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Many like the author fail to convince me because they never also explain how human minds work. They just wave their hand, look off to a corner of the ceiling wi

Many like the author fail to convince me because they never also explain how human minds work. They just wave their hand, look off to a corner of the ceiling with, "But of course that's not how humans think at all," as if we all just know that.

monkaiju 1y ago
First off, there's an entire field attempting to answer that question, cognitive science. Secondly, the burden of proof isn't on cog-Sci folk to prove the human mind doesn't work like an llm, it'd be to prove that it does. From we do know, despite not having a flawless understanding on the human mind, it works nothing like an llm. Side note: The temptation to call anything that appears to act like a mind a mind is called behavioral ism and is a very old cog-Sci concept, disproved many times over.
mjburgess 1y ago
Some features of animal sentience: * direct causal contact with the environment, e.g., the light from the pen hits my eye, which induces mental states * sensory-motor coordination, ie., that the light hits my eye from the pen enables coordination of the movement of the pen with my body * sensory-motor representations, ie., my sensory motor system is trainable, and trained by historical envirionemntal coordination * heirachical planning in coordination, ie., these sensory-motor representations are goal-contextualised, so that I can "solve my hunger" in an infinite number of ways (i can achive this goal against an infinite permutation of obstacles) * counterfactual reality-oriented mental simulation (aka imagination) -- these rich sensory motor representatiosn are reifable in imagination so i can simulate novel permutaitons to the environment, possible shifts to physics, and so on. I can anticipate these infinite number of obsatcles before any have occured, or have ever occured. * self-modelling feedback loops, ie., that my own process of sensory-motor coordination is an input into that coordination * abstraction in self-modelling, ie., that i can form cognitive representations of my own goal directed actions as they succeed/fail, and treat them as objects of their own refinement * abstraction across representation mental faculties into propositional represenations, ie., that when i imagine that "I am writing", the object of my imagination is the very same object as the action "to write" -- so I know that when I recall/imagine/act/reflect/etc. I am operating on the very-same-objects of thought * facilities of cognition: quantification, causal reasoning, discrete logical reasoning -- etc. which can be applied both at the sensory, motor and abstract conceptual level (ie., i can "count in sensation" a few objects, also with action, also in intellection) * concept formation: abduction, various various of induction, etc. * concept composition: recursion, composition in extension of concepts, composition in intension, etc. One can go on and on here. Decribe only what happens in a few minutes of the life of a toddler as they play around with some blocks and you have listed, rather trivially, a vast universe of capbilities that an LLM lacks. To believe an LLM has anything to do with intelligence is to have somewhat quite profoundly mistaken what capabilities are implied by intelligence -- what animals have, some more than others, and a few even more so. To think this has anything to do with linguistic competence is a proudly strange view of the world. Nature did not produce intelligence in animals in order that they acquire competence in the correct ordering of linguistic tokens. Universities did, to some degree, produce computer science departments for this activity however.
tsimionescu 1y ago
Well, if there's one thing we're pretty sure of about human cognition, it's that there's very few GPUs in a human brain, on account of the very low percentage of sillicon. So, in a very very direct sense, we know for sure that human brains don't work like LLMs. Now, you could argue that, even though the substrate is different, some important operations might be equivalent in some way. But that is entirely up to you to argue, if you wish to. The one thing we can say for sure is that they are nothing even remotely similar at the physical layer, so the default assumption has to be that they are nothing alike period.
gitaarik 1y ago
So you mean because we don't know how the human mind works, LLMs won't be far off?

monkaiju 1y ago

First off, there's an entire field attempting to answer that question, cognitive science. Secondly, the burden of proof isn't on cog-Sci folk to prove the human mind doesn't work like an llm, it'd be to prove that it does. From we do know, despite not having a flawless understanding on the human mind, it works nothing like an llm. Side note: The temptation to call anything that appears to act like a mind a mind is called behavioral ism and is a very old cog-Sci concept, disproved many times over.

mjburgess 1y ago

Some features of animal sentience: * direct causal contact with the environment, e.g., the light from the pen hits my eye, which induces mental states * sensory-motor coordination, ie., that the light hits my eye from the pen enables coordination of the movement of the pen with my body * sensory-motor representations, ie., my sensory motor system is trainable, and trained by historical envirionemntal coordination * heirachical planning in coordination, ie., these sensory-motor representations are goal-contextualised, so that I can "solve my hunger" in an infinite number of ways (i can achive this goal against an infinite permutation of obstacles) * counterfactual reality-oriented mental simulation (aka imagination) -- these rich sensory motor representatiosn are reifable in imagination so i can simulate novel permutaitons to the environment, possible shifts to physics, and so on. I can anticipate these infinite number of obsatcles before any have occured, or have ever occured. * self-modelling feedback loops, ie., that my own process of sensory-motor coordination is an input into that coordination * abstraction in self-modelling, ie., that i can form cognitive representations of my own goal directed actions as they succeed/fail, and treat them as objects of their own refinement * abstraction across representation mental faculties into propositional represenations, ie., that when i imagine that "I am writing", the object of my imagination is the very same object as the action "to write" -- so I know that when I recall/imagine/act/reflect/etc. I am operating on the very-same-objects of thought * facilities of cognition: quantification, causal reasoning, discrete logical reasoning -- etc. which can be applied both at the sensory, motor and abstract conceptual level (ie., i can "count in sensation" a few objects, also with action, also in intellection) * concept formation: abduction, various various of induction, etc. * concept composition: recursion, composition in extension of concepts, composition in intension, etc. One can go on and on here. Decribe only what happens in a few minutes of the life of a toddler as they play around with some blocks and you have listed, rather trivially, a vast universe of capbilities that an LLM lacks. To believe an LLM has anything to do with intelligence is to have somewhat quite profoundly mistaken what capabilities are implied by intelligence -- what animals have, some more than others, and a few even more so. To think this has anything to do with linguistic competence is a proudly strange view of the world. Nature did not produce intelligence in animals in order that they acquire competence in the correct ordering of linguistic tokens. Universities did, to some degree, produce computer science departments for this activity however.

tsimionescu 1y ago

Well, if there's one thing we're pretty sure of about human cognition, it's that there's very few GPUs in a human brain, on account of the very low percentage of sillicon. So, in a very very direct sense, we know for sure that human brains don't work like LLMs. Now, you could argue that, even though the substrate is different, some important operations might be equivalent in some way. But that is entirely up to you to argue, if you wish to. The one thing we can say for sure is that they are nothing even remotely similar at the physical layer, so the default assumption has to be that they are nothing alike period.

gitaarik 1y ago

So you mean because we don't know how the human mind works, LLMs won't be far off?