2 ms·

One thing that LLMs have exposed is how much of a house of cards all of our definitions of "human mind"-adjacent concepts are. We have a single example in all

One thing that LLMs have exposed is how much of a house of cards all of our definitions of "human mind"-adjacent concepts are. We have a single example in all of reality of a being that thinks like we do, and so all of our definitions of thinking are inextricably tied with "how humans think", and now we have an entity that does things which seem to be very like how we think, but not _exactly like it_, and a lot of our definitions don't seem to work any more: Reasoning, thinking, knowing, feeling, understanding, etc. Or at the very least, our rubrics and heuristics for determining if someone (thing) thinks, feels, knows, etc, no longer work. And in particular, people create tests for those things thinking that they understand what they are testing for, when _most human beings_ would also fail those tests. I think a _lot_ of really foundational work needs to be done on clearly defining a lot of these terms and putting them on a sounder basis before we can really move forward on saying whether machines can do those things.

gdbsjjdn 1y ago
Congratulations, you've invented philosophy.
- empath75 1y ago
  This is an obnoxious response. Of course I recognize that philosophy is the solution to this. What I am pointing out is that philosophy has not as of yet resolved these relatively new problems. The idea that non-human intelligences might exist is of course an old one, but that is different from having an actual (potentially) existing one to reckon with.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    These are not new problems though.
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    Non-human intelligences have always existed in the form of animals. Animals do not have spoken language the way humans do, so their thoughts aren’t really composed of sentences. Yet, they have intelligence and can reason about their world. How could we build an AGI that doesn’t use language to think at all? We have no fucking clue and won’t for a while because everyone is chasing the mirage created by LLMs. AI winter will come and we’ll sit around waiting for the next big innovation. Probably some universal GOAP with deeply recurrent neural nets.
  - gdbsjjdn 1y ago
    > Writings on metacognition date back at least as far as two works by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC): On the Soul and the Parva Naturalia We built a box that spits out natural language and tricks humans into believing it's conscious. The box itself actually isn't that interesting, but the human side of the equation is.
    - mdp2021 1y ago
      > the human side of the equation is You have only proven the urgency of Intelligence, the need to produce it in inflationary amounts.
- meindnoch 1y ago
  We need to reinvent philosophy. With JSON this time.
mdp2021 1y ago
> which seem to be very like how we think I would like to reassure you that we - we here - see LLMs are very much unlike us.
- empath75 1y ago
  Yes I very much understand that most people do not think that LLMs think or understand like we do, but it is _very difficult_ to prove that that is the case, using any test which does not also exclude a great deal of people. And that is because "thinking like we do" is not at all a well-defined concept.
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    > exclude a great deal of people And why should you not exclude them. Where does this idea come from, taking random elements as models. Where do you see pedestals of free access? Is the Nobel Prize a raffle now?
gilbetron 1y ago
I agree 100% with you. I'm most excited about LLMs because they seem to capture at least some aspect of intelligence, and that's amazing given how much long it took to get here. It's exciting that we don't just understand it. I see people say, "LLMs aren't human intelligence", but instead, I really feel that it shows that many people, and much of what we do, probably is like an LLM. Most people just hallucinate their way through a conversation, they certainly don't reason. Reasoning is incredibly rare.

gdbsjjdn 1y ago

Congratulations, you've invented philosophy.

empath75 1y ago
This is an obnoxious response. Of course I recognize that philosophy is the solution to this. What I am pointing out is that philosophy has not as of yet resolved these relatively new problems. The idea that non-human intelligences might exist is of course an old one, but that is different from having an actual (potentially) existing one to reckon with.
- adastra22 1y ago
  These are not new problems though.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  Non-human intelligences have always existed in the form of animals. Animals do not have spoken language the way humans do, so their thoughts aren’t really composed of sentences. Yet, they have intelligence and can reason about their world. How could we build an AGI that doesn’t use language to think at all? We have no fucking clue and won’t for a while because everyone is chasing the mirage created by LLMs. AI winter will come and we’ll sit around waiting for the next big innovation. Probably some universal GOAP with deeply recurrent neural nets.
- gdbsjjdn 1y ago
  > Writings on metacognition date back at least as far as two works by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC): On the Soul and the Parva Naturalia We built a box that spits out natural language and tricks humans into believing it's conscious. The box itself actually isn't that interesting, but the human side of the equation is.
  - mdp2021 1y ago
    > the human side of the equation is You have only proven the urgency of Intelligence, the need to produce it in inflationary amounts.
meindnoch 1y ago
We need to reinvent philosophy. With JSON this time.

mdp2021 1y ago

> which seem to be very like how we think I would like to reassure you that we - we here - see LLMs are very much unlike us.

empath75 1y ago
Yes I very much understand that most people do not think that LLMs think or understand like we do, but it is _very difficult_ to prove that that is the case, using any test which does not also exclude a great deal of people. And that is because "thinking like we do" is not at all a well-defined concept.
- mdp2021 1y ago
  > exclude a great deal of people And why should you not exclude them. Where does this idea come from, taking random elements as models. Where do you see pedestals of free access? Is the Nobel Prize a raffle now?

gilbetron 1y ago

I agree 100% with you. I'm most excited about LLMs because they seem to capture at least some aspect of intelligence, and that's amazing given how much long it took to get here. It's exciting that we don't just understand it. I see people say, "LLMs aren't human intelligence", but instead, I really feel that it shows that many people, and much of what we do, probably is like an LLM. Most people just hallucinate their way through a conversation, they certainly don't reason. Reasoning is incredibly rare.