8 ms·

>Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point i

>Having seen LLMs so many times produce coherent, sensible and valid chains of reasoning to diagnose issues and bugs in software I work on, I am at this point in absolutely no doubt that they are thinking. If one could write a quadrillion-line python script of nothing but if/elif/else statements nested 1 million blocks deep that seemingly parsed your questions and produced seemingly coherent, sensible, valid "chains of reasoning"... would that software be thinking? And if you don't like the answer, how is the LLM fundamentally different from the software I describe? >Knee jerk dismissing the evidence in front of your eyes because There is no evidence here. On the very remote possibility that LLMs are at some level doing what humans are doing, I would then feel really pathetic that humans are as non-sapient as the LLMs. The same way that there is a hole in your vision because of a defective retina, there is a hole in your cognition that blinds you to how cognition works. Because of this, you and all the other humans are stumbling around in the dark, trying to invent intelligence by accident, rather than just introspecting and writing it out from scratch. While our species might someday eventually brute force AGI, it would be many thousands of years before we get there.

hattmall 1y ago
I write software that is far less complex and I consider it to be "thinking" while it is working through multiple possible permutations of output and selecting the best one. Unless you rigidly define thinking, processing, computing, it's reasonable to use them interchangeably.
- emodendroket 1y ago
  To borrow a line from Dijkstra, the claim seems a bit like saying that a submarine is swimming.
  - gkbrk 1y ago
    I think most people would agree that submarines are swimming.
    - isaacremuant 1y ago
      No. Cars don't walk. Submarines don't swim. You can call it navigation if you want but words have meaning. > to move through water by moving the body or parts of the body.
      - hackinthebochs 1y ago
        Spinning propellers is "moving parts of the [submarines] body"
        isaacremuant 1y ago
        No they aren't. Of course you cans also call it's sonar eyes but it isn't. Anthropomorphizing cars doesn't make them humans either.
        hackinthebochs 1y ago
        Why would you think body only refers to flesh?
        emodendroket 1y ago
        Even if I take the more expansive possible interpretation of “body” typically applied to vehicles, the propeller on the back of it isn’t part of the “body” and the “body” of a submarine is rigid and immobile. Is this an intellectual exercise for you or have you ever in your life heard someone say something like “the submarine swam through the water”? It’s so ridiculous I would be shocked to see it outside of a story intended for children or an obvious nonnative speaker of English.
        hackinthebochs 1y ago
        >the propeller on the back of it isn’t part of the “body” and the “body” of a submarine is rigid and immobile. That's a choice to limit the meaning of the term to the rigid/immobile parts of the external boundary of an object. It's not obviously the correct choice. Presumably you don't take issue with people saying planes fly. The issue of submarines swimming seems analogous. >Is this an intellectual exercise for you or have you ever in your life heard someone say something like “the submarine swam through the water”? I don't think I've ever had a discussion about submarines with anyone, outside of the OceanGate disaster. But this whole approach to the issue seems misguided. With terms like this we should ask what the purpose behind the term is, i.e. it's intension (the concept), not the incidental extension of the term (the collection of things it applies to at some point in time). When we refer to something swimming, we mean that it is moving through water under its own power. The reference to "body" is incidental.
helloplanets 1y ago
10^15 lines of code is a lot. We would pretty quickly enter the realm of it not having much to do with programming and more about just treating the LOC count as an amount of memory allocated to do X. How much resemblance does the information in the conditionals need to have with the actual input, or can they immediately be transformed to a completely separate 'language' which simply uses the string object as its conduit? Can the 10^15 lines of code be generated with an external algorithm, or is it assumed that I'd written it by hand given an infinitely long lifespan?

hattmall 1y ago

I write software that is far less complex and I consider it to be "thinking" while it is working through multiple possible permutations of output and selecting the best one. Unless you rigidly define thinking, processing, computing, it's reasonable to use them interchangeably.

emodendroket 1y ago
To borrow a line from Dijkstra, the claim seems a bit like saying that a submarine is swimming.
- gkbrk 1y ago
  I think most people would agree that submarines are swimming.
  - isaacremuant 1y ago
    No. Cars don't walk. Submarines don't swim. You can call it navigation if you want but words have meaning. > to move through water by moving the body or parts of the body.
    - hackinthebochs 1y ago
      Spinning propellers is "moving parts of the [submarines] body"
      - isaacremuant 1y ago
        No they aren't. Of course you cans also call it's sonar eyes but it isn't. Anthropomorphizing cars doesn't make them humans either.
        hackinthebochs 1y ago
        Why would you think body only refers to flesh?
        emodendroket 1y ago
        Even if I take the more expansive possible interpretation of “body” typically applied to vehicles, the propeller on the back of it isn’t part of the “body” and the “body” of a submarine is rigid and immobile. Is this an intellectual exercise for you or have you ever in your life heard someone say something like “the submarine swam through the water”? It’s so ridiculous I would be shocked to see it outside of a story intended for children or an obvious nonnative speaker of English.
        hackinthebochs 1y ago
        >the propeller on the back of it isn’t part of the “body” and the “body” of a submarine is rigid and immobile. That's a choice to limit the meaning of the term to the rigid/immobile parts of the external boundary of an object. It's not obviously the correct choice. Presumably you don't take issue with people saying planes fly. The issue of submarines swimming seems analogous. >Is this an intellectual exercise for you or have you ever in your life heard someone say something like “the submarine swam through the water”? I don't think I've ever had a discussion about submarines with anyone, outside of the OceanGate disaster. But this whole approach to the issue seems misguided. With terms like this we should ask what the purpose behind the term is, i.e. it's intension (the concept), not the incidental extension of the term (the collection of things it applies to at some point in time). When we refer to something swimming, we mean that it is moving through water under its own power. The reference to "body" is incidental.

helloplanets 1y ago

10^15 lines of code is a lot. We would pretty quickly enter the realm of it not having much to do with programming and more about just treating the LOC count as an amount of memory allocated to do X. How much resemblance does the information in the conditionals need to have with the actual input, or can they immediately be transformed to a completely separate 'language' which simply uses the string object as its conduit? Can the 10^15 lines of code be generated with an external algorithm, or is it assumed that I'd written it by hand given an infinitely long lifespan?