6 ms·
Thinking is undefined so all statements about it are unverifiable.
by jvanderbot 10mo ago
Thinking is undefined so all statements about it are unverifiable.
- nh23423fefe 10mo agoIs this some self refuting sentence?
- random9749832 10mo agoIs reasoning undefined? That's what usually meant by "thinking".
- nutjob2 10mo agoFormal reasoning is defined, informal reasoning very much isn't.
- random9749832 10mo agoAt the end of the day most people would agree that if something is able to solve a problem without a lookup table / memorisation that it used reasoning to reach the answer. You are really just splitting hairs here.
- gowld 10mo agoWhat do "most" people thinking about LLMs, then? The "hair-splitting" underlies the whole GenAI debate.
- random9749832 10mo agoWe have widely used benchmarks for reasoning. And no no it does not, you need get off HN.
- CamperBob2 10mo agoThe difference between thinking and reasoning is that I can "think" that Elvis is still alive, Jewish space lasers are responsible for California wildfires, and Trump was re-elected president in 2020, but I cannot "reason" myself into those positions. It ties into another aspect of these perennial threads, where it is somehow OK for humans to engage in deluded or hallucinatory thought, but when an AI model does it, it proves they don't "think."
- d-lisp 10mo agoDo you think that thinking is undefinable ? If thinking is definable, then all statements about it aren't unverifiable.
- ablob 10mo agoCaveat: if thinking is definable, then not all statements about it are unverifiable.
- d-lisp 10mo agoYes, that's a problem of me not being a native english speaker. "All x aren't y" may mean "not all x are y" in my tongue. Not a single x is y is more what we would say in the previous case. But in our case we would say there are x that aren't y. If thinking is definable, it is wrong that all statements about it are unverifiable (i.e. there are statements about it that are verifiable.) Well, basic shit.
- terminalshort 10mo agoStatements like "it is bound by the laws of physics" are not "verifiable" by your definition, and yet we safely assume it is true of everything. Everything except the human brain, that is, for which wild speculation that it may be supernatural is seemingly considered rational discussion so long as it satisfies people's needs to believe that they are somehow special in the universe.
- jvanderbot 10mo agoTrue. You need to define "it" before you can verify physics bounds it. Unicorns are not bound by the laws of physics - because they do not exist.
- gowld 10mo ago> it satisfies people's needs to believe that they are somehow special in the universe. Is it only humans that have this need? That makes the need special, so humans are special in the universe.
- terminalshort 10mo agoIt is bound by the same laws of physics as everything else, so no, not special.
- sublinear 10mo agoI think what many are saying is that of all the things we know best, it's going to be the machines we build and their underlying principles. We don't fully understand how brains work, but we know brains don't function like a computer. Why would a computer be assumed to function like a brain in any way, even in part, without evidence and just hopes based on marketing? And I don't just mean consumer marketing, but marketing within academia as well. For example, names like "neural networks" have always been considered metaphorical at best.
- ben_w 10mo agoI would say a different problem: There's many definitions of "thinking". AI and brains can do some, AI and brains definitely provably cannot do others, some others are untestable at present, and nobody really knows enough about what human brains do to be able to tell if or when some existing or future AI can do whatever is needed for the stuff we find special about ourselves. A lot of people use different definitions, and respond to anyone pointing this out by denying the issue and claiming their own definition is the only sensible one and "obviously" everyone else (who isn't a weird pedant) uses it.
- jvanderbot 10mo agoThis is not a meta-question. The definition of "thinking" in any of the parent comments or TFA is actually not defined. Like literally no statements are made about what is being tested. So, if we had that we could actually discuss it. Otherwise it's just opinions about what a person believes thinking is, combined with what LLMs are doing + what the person believes they themselves do + what they believe others do. It's entirely subjective with very low SNR b/c of those confounding factors.
- BobaFloutist 10mo agoWhat's a definition of thinking that brains definitely provably can't do?
- _alternator_ 10mo agoComputing the Kolmorgorov constant?
- BobaFloutist 10mo agoI don't know that I agree that computation is a variety of thinking. It's certainly influenced by thinking, but I think of thinking as more the thing you do before, after, and in-between the computation, not the actual computation itself.
- ben_w 10mo ago