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Can you define "thinking" in a way that excludes what the AI is doing, but includes what humans do? I haven't' really seen anyone else manage it without talkin

Can you define "thinking" in a way that excludes what the AI is doing, but includes what humans do? I haven't' really seen anyone else manage it without talking about ghosts or some other kind of metaphysical voodoo.

dttze 1y ago
Using a conceptual understanding of something to deduce or infer something else. An LLM doesn't know what anything is. Just what goes around the token representation of that thing.
- stevenAthompson 1y ago
  "conceptual understanding of something" is just another way of saying "the relationship between concepts", which is exactly what transformer models use. *EDIT* To elaborate, how can you define anything in isolation of every other concept/thing? You can't. Things are only defined by their relationships to each other, which is exactly the same thing transformer models do.
  - dttze 1y ago
    No, it isn't. "Conceptual understanding" is a deep comprehension of a particular concept. It is grasping its meaning, significance, applications, and boundaries. It involves knowing not just what something is definitionally, but understanding how it works, why it matters, and how it connects to other ideas. "The relationship between concepts," is focusing specifically on how different ideas connect, overlap, contradict, or complement each other. It's more about the network or system of connections rather than deep comprehension of individual concepts. Understanding relationships between concepts is part of conceptual understanding, sure. But conceptual understanding is broader - it includes both mastery of individual concepts and awareness of their relationships to other concepts.
    - stevenAthompson 1y ago
      > It is grasping its meaning, significance, applications, and boundaries To define "thinking" by using words like "meaning", "understanding", or "comprehension" just moves the need for definition further up the abstraction ladder. It doesn't help to define what "thinking" is in any quantifiable way. To play along, could you define "meaning" or "understanding" in a way that doesn't resort to ghost-talk or just move the definition even further up the abstraction ladder? They are both subjective terms that describe how humans feel, not well defined words that describe objective reality in some way. To use a more quantifiable metric we could look at something like Humanity's Last Exam. OpenAI's o3 scores something like 20% (a feat which few humans could accomplish). To put that in perspective, consider that fifty four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level. Like it or not the machines are "smarter" than the majority of humans and have deeper "understanding" in most of the objective ways we've thought of to measure it. Subjective feelings aside, it's tough to argue that the machines aren't conscious if we're going to accept that our fellow citizens are.

dttze 1y ago

Using a conceptual understanding of something to deduce or infer something else. An LLM doesn't know what anything is. Just what goes around the token representation of that thing.

stevenAthompson 1y ago
"conceptual understanding of something" is just another way of saying "the relationship between concepts", which is exactly what transformer models use. *EDIT* To elaborate, how can you define anything in isolation of every other concept/thing? You can't. Things are only defined by their relationships to each other, which is exactly the same thing transformer models do.
- dttze 1y ago
  No, it isn't. "Conceptual understanding" is a deep comprehension of a particular concept. It is grasping its meaning, significance, applications, and boundaries. It involves knowing not just what something is definitionally, but understanding how it works, why it matters, and how it connects to other ideas. "The relationship between concepts," is focusing specifically on how different ideas connect, overlap, contradict, or complement each other. It's more about the network or system of connections rather than deep comprehension of individual concepts. Understanding relationships between concepts is part of conceptual understanding, sure. But conceptual understanding is broader - it includes both mastery of individual concepts and awareness of their relationships to other concepts.
  - stevenAthompson 1y ago
    > It is grasping its meaning, significance, applications, and boundaries To define "thinking" by using words like "meaning", "understanding", or "comprehension" just moves the need for definition further up the abstraction ladder. It doesn't help to define what "thinking" is in any quantifiable way. To play along, could you define "meaning" or "understanding" in a way that doesn't resort to ghost-talk or just move the definition even further up the abstraction ladder? They are both subjective terms that describe how humans feel, not well defined words that describe objective reality in some way. To use a more quantifiable metric we could look at something like Humanity's Last Exam. OpenAI's o3 scores something like 20% (a feat which few humans could accomplish). To put that in perspective, consider that fifty four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level. Like it or not the machines are "smarter" than the majority of humans and have deeper "understanding" in most of the objective ways we've thought of to measure it. Subjective feelings aside, it's tough to argue that the machines aren't conscious if we're going to accept that our fellow citizens are.