4 ms·
> LLM just complete your prompt in a way that match their training data. They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own. It's quite reasonable
by anorwell 1y ago
> LLM just complete your prompt in a way that match their training data. They do not have a plan, they do not have thoughts of their own.
It's quite reasonable to think that LLMs might plan and have thoughts of their own. No one understands consciousness or the emergent behavior of these models to say with much certainty.
It is the "Chinese room" fallacy to assume it's not possible. There's a lot of philosophical debate going back 40 years about this. If you want to show that humans can think while LLMs do not, then the argument you make to show LLMs do not think must not equally apply to neuron activations in human brains. To me, it seems difficult to accomplish that.
- jrmg 1y agoLLMs are the Chinese Room. They would generate identical output for the same input text every time were it not for artificially introduced randomness (‘heat’). Of course, some would argue the Chinese Room is conscious.
- scarmig 1y agoIf you somehow managed to perfectly simulate a human being, they would also act deterministically in response to identical initial conditions (modulo quantum effects, which are insignificant at the neural scale and also apply just as well to transistors).
- elcritch 1y agoIt's not entirely infeasible that neurons could harness quantum effects. Not across the neurons as a whole, but via some sort of microstructures or chemical processes [0]. It seems likely that birds harness quantum effects to measure magnetic fields [1]. 0: https://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-entanglement-in-neurons-may-actually-explain-consciousness https://www.sciencealert.com/quantum-entanglement-in-neurons... 1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-migrating-birds-use-quantum-effects-to-navigate/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-migrating-bir...
- andrei_says_ 1y agoDoesn’t everything act deterministically if all the forces are understood? Humans included.
- andrei_says_ 1y agoDoesn’t everything act deterministically if all the forces are understood? Humans included. One can say the notion of free will is an unpacked bundle of near infinite forces emerging in and passing through us.
- defrost 1y ago> in response to identical initial conditions precisely, mathematically identical to infinite precision .. "yes". Meanwhile, in the real world we live in it's essentially physically impossible to stage two seperate systems to be identical to such a degree AND it's an important result that some systems, some very simple systems, will have quite different outcomes without that precise degree of impossibly infinitely detailed identical conditions. See: Lorenz's Butterfly and Smale's Horseshoe Map.
- scarmig 1y agoOf course. But that's not relevant to the point I was responding to suggesting that LLMs may lack consciousness because they're deterministic. Chaos wasn't the argument (though that would be a much more interesting one, cf "edge of chaos" literature).
- defrost 1y agoSure .. all the same it's always worth emphasizing that neither the tumbling of a tennis racket under gravity nor the axis flipping of a spinning wingnut in an orbiting satellite are deterministic in any predictive sense no matter how well initial conditions are measured ... they are only "deterministic" given out of band god like powers. Clearly you're aware of this, however I find that the majority of casual referrers to determinism are not.
- anorwell 1y agoI am arguing (or rather, presenting without argument) that the Chinese room may be conscious, hence calling it a fallacy above. Not that it _is_ conscious, to be clear, but that the Chinese room has done nothing to show that it is not. Hofstadter makes the argument well in GEB and other places.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThe Chinese room has no plane of imagination where it can place things.
- jdkee 1y agohttps://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...
- andrei_says_ 1y agoSeeing faces in the clouds in the sky does not mean the skies are now populated by people. More likely means that our brains are wired to see faces.