4 ms·

As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there

As a linguist, article like this also annoy me by the claims that "X [whales, dolphins, parrots, crows...] uses language." We have known since 1957 that there is a hierarchy of "grammars", with finite state "languages" being near the bottom, and transformational grammars at the top. Human languages are certainly at a minimum at the context free phrase structure grammar level. My point is that by using the word "language" loosely, almost anything (DNA codons, for example) can be considered to be a language. But few if any other animals can get past the finite state level--and perhaps none gets even that far. And an article or book that uses the word "communicate" is even more annoying, since "communicate" seems to mean virtually anything. End of my rant...

ggm 2y ago
This. it nicely encapsulates why AI aficionados use words like "hallucinate" which become secret clues to belief around the G part of AGI. If it's just a coding mistake, how can the machine be "alive" but if I can re-purpose "hallucinate" as a term of art, I can also make you, dear reader, embue the AI with more and more traits of meaning which go to "it's alive" It's language Jim, but more as Chomsky said. or maybe Chimpsky. I 100% agree with your rant. This time fly likes your arrow.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  The correct term isn't "hallucinate", it's "bullshit". I mean that in the casual sense of "a bullshitter" - every LLM is a moderately knowleable bullshitter that never stops talking (In a literal sense - even the end of responses is just a magic string from the LLM that cues the containing system to stop the LLM, and if not stopped like that it would just keep going after the "end".) The remarkable thing is that we ever get correct responses out of them.
  - h0l0cube 2y ago
    You could probably s/LLM/human/ in your comment. Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs. In between there may be thoughts in there, like 'I've no more to say', or 'Shut your mouth before they figure you out'. The question is, how is it that humans are not a deterministic computer? And if the answer is that actually they are, then what differs between LLMs and actual intelligence?
    - whycome 2y ago
      There’s something meta about your comment and my reaction. Metaphor. The pachinko metaphor seems so apt it made me pause and probably internalize it in some way. It’s now added to my brains dataset specifically about LLMs. It’s an interesting moment to be hyper aware of in the context that you’re also describing (definition of intelligence). Far out.
    - wnmurphy 2y ago
      > Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs. This metaphor of the pachinko machine (or Plinko game) is exactly how I explain LLMs/ML to laypersons. The process of training is the act of discovering through trial and error the right settings for each peg on the board, in order to consistently get the ball to land in the right spot-ish.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - wruza 2y ago
      It’s survival in reality. Bullshit doesn’t survive (at least on the lower levels of existense, corporate and cultural bs easily does) and that’s why people are so angry at it. We hate absurdity because using absurd results yields failures and loses time or resources that were important to stay fed and warm. People also can lose your time or resources (first line support, women’s shopping, etc) and the reaction is the same. I don’t know why there’s still no LLM with a constant reality feedback loop yet. Maybe there’s a set of technical issues that prevents it. But until this happens, pretrained AI will bullshit itself and everyone cause there’s nothing that could hit it on the head.
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Well in some ways it does, some insect species use various strategies to fool other insect species, such as a special type of caterpillar that does so against ant colonies, to live at their expense.
  - foolswisdom 2y ago
    A la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- taneq 2y ago
  > This time fly likes your arrow. And fruit flies like bananas. :)
School-Cotton 2y ago
I’m a linguistics layman, but can’t you make an even stronger claim about human language? Apparently there are certain constructs in Swiss German that are not context-free.
- skissane 2y ago
  From another viewpoint, all human language is only at the finite-state level - a finite state automaton can recognise a language from any level in the Chomsky hierarchy provided you constrain all sentences to a finite maximum length, which of course you can - no human utterance will ever be longer than a googolplex symbols, since there aren’t enough atoms in the observable universe to encode such an utterance Really the way people use the Chomsky hierarchy in practice (both in linguistics and computer science) is “let’s agree to ignore the finitude of language” - a move borrowed from classical mathematics
  - suddenlybananas 2y ago
    This is why the classical notion of competence and performance in linguistics is important. We describe programming languages as being Turing-complete even if every computer is always in practice finite because, in principle, it could be run on a computer with more memory or whatever. Likwise, it seems that language is bounded by language external facts about memory not intrinsic facts about how language is processed.
scotty79 2y ago
It's philosophy. It doesn't concern itself with facts or knowledge.
teekert 2y ago
As a scientist, articles like this also annoy me. Because it, right off the bat, assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness. Just because we don't experience those degrees, and animals can't convey what they feel through language, we assume it is "emergent", or "suddenly there". I think we are too caught up in believing that consciousness must be something really special or some magic discontinuity of spacetime. I don't believe it is. Somewhere inside our brain there is some perception of self related to the outside world. So we can project self into the future using information from the now and make better choices and survive better ("Information is that which allows you [who is in possession of that information] to make predictions with accuracy better than chance"- Chris Adami). Why do we need all these difficult words? I bet animals also have some image of self inside there somewhere, and make decisions based on simulated scenarios. Perhaps to a lesser degree, perhaps because of a lack of language they experience it in a different way? Not being able to label any of the steps in the process... Who knows? Perhaps when we get to simulate a whole brain we can get some idea. But then there is the ethics. We do attribute great value to organisms that have this image of self.
- IsTom 2y ago
  > assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness And I don't get why, it seems to me quite self evident that you yourself can experience reduced-consciousness states, be it being half-asleep or quite drunk.
  - ffwd 2y ago
    The problem for me is that we haven't conceptualized what we mean by "reduced" consciousness. Reduced in what way? If we create an analogy with audio - audio can have 2 properties: frequencies and volume. Frequencies are the content of the audio and volume is how "present" the sound is. Well the same could be applied to consciousness. When we say reduced consciousness do we mean that the mind experiences less content (frequencies) or do we mean that all the frequencies are there but at a reduced volume?
    - IsTom 2y ago
gizajob 2y ago
Yes, it's such a waffle. Instead of the unnecessary title "A Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter" – a more appropriate one would be "On plant intelligence (and possible consciousness)" given the entirety of the article is devoted to plant intelligence. We don't have anything radical, nor is it very deeply related to the mind/matter problem. If an author can't get something simple like that correct, then they don't deserve our time. Shame one has to get paragraphs deep into the article to find out we have a spiel about plants, not about mind.
Xmd5a 2y ago
Here lies the promised land: the possibility of a precise and concise nomenklatura that assigns each thing a unique name, perfectly matching its unique position in the world, derived from the complete determination of the laws governing what it is and how it interacts with others. The laws of what is shall dictate how things ought to be named. What a motivating carrot—let’s keep following these prescriptions, for surely, in the end, the harmony of their totality will prove they were objective descriptions all along. Above all, let’s not trust our own linguistic ability to distinguish between the subtle nuances hidden within the same word, or at least, let’s distrust the presence of this ability in our fellow speakers. That should be enough to justify our intervention in the name of universality itself. Imagine this: language is an innate ability that all speakers have mastered, yet none are experts in—unless they are also linguists. And what, according to experts, is the source of such mastery? A rigid set of rules capturing the state of a language (langue) at a given time, in a specific geographical area, social class, etc., from which all valid sentences (syntactically and beyond) can supposedly be derived. Yet this framework never truly explains—or at best relegates to the background—our ability to understand (or recognize that we have not understood) and to correct (or request clarification) when ill-formed sentences are thrown at us like wrenches into a machine. Parsers work this way: they reject errors, bringing communication to an end. They do not ask for clarification, they do not correct their interlocutors, let alone engage in arguments about usage, which, under the effect of rational justification, hardens into "rules." Giving in to the temptation of an objective description of language as an external reality—especially when aided by formal languages—makes us lose sight of this fundamental origin. In the end, we construct yet another norm, one that obscures our ability to account for normativity itself, starting with out own. Perhaps this initial concealment is its very origin.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

ggm 2y ago

This. it nicely encapsulates why AI aficionados use words like "hallucinate" which become secret clues to belief around the G part of AGI. If it's just a coding mistake, how can the machine be "alive" but if I can re-purpose "hallucinate" as a term of art, I can also make you, dear reader, embue the AI with more and more traits of meaning which go to "it's alive" It's language Jim, but more as Chomsky said. or maybe Chimpsky. I 100% agree with your rant. This time fly likes your arrow.

crooked-v 2y ago
The correct term isn't "hallucinate", it's "bullshit". I mean that in the casual sense of "a bullshitter" - every LLM is a moderately knowleable bullshitter that never stops talking (In a literal sense - even the end of responses is just a magic string from the LLM that cues the containing system to stop the LLM, and if not stopped like that it would just keep going after the "end".) The remarkable thing is that we ever get correct responses out of them.
- h0l0cube 2y ago
  You could probably s/LLM/human/ in your comment. Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs. In between there may be thoughts in there, like 'I've no more to say', or 'Shut your mouth before they figure you out'. The question is, how is it that humans are not a deterministic computer? And if the answer is that actually they are, then what differs between LLMs and actual intelligence?
  - whycome 2y ago
    There’s something meta about your comment and my reaction. Metaphor. The pachinko metaphor seems so apt it made me pause and probably internalize it in some way. It’s now added to my brains dataset specifically about LLMs. It’s an interesting moment to be hyper aware of in the context that you’re also describing (definition of intelligence). Far out.
  - wnmurphy 2y ago
    > Essentially all intelligent life is a pachinko machine that takes a bunch of sensory inputs, bounces electricity around a number of neurons, and eventually lands them as actions, which further affect sensory inputs. This metaphor of the pachinko machine (or Plinko game) is exactly how I explain LLMs/ML to laypersons. The process of training is the act of discovering through trial and error the right settings for each peg on the board, in order to consistently get the ball to land in the right spot-ish.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - wruza 2y ago
    It’s survival in reality. Bullshit doesn’t survive (at least on the lower levels of existense, corporate and cultural bs easily does) and that’s why people are so angry at it. We hate absurdity because using absurd results yields failures and loses time or resources that were important to stay fed and warm. People also can lose your time or resources (first line support, women’s shopping, etc) and the reaction is the same. I don’t know why there’s still no LLM with a constant reality feedback loop yet. Maybe there’s a set of technical issues that prevents it. But until this happens, pretrained AI will bullshit itself and everyone cause there’s nothing that could hit it on the head.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Well in some ways it does, some insect species use various strategies to fool other insect species, such as a special type of caterpillar that does so against ant colonies, to live at their expense.
- foolswisdom 2y ago
  A la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
taneq 2y ago
> This time fly likes your arrow. And fruit flies like bananas. :)

School-Cotton 2y ago

I’m a linguistics layman, but can’t you make an even stronger claim about human language? Apparently there are certain constructs in Swiss German that are not context-free.

skissane 2y ago
From another viewpoint, all human language is only at the finite-state level - a finite state automaton can recognise a language from any level in the Chomsky hierarchy provided you constrain all sentences to a finite maximum length, which of course you can - no human utterance will ever be longer than a googolplex symbols, since there aren’t enough atoms in the observable universe to encode such an utterance Really the way people use the Chomsky hierarchy in practice (both in linguistics and computer science) is “let’s agree to ignore the finitude of language” - a move borrowed from classical mathematics
- suddenlybananas 2y ago
  This is why the classical notion of competence and performance in linguistics is important. We describe programming languages as being Turing-complete even if every computer is always in practice finite because, in principle, it could be run on a computer with more memory or whatever. Likwise, it seems that language is bounded by language external facts about memory not intrinsic facts about how language is processed.

scotty79 2y ago

It's philosophy. It doesn't concern itself with facts or knowledge.

teekert 2y ago

As a scientist, articles like this also annoy me. Because it, right off the bat, assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness. Just because we don't experience those degrees, and animals can't convey what they feel through language, we assume it is "emergent", or "suddenly there". I think we are too caught up in believing that consciousness must be something really special or some magic discontinuity of spacetime. I don't believe it is. Somewhere inside our brain there is some perception of self related to the outside world. So we can project self into the future using information from the now and make better choices and survive better ("Information is that which allows you [who is in possession of that information] to make predictions with accuracy better than chance"- Chris Adami). Why do we need all these difficult words? I bet animals also have some image of self inside there somewhere, and make decisions based on simulated scenarios. Perhaps to a lesser degree, perhaps because of a lack of language they experience it in a different way? Not being able to label any of the steps in the process... Who knows? Perhaps when we get to simulate a whole brain we can get some idea. But then there is the ethics. We do attribute great value to organisms that have this image of self.

IsTom 2y ago
> assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness And I don't get why, it seems to me quite self evident that you yourself can experience reduced-consciousness states, be it being half-asleep or quite drunk.
- ffwd 2y ago
  The problem for me is that we haven't conceptualized what we mean by "reduced" consciousness. Reduced in what way? If we create an analogy with audio - audio can have 2 properties: frequencies and volume. Frequencies are the content of the audio and volume is how "present" the sound is. Well the same could be applied to consciousness. When we say reduced consciousness do we mean that the mind experiences less content (frequencies) or do we mean that all the frequencies are there but at a reduced volume?
  - IsTom 2y ago

gizajob 2y ago

Yes, it's such a waffle. Instead of the unnecessary title "A Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter" – a more appropriate one would be "On plant intelligence (and possible consciousness)" given the entirety of the article is devoted to plant intelligence. We don't have anything radical, nor is it very deeply related to the mind/matter problem. If an author can't get something simple like that correct, then they don't deserve our time. Shame one has to get paragraphs deep into the article to find out we have a spiel about plants, not about mind.

Xmd5a 2y ago

Here lies the promised land: the possibility of a precise and concise nomenklatura that assigns each thing a unique name, perfectly matching its unique position in the world, derived from the complete determination of the laws governing what it is and how it interacts with others. The laws of what is shall dictate how things ought to be named. What a motivating carrot—let’s keep following these prescriptions, for surely, in the end, the harmony of their totality will prove they were objective descriptions all along. Above all, let’s not trust our own linguistic ability to distinguish between the subtle nuances hidden within the same word, or at least, let’s distrust the presence of this ability in our fellow speakers. That should be enough to justify our intervention in the name of universality itself. Imagine this: language is an innate ability that all speakers have mastered, yet none are experts in—unless they are also linguists. And what, according to experts, is the source of such mastery? A rigid set of rules capturing the state of a language (langue) at a given time, in a specific geographical area, social class, etc., from which all valid sentences (syntactically and beyond) can supposedly be derived. Yet this framework never truly explains—or at best relegates to the background—our ability to understand (or recognize that we have not understood) and to correct (or request clarification) when ill-formed sentences are thrown at us like wrenches into a machine. Parsers work this way: they reject errors, bringing communication to an end. They do not ask for clarification, they do not correct their interlocutors, let alone engage in arguments about usage, which, under the effect of rational justification, hardens into "rules." Giving in to the temptation of an objective description of language as an external reality—especially when aided by formal languages—makes us lose sight of this fundamental origin. In the end, we construct yet another norm, one that obscures our ability to account for normativity itself, starting with out own. Perhaps this initial concealment is its very origin.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]