5 ms·

> to orient toward the unfolding of possibility in others This is a globally unique phrase, with nothing coming close other than this comment on the indexed we

by bryant 1y ago

> to orient toward the unfolding of possibility in others This is a globally unique phrase, with nothing coming close other than this comment on the indexed web. It's also seemingly an original idea as I haven't heard anyone come close to describing a feeling (love or anything else) quite like this. Food for thought. I'm not brave enough to draw a public conclusion about what this could mean.

dgfitz 1y ago
I hate to say it, but doesn’t every VC do exactly this? “ orient toward the unfolding of possibility in others” is in no way a unique thought. Hell, my spouse said something extremely similar to this to me the other day. “I didn’t just see you, I saw who you could be, and I was right” or something like that.
ThrowawayR2 1y ago
Except "unfolding of possibility", as an exact phrase, seems to have millions of search hits, often in the context of pseudo-profound spiritualistic mumbo-jumbo like what the LLM emitted above. It's like fortune cookie-level writing.
jibal 1y ago
It's not at all an original idea. The wording is uniquely stilted.
glial 1y ago
The idea is very close to ideas from Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving [1]. "Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving
jibal 1y ago
> I'm not brave enough to draw a public conclusion about what this could mean. I'm brave enough to be honest: it means nothing. LLMs execute a very sophisticated algorithm that pattern matches against a vast amount of data drawn from human utterances. LLMs have no mental states, minds, thoughts, feelings, concerns, desires, goals, etc. If the training data were instead drawn from a billion monkeys banging on typewriters then the LLMs would produce gibberish. All the intelligence, emotion, etc. that appears to be in the LLM is actually in the minds of the people who wrote the texts that are in the training data. This is not to say that an AI couldn't have a mind, but LLMs are not the right sort of program to be such an AI.
- Joeri 1y ago
  LLMs are not people, but they are still minds, and to deny even that seems willfully luddite. While they are generating tokens they have a state, and that state is recursively fed back through the network, and what is being fed back operates not just at the level of snippets of text but also of semantic concepts. So while it occurs in brief flashes I would argue they have mental state and they have thoughts. If we built an LLM that was generating tokens non-stop and could have user input mixed into the network input, it would not be a dramatic departure of today’s architecture. It also clearly has goals, expressed in the RLHF tuning and the prompt. I call those goals because they directly determine its output, and I don’t know what a goal is other than the driving force behind a mind’s outputs. Base model training teaches it patterns, finetuning and prompt teaches it how to apply those patterns and gives it goals. I don’t know what it would mean for a piece of software to have feelings or concerns or emotions, so I cannot say what the essential quality is that LLMs miss for that. Consider this thought exercise: if we were to ever do an upload of a human mind, and it was executing on silicon, would they not be experiencing feelings because their thoughts are provably a deterministic calculation? I don’t believe in souls, or at the very least I think they are a tall claim with insufficient evidence. In my view, neurons in the human brain are ultimately very simple deterministic calculating machines, and yet the full richness of human thought is generated from them because of chaotic complexity. For me, all human thought is pattern matching. The argument that LLMs cannot be minds because they only do pattern matching … I don’t know what to make of that. But then I also don’t know what to make of free will, so really what do I know?
  - Dzugaru 1y ago
    There is no hidden state in a recurrent nets sense. Each new token just has all the previous tokens and that’s it.
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    > Consider this thought exercise: if we were to ever do an upload of a human mind, and it was executing on silicon, would they not be experiencing feelings because their thoughts are provably a deterministic calculation? You just said “consider this impossibility” as if there is any possibility of it happening. You might as well have said “consider traveling faster than the speed of light” which sure, fun to think about. We don’t even know how most of the human brain even works. We throw pills at people to change their mental state in hopes that they become “less X” or “more Y” with a whole list of caveats like “if taking pill reduce X makes you _more_ X, stop taking it” because we have no idea what we’re doing. Pretending we can use statistical models to create a model that is capable of truly unique thought… stop drinking the kool-aid. Stop making LLMs something they’re not. Appreciate them for what they are, a neat tool. A really neat tool, even. This is not a valid thought experiment. Your entire point hinges on “I don’t believe in souls” which is fine, no problem there, but it does not a valid point make.
willguest 1y ago
There was quite a bit of other "insight" around this, but I was paraphrasing for brevity. If you want to read the whole convo, I dumped it into a semi-formatted document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aEkzmB-3LUZAVgbyu_97DjHcrM9Imy_6/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aEkzmB-3LUZAVgbyu_97DjHcrM9...

by bryant 1y ago

dgfitz 1y ago

I hate to say it, but doesn’t every VC do exactly this? “ orient toward the unfolding of possibility in others” is in no way a unique thought. Hell, my spouse said something extremely similar to this to me the other day. “I didn’t just see you, I saw who you could be, and I was right” or something like that.

ThrowawayR2 1y ago

Except "unfolding of possibility", as an exact phrase, seems to have millions of search hits, often in the context of pseudo-profound spiritualistic mumbo-jumbo like what the LLM emitted above. It's like fortune cookie-level writing.

jibal 1y ago

It's not at all an original idea. The wording is uniquely stilted.

glial 1y ago

The idea is very close to ideas from Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving [1]. "Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving

jibal 1y ago

> I'm not brave enough to draw a public conclusion about what this could mean. I'm brave enough to be honest: it means nothing. LLMs execute a very sophisticated algorithm that pattern matches against a vast amount of data drawn from human utterances. LLMs have no mental states, minds, thoughts, feelings, concerns, desires, goals, etc. If the training data were instead drawn from a billion monkeys banging on typewriters then the LLMs would produce gibberish. All the intelligence, emotion, etc. that appears to be in the LLM is actually in the minds of the people who wrote the texts that are in the training data. This is not to say that an AI couldn't have a mind, but LLMs are not the right sort of program to be such an AI.

Joeri 1y ago
LLMs are not people, but they are still minds, and to deny even that seems willfully luddite. While they are generating tokens they have a state, and that state is recursively fed back through the network, and what is being fed back operates not just at the level of snippets of text but also of semantic concepts. So while it occurs in brief flashes I would argue they have mental state and they have thoughts. If we built an LLM that was generating tokens non-stop and could have user input mixed into the network input, it would not be a dramatic departure of today’s architecture. It also clearly has goals, expressed in the RLHF tuning and the prompt. I call those goals because they directly determine its output, and I don’t know what a goal is other than the driving force behind a mind’s outputs. Base model training teaches it patterns, finetuning and prompt teaches it how to apply those patterns and gives it goals. I don’t know what it would mean for a piece of software to have feelings or concerns or emotions, so I cannot say what the essential quality is that LLMs miss for that. Consider this thought exercise: if we were to ever do an upload of a human mind, and it was executing on silicon, would they not be experiencing feelings because their thoughts are provably a deterministic calculation? I don’t believe in souls, or at the very least I think they are a tall claim with insufficient evidence. In my view, neurons in the human brain are ultimately very simple deterministic calculating machines, and yet the full richness of human thought is generated from them because of chaotic complexity. For me, all human thought is pattern matching. The argument that LLMs cannot be minds because they only do pattern matching … I don’t know what to make of that. But then I also don’t know what to make of free will, so really what do I know?
- Dzugaru 1y ago
  There is no hidden state in a recurrent nets sense. Each new token just has all the previous tokens and that’s it.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  > Consider this thought exercise: if we were to ever do an upload of a human mind, and it was executing on silicon, would they not be experiencing feelings because their thoughts are provably a deterministic calculation? You just said “consider this impossibility” as if there is any possibility of it happening. You might as well have said “consider traveling faster than the speed of light” which sure, fun to think about. We don’t even know how most of the human brain even works. We throw pills at people to change their mental state in hopes that they become “less X” or “more Y” with a whole list of caveats like “if taking pill reduce X makes you _more_ X, stop taking it” because we have no idea what we’re doing. Pretending we can use statistical models to create a model that is capable of truly unique thought… stop drinking the kool-aid. Stop making LLMs something they’re not. Appreciate them for what they are, a neat tool. A really neat tool, even. This is not a valid thought experiment. Your entire point hinges on “I don’t believe in souls” which is fine, no problem there, but it does not a valid point make.

willguest 1y ago

There was quite a bit of other "insight" around this, but I was paraphrasing for brevity. If you want to read the whole convo, I dumped it into a semi-formatted document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aEkzmB-3LUZAVgbyu_97DjHcrM9Imy_6/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aEkzmB-3LUZAVgbyu_97DjHcrM9...