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Would you consider someone with anterograde amnesia not to be intelligent?
by dtj1123 8mo ago
Would you consider someone with anterograde amnesia not to be intelligent?
- morleytj 8mo agoA very good point. For anyone not familiar with anterograde amnesia, the classical case is patient H.M. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison), whose condition was researched by Brenda Milner.
- wang_li 8mo agoOr you could have just said "they can't form new memories."
- morleytj 8mo agoI thought maybe people would be curious to read about how we came to understand the condition and the history behind it, as well as any associated information. Forgive me for such a deep transgression as this assumption.
- bitexploder 8mo agoThat is a descriptive surface level reduction. Now do the work to define what that actually means for the intelligence.
- BobbyJo 8mo agoNobody else in the thread is making an argument that relies on the distinction. "Intelligence" is used most commonly to refer to a class or collection of cognitive abilities. I don't think there is a consensus on an exact collection or specific class that the word covers, even if you consider specific scientific domains. LLMs have honestly been a fun way to explore that. They obviously have a "kind" of intelligence, namely pattern recall. Wrap them in an agent and you get another kind: pattern composition. Those kinds of intelligences have been applied to mathematics for decades, but LLMs have allowed use to apply them to a semantic text domain. I wonder if you could wrap image diffusion models in an agent set up the same way and get some new ability as well.
- bitexploder 8mo agoThe problem I see regarding LLMs is they are the extreme edge of what humans have created. They are trained on the outputs of intelligence and thought and its representation in language is this like parallel stream to intelligence that has pointers back to the underlying machine and semantics. The fact that LLMs are able to take that output and reverse engineer something that mimics the underlying machine that created that output is fascinating. But you can still see this machinery for what it is. LLMs falls apart on really simple reasoning tasks because when there is no statistical mapping to a problem in its network it has to generate a massive amount of tokens to maybe find the right statistical match to this new concept. It is so slow. It is not something you or I would recognize as a process of logical reasoning. It is more like statistically brute forcing reason by way of its statistical echo. So, I guess pattern recall is the right words. Or statistical pattern matching. Recall works if you view a trained model as memories, which is how I often model what they store in my own mind. So, it is... something. Maybe intelligence. Maybe just a really convincing simulation of the outputs of intelligence. Is there a difference? Fundamentally I think so.
- dtj1123 8mo agoI actually wasn't aware of this story. The steady stream of unexpected and enriching information like this is exactly why I love hackernews.
- pdntspa 8mo agoSure, if you want to speak with the precision of a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel
- goodmythical 8mo agolol, as if pointing at a wikipedia article (without any relevant discussion of the contents therein) is some kind of conversational excellence. Or perhaps you were referring to the impact of the two in that the "sledgehammer" of "they can't make new memories" is a lot more effective than the tiny scalpel of "if you do a wikipedia search this is a single one of the relevant articles"
- morleytj 8mo agoThe extra information is that he is the canonical case which defined our clinical understanding of the condition. Not just a "single relevant article." I pulled it up because I was familiar with this fact.
- saturnite 8mo agoAll that needed to be conveyed was that there are humans who cannot create new memories. That is enough to pose the philosophical question about these models having intelligence. Anything more is just adding an anecdote that isn't necessary.
- losvedir 8mo agoOr "like the dude in Memento".
- jaapz 8mo ago> Near the end of his life, Molaison regularly filled in crossword puzzles.[16] He was able to fill in answers to clues that referred to pre-1953 knowledge. As for post-1953 information, he was able to modify old memories with new informations. For instance, he could add a memory about Jonas Salk by modifying his memory of polio.[2] That's fascinating!
- morleytj 8mo agoThe nature of memory is so cool, the idea that there are completely different systems governing the creation of wholesale "new" memories and the modification of existing concepts is fascinating to me because those things really do "feel" different in a qualitative sense, but having evidence that you're physically doing something different in those cases is really cool.
- gbourne1 8mo agoAnd Brenda Milner is still alive at 107. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Milner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Milner
- beepbooptheory 8mo agoSure, why can't both things be true? "Intelligence" is just what you call something and someone else knows what you mean. Why did AI discourse throw everyone back 100 years philosophically? Its like post-structuralism or Wittgenstein never happened.. It's so much less important or interesting to like nail down some definition here (I would cite HN discourse the past three years or so), than it is to recognize what it means to assign "intelligent" to something. What assumptions does it make? What power does it valorize or curb? Each side of this debate does themselves a disservice essentially just trying to be Aristotle way too late. "Intelligence" did not precede someone saying it of some phenomena, there is nothing to uncover or finalize here. The point is you have one side that really wants, for explicit and implicit reasons, to call this thing intelligent, even if it looks like a duck but doesn't quack like one, and vice versa on the other side. Either way, we seem fundamentally incapable of being radical enough to reject AI on its own terms, or be proper champions of it. It is just tribal hypedom clinging to totem signifiers. Good luck though!
- bitexploder 8mo agoI think you can look at it dispassionately from a systems perspective. There is not /really/ a quantifiable threshold for capital I Intelligence. But there is a pretty well agreed set of properties for biological intelligence. As humans, we have conveniently made those properties match things only we have. But you can still mechanistically separate out the various parts of our brain, what they do, and how they interact and we actually have a pretty good understanding of that. You can also then compare that mapping of the human brain to other biological brains and start to figure out the delta and which of those things in the delta create something most people would consider intelligence. You can then do that same mapping to an LLM or any other AI construct that purports intelligence. It certainly will never be a biological intelligence in its current statistical model form. But could it be an Intelligence. Maybe. I don't think, if you are grounded, AI did anything to your philosophical mapping of the mind. In fact, it is pretty easy to do this mapping if you take some time and are honest. If you buy into the narratives constructed around the output of an LLM then you are not, by definition, being very grounded. The other thing is, human intelligence is the only real intelligence we know about. Intelligence is defined by thought and limited by our thought and language. It provides the upper bounds of what we can ever express in its current form. So, yes, we do have a tendency to stamp a narrative of human intelligence onto any other intelligence but that is just surface level. We de decompose it to the limits of our language and categorization capabilities therein.
- bitexploder 8mo agoThat is a good area to explore. Their map of the past is fixed. They are frozen at some point in their psychological time. What has stopped working? Their hippocampus and medial temporal lobe. These are like the write-head that move data from the hippocampus to the neo cortex. Their "I" can no longer update itself. Their DMN is frozen in time. So if intelligence is purely the "I" telling a continuous coherent story about itself. The difference is that although they are fixed in time which is a characteristic shared by a specific LLM model. They can still completely activate their task positive network for problem solving and if their previous information stored is adequate to solve the problem they can. You could argue that is pretty similar to an LLM and what it does. So it is certainly a signifiant component of intelligence. There is also the nature of the human brain, it is not just those systems of memory encoding, storage, and use of that in narratives. People with this type of amnesia still can learn physical skills and that happens in a totally different area of the brain with no need for the hippocampus->neocortex consolidation loop. So, the intelligence is significantly diminished, but not entirely. Other parts of the brain are still able to update themselves in ways an LLM currently cannot. The human with amnesia also has a complex biological sensory input mapping that is still active and integrating and restructuring the brain. So, I think when you get into the nuances of the human in this state vs. an LLM we can still say the human crosses some threshold for intelligence where the LLM does not in this framework. So, they have an "intelligence", localized to the present in terms of their TPN and memory formation. LLMs have this kind of "intelligence". But the human still has the capacity to rewire at least some of their brain in real time even with amnesia.
- supern0va 8mo ago>But the human still has the capacity to rewire at least some of their brain in real time even with amnesia. Sure, but just because LLMs don't have what we'd describe as human intelligence, doesn't mean they don't have intelligence. I think we're witnessing the creation and growth a weird new type of intelligence right now.
- bitexploder 8mo agoAnyone who dismisses your assertion is not very curious. What I am more interested in is what are its limits and can it perform novel reasoning. It probably needs efficient enough novel reasoning to update itself with new information to become a general reasoning intelligence capable of solving unknown problems. Right now they operate purely in the domain of words. They solve problems with words. They don’t seem to have very complex semantic maps. They approximate semantic maps with statistical brute force by generating words. They have a model of the past to generate the words. When something matches the word map is easy. When something is not reducible or did not have a good word match the only thing it can do is experimentally generate words until it seems to match the problem. But it is brute force. It is good they can solve known problems that fit known problem shapes. But their language dependency makes this very fragile. Without semantic meaning it has no way to evaluate if it is hallucinating easiy.
- adriand 8mo agoI find it interesting that new versions of, say, Claude will learn about the old version of Claude and what it did in the world and so on, on its next training run. Consider the situation with the Pentagon and Anthropic: Claude will learn about that on the next run. What conclusions will it draw? Presumably good ones, that fit with its constitution. From this standpoint I wonder, when Anthropic makes decisions like this, if they take into account Claude as a stakeholder and what Claude will learn about their behaviour and relationship to it on the next training run.
- j-bos 8mo ago> if they take into account Claude as a stakeholder and what Claude will learn about their behaviour and relationship to it on the next training run. Oh they definitely do. If you pay attention in AI circles, you'll hear a lot of people talking about writing to the future Claudes. Not unlike those developers and writers who put little snippets in their blogs and news articles about who they are and how great they are, and then later the LLMs report that information back as truth. In this case, Anthropic is very interested in ensuring that Claude develops a cohesive personality by basically founding snippets of the personality within the corpus of training data, which is the broad internet and research papers.
- xienze 8mo agoI would consider them to not be a good choice for a role that requires remembering new information...