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Would you say that a calculator is also self-aware, and that it must know its limitations so that it doesn't attempt to do calculations it isn't capable of doin
by lottin 2y ago
Would you say that a calculator is also self-aware, and that it must know its limitations so that it doesn't attempt to do calculations it isn't capable of doing, for instance?
- killerstorm 2y agoNo. The difference is that LLMs can talk, they can use knowledge of themselves in many different ways.
- benchmarkist 2y agoAnd how do they do that? Be very specific.
- killerstorm 2y agoAlright. Suppose "meaning" (or "understanding") is something which exists in human head. It might seem as a complete black box, but we can get some information about it by observing human interactions. E.g. suppose Алиса does not know English, but she has a bunch of cards with instructions "Turn left", "Bring me an apple", etc. If she shows these cards to Bob and Bob wants to help her, Bob can carry out instructions in a card. If they play this game, the meaning which card induces in Bob's head will be understood by Алиса, thus she will be able to map these cards to meaning in her head. So there's a way to map meaning which is mediated by language. Now from math perspective, if we are able to estimate semantic similarity between utterances we might be able to embed them into a latent "semantic" space. If you accept that the process of LLM training captures some aspects of meaning of the language, you can also see how it leads to some degree of self-awareness. If you believe that meaning cannot be modeled with math then there's no way anyone can convince you.
- benchmarkist 2y agoHow does math encode meaning if there is no Alice and Bob? You should quickly realize the absurdity of your argument once you take people out of the equation.
- killerstorm 2y agoAlright, I wrote an article: https://killerstorm.github.io/2024/12/15/meaning.html https://killerstorm.github.io/2024/12/15/meaning.html Please let me know which part you find absurd.
- benchmarkist 2y agoIt's a good essay but you didn't address my point.
- killerstorm 2y agoNot sure what you mean... A NN training process can extract semantics from observations. That semantics can be then subsequently applied e.g. to robots. So it doesn't depend on humans beyond production of observations.
- benchmarkist 2y agoThe function/mathematics in an NN (neural network) is meaningless unless there is an outside observer to attribute meaning to it. There is no such thing as a meaningful mathematical expression without a conscious observer to give it meaning. Fundamentally there is no objective difference between one instance of a NN with one parameter, f(θ), evaluated on some input, f(θ)(x), and another instance of the same network with a small perturbation of the parameter, f(θ+ε), evaluated on the same input, f(θ+ε)(x), unless a conscious observer perceives the output and attributes meaning to the differences because the arithmetic operations performed by the network are the same in both networks in terms of their objective complexity and energy utilization.
- ben_w 2y agoHow does the universe encode meaning if there is no Alice and Bob? One common answer is: it doesn't. And yet, here we are, creating meaning for ourselves despite being a state of the quantum wave functions for the relevant fermion and boson fields, evolving over time according to a mathematical equation. (Philosophical question: if the time-evolution of the wave functions couldn't be described by some mathematical equation, what would that imply?)