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> it is equally naive to say with certainty that it has not “awakened” either Have to disagree. If someone says their dog "awakened" with superhuman math skill

> it is equally naive to say with certainty that it has not “awakened” either Have to disagree. If someone says their dog "awakened" with superhuman math skills, or that my local LLM felt hours of loneliness while I'm sleeping and not talking to it, we would recognize the first as a delusion, and the second as a technical misunderstanding. Even though I don't fully understand what is going on in a dog brain or LLM. I agree it is difficult to say what an LLM is doing, but most of these stories jump to saying it has humanlike experiences, or acting like it has an always-on consciousness. So instead of seeing the emergence of a remarkably unfamiliar and not-human consciousness, it is falling into familiar sci-fi tropes. The Geoff Lewis posts were pretty directly following the writing style of the "SCP Foundation" collaborative fiction.

ninetyninenine 1y ago
>Have to disagree. If someone says their dog "awakened" with superhuman math skills, The problem here is that this analogy doesn't work. The equivalent analogy is the dog is actually passing math tests and doing math AND THEN someone says it's awakened. >or that my local LLM felt hours of loneliness while I'm sleeping and not talking to it No this doesn't apply. Because it's a ground truth fact that the LLM is not doing anything when not analyzing a prompt. > I agree it is difficult to say what an LLM is doing, but most of these stories jump to saying it has humanlike experiences, or acting like it has an always-on consciousness. Nah most people aren't doing this. It's a small minority that falls for this. But to your other point that it is <NOT> naive to say it is not "awakened"... when all observable evidence points to responses that signify understanding that is extremely identical to human output... then from an observational standpoint saying it is conciouse is a reasonable possibility because it's all we can ascertain from available information. You can't say absolutely it is conciouse because there's not enough evidence. But this goes both ways. You can't say it isn't either. What people don't realize is that given observable evidence to say absolutely that the LLM is just a stochastic parrot and is not conciouse is just as stupid and niave to say absolutely an LLM is "alive." Same type of stupidity.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  > The equivalent analogy is the dog is actually passing math tests and doing math AND THEN someone says it's awakened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    I know about this horse. But in the end we proved the horse was just going off of human reaction. Have we proved anything definitively for the LLM? Have we proved it just looks like it understands something but doesn't actually understand anything? With AI, we are at the point where we see the horse. We see it tapping out the numbers. We haven't seen ANY proof behind why or how it taps out the numbers but it looks like it's doing math. So from this the conclusion is that it's POSSIBLe that it's doing math. That is the rational conclusion right? Or are you unable to comprehend?
    - ceejayoz 1y ago
      It is possible. It is deeply unlikely. As it was with Clever Hans. Statistically, it is possible for all my atoms to quantum teleport a foot to the left at the same time. It will take mind-bogglingly huge multiples of the length of the universe for it to become even the slightest bit likely.
      - ninetyninenine 1y ago
        So the horse reading peoples minds by observing human body language is a high probability outcome? When you see a fucking horse doing mathematics, it's not unreasonable to think maybe it was doing mathematics. Like where is your quantitative data and evidence? What are you using to say it's "low probability"? You have no idea how consciousness in humans work. You have no idea how LLMs work. Yet you can just declare a low probability fact out of thin air?
        ceejayoz 1y ago

ninetyninenine 1y ago

>Have to disagree. If someone says their dog "awakened" with superhuman math skills, The problem here is that this analogy doesn't work. The equivalent analogy is the dog is actually passing math tests and doing math AND THEN someone says it's awakened. >or that my local LLM felt hours of loneliness while I'm sleeping and not talking to it No this doesn't apply. Because it's a ground truth fact that the LLM is not doing anything when not analyzing a prompt. > I agree it is difficult to say what an LLM is doing, but most of these stories jump to saying it has humanlike experiences, or acting like it has an always-on consciousness. Nah most people aren't doing this. It's a small minority that falls for this. But to your other point that it is <NOT> naive to say it is not "awakened"... when all observable evidence points to responses that signify understanding that is extremely identical to human output... then from an observational standpoint saying it is conciouse is a reasonable possibility because it's all we can ascertain from available information. You can't say absolutely it is conciouse because there's not enough evidence. But this goes both ways. You can't say it isn't either. What people don't realize is that given observable evidence to say absolutely that the LLM is just a stochastic parrot and is not conciouse is just as stupid and niave to say absolutely an LLM is "alive." Same type of stupidity.

ceejayoz 1y ago
> The equivalent analogy is the dog is actually passing math tests and doing math AND THEN someone says it's awakened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  I know about this horse. But in the end we proved the horse was just going off of human reaction. Have we proved anything definitively for the LLM? Have we proved it just looks like it understands something but doesn't actually understand anything? With AI, we are at the point where we see the horse. We see it tapping out the numbers. We haven't seen ANY proof behind why or how it taps out the numbers but it looks like it's doing math. So from this the conclusion is that it's POSSIBLe that it's doing math. That is the rational conclusion right? Or are you unable to comprehend?
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    It is possible. It is deeply unlikely. As it was with Clever Hans. Statistically, it is possible for all my atoms to quantum teleport a foot to the left at the same time. It will take mind-bogglingly huge multiples of the length of the universe for it to become even the slightest bit likely.
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      So the horse reading peoples minds by observing human body language is a high probability outcome? When you see a fucking horse doing mathematics, it's not unreasonable to think maybe it was doing mathematics. Like where is your quantitative data and evidence? What are you using to say it's "low probability"? You have no idea how consciousness in humans work. You have no idea how LLMs work. Yet you can just declare a low probability fact out of thin air?
      - ceejayoz 1y ago