literally almost nothing in the distribution of text tokens that corresponds to any features of these processes. There's nothing in evolutionary fitness that necessitates intelligence or reasoning ability either. Yet here we are. Sorry but if you don't see the connections then you need to do some reading on theory of mind, cognition, information theory, physics, philosophy. All of the fundamental basis are met to allow reasoning to emerge in LLMs. It is clear now where your confusion lies, and why you are led to believe so strongly that LLMs cannot reason: it is because you are an ML practitioner you overweight your expertise yet you don't know what you don't know, and have foundational gaps in your knowledge. You lack the context in these other fields. If you had them, your position should be closer to agnostic than this strong belief of yours that LLMs in their current form cannot reason.

mjburgess 2y ago
lol, well when I've written my PhD on those areas we can return to whether I'm an expert on them or not. One does not form "connections" between them as in some wide-eye conspiracy theorist.. "predictive coding" has little to do with "prediction" in the ML sense. The latter concerned with making a quantitive estimate of some variable by summarising historical data. What we are doing when we revise a "mental model" is done by counter-factual simulation of possible future states. Statistical AI models conditional probability structures, and computes predictions as an expectation over weighted summarised historical data. This is not a means of performing counter-factual simulation. One trivial, sadly empirical, way to see this is to note that each marginal token generated is of constant time and energy use. Yet trivially, reasoning and a variety of other mental capacities should require abitarily different time to run. Eg., simulating a complex scenario is necessarily more intensive than a simple one, and so on. Yet I am quite annoyed that we need such dumb observations to make this point. It speaks of a profound ignorance of "theory of mind, cognition, information theory, physics, philosophy" and especially neurology and zoology which are your most significant missing terms. It is no real mystery what the structure of various mental capacities involves; nor any mystery what s(Ws(Ws(WX+B)+B...)...)...) computes. Even involving anything beyond trivial applied statistics and trivial results in science shouldnt be required here. This stuff is very obvious.

mjburgess 2y ago

lol, well when I've written my PhD on those areas we can return to whether I'm an expert on them or not. One does not form "connections" between them as in some wide-eye conspiracy theorist.. "predictive coding" has little to do with "prediction" in the ML sense. The latter concerned with making a quantitive estimate of some variable by summarising historical data. What we are doing when we revise a "mental model" is done by counter-factual simulation of possible future states. Statistical AI models conditional probability structures, and computes predictions as an expectation over weighted summarised historical data. This is not a means of performing counter-factual simulation. One trivial, sadly empirical, way to see this is to note that each marginal token generated is of constant time and energy use. Yet trivially, reasoning and a variety of other mental capacities should require abitarily different time to run. Eg., simulating a complex scenario is necessarily more intensive than a simple one, and so on. Yet I am quite annoyed that we need such dumb observations to make this point. It speaks of a profound ignorance of "theory of mind, cognition, information theory, physics, philosophy" and especially neurology and zoology which are your most significant missing terms. It is no real mystery what the structure of various mental capacities involves; nor any mystery what s(Ws(Ws(WX+B)+B...)...)...) computes. Even involving anything beyond trivial applied statistics and trivial results in science shouldnt be required here. This stuff is very obvious.