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Yeah, I have always firmly maintained that there is less fundamental difference between LLMs and human brains than most people seems to assume. Going a bit fur

Yeah, I have always firmly maintained that there is less fundamental difference between LLMs and human brains than most people seems to assume. Going a bit further, I'll speculate that the actions made by a human brain are simply a function of the "input" from our ~5 senses combined with our memory (obviously there are complications such as spinal reflexes, but I don't think those affect my main point). Neural nets are universal function approximators, so can't a sufficiently large neural net approximate a full human brain? In that case, is there any merit to saying that a human "understands" something in a way that a neural net doesn't? There's obviously a huge gap between the two right now, but I don't see any fundamental difference besides "consciousness" which is not well defined to begin with.

AlotOfReading 2y ago
The UAT is a pretty weak result in practice. A lot of systems have the same property, and most of them are pretty poor approximators in practice. It may very well be that no reasonable amount of computing power allows approximating the "function of consciousness". Plus, if you're a certain kind of dualist the entire idea of a compact, smooth "consciousness" function may be something you reject philosophically.
- hatthew 2y ago
  I agree there are issues with the UAT, but I feel like my conclusion is still valid: a neural net, given the memories and senses that a humans has, is capable of approximating a human's response accurately enough to be indistinguishable from another human, at least to another human. I philosophically reject the notion that consciousness is an important factor here. The question of whether or not you have a consciousness doesn't affect what I take away from this conversation, and similarly the question of whether an AI has a consciousness doesn't affect what I take away from my actions with it. If the (non-)existence of others' consciousnesses doesn't materially affect my life—and we assume that it's a fundamentally unanswerable question—why should I care other than curiosity?
  - suddenlybananas 2y ago
    >a neural net, given the memories and senses that a humans has, is capable of approximating a human's response accurately enough to be indistinguishable from another human, at least to another human. That doesn't remotely follow from the UAT and is also almost certainly false.
    - hatthew 2y ago
      I am not saying that follows from the formal UAT, I'm saying that in general, if we assume that the human brain is simply producing outputs in response to inputs, I have no reason to believe that a neural net couldn't be constructed to approximate the same outputs given the same inputs. And specifically, the threshold of "good enough approximation" I chose is effectively just a stronger form of the turing test. AI has arguably already passed a weaker form of the turing test (most people in the world cannot tell the difference between a human-written and an AI-written article, for example).
dboreham 2y ago
Ah, so there's two of us now :)
__loam 2y ago
> I have always firmly maintained that there is less fundamental difference between LLMs and human brains than most people seems to assume. What is your basis for this? Do you have any evidence or expertise in neuroscience to be able to make this claim? > Neural nets are universal function approximators, so can't a sufficiently large neural net approximate a full human brain? We do not understand the brain well enough to make this claim. > but I don't see any fundamental difference besides "consciousness" which is not well defined to begin with. Yeah besides the gaping hole in our current understanding of neuroscience, you have some good points I guess.
- hatthew 2y ago
  Computers can compute anything, with the only limitations being time, space, energy, programming, etc. So far, it seems like all of those things can be increased without bound. I see no reason to believe that there will be some fundamental limitation that prevents us from improving computers to the point that they can compute the equivalent of a human brain. Yes I agree we don't understand the human brain well enough yet, but empirically we can observe that AI agents and human agents behave in similar ways. Sure, it may not end up being a complete copy of a human brain, but if the inputs and outputs are the same, does it make a difference?

AlotOfReading 2y ago

The UAT is a pretty weak result in practice. A lot of systems have the same property, and most of them are pretty poor approximators in practice. It may very well be that no reasonable amount of computing power allows approximating the "function of consciousness". Plus, if you're a certain kind of dualist the entire idea of a compact, smooth "consciousness" function may be something you reject philosophically.

hatthew 2y ago
I agree there are issues with the UAT, but I feel like my conclusion is still valid: a neural net, given the memories and senses that a humans has, is capable of approximating a human's response accurately enough to be indistinguishable from another human, at least to another human. I philosophically reject the notion that consciousness is an important factor here. The question of whether or not you have a consciousness doesn't affect what I take away from this conversation, and similarly the question of whether an AI has a consciousness doesn't affect what I take away from my actions with it. If the (non-)existence of others' consciousnesses doesn't materially affect my life—and we assume that it's a fundamentally unanswerable question—why should I care other than curiosity?
- suddenlybananas 2y ago
  >a neural net, given the memories and senses that a humans has, is capable of approximating a human's response accurately enough to be indistinguishable from another human, at least to another human. That doesn't remotely follow from the UAT and is also almost certainly false.
  - hatthew 2y ago
    I am not saying that follows from the formal UAT, I'm saying that in general, if we assume that the human brain is simply producing outputs in response to inputs, I have no reason to believe that a neural net couldn't be constructed to approximate the same outputs given the same inputs. And specifically, the threshold of "good enough approximation" I chose is effectively just a stronger form of the turing test. AI has arguably already passed a weaker form of the turing test (most people in the world cannot tell the difference between a human-written and an AI-written article, for example).

dboreham 2y ago

Ah, so there's two of us now :)

__loam 2y ago

> I have always firmly maintained that there is less fundamental difference between LLMs and human brains than most people seems to assume. What is your basis for this? Do you have any evidence or expertise in neuroscience to be able to make this claim? > Neural nets are universal function approximators, so can't a sufficiently large neural net approximate a full human brain? We do not understand the brain well enough to make this claim. > but I don't see any fundamental difference besides "consciousness" which is not well defined to begin with. Yeah besides the gaping hole in our current understanding of neuroscience, you have some good points I guess.

hatthew 2y ago
Computers can compute anything, with the only limitations being time, space, energy, programming, etc. So far, it seems like all of those things can be increased without bound. I see no reason to believe that there will be some fundamental limitation that prevents us from improving computers to the point that they can compute the equivalent of a human brain. Yes I agree we don't understand the human brain well enough yet, but empirically we can observe that AI agents and human agents behave in similar ways. Sure, it may not end up being a complete copy of a human brain, but if the inputs and outputs are the same, does it make a difference?