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These LLMs don’t have senses, they have a token stream. They have no experience of the world outside of the language tokens they operate on. I’m not sure I bel
by brookst 6mo ago
These LLMs don’t have senses, they have a token stream. They have no experience of the world outside of the language tokens they operate on.
I’m not sure I believe that consciousness emerges from sensory experience, but if it does, LLMs won’t get it.
- vidarh 6mo agoSensory input is nothing but data.
- root_axis 6mo agoThat's just reductive semantics. Anything can be described as "nothing but data".
- digitaltrees 6mo agoSensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.
- root_axis 6mo agoThey don't have senses because they don't have a body. It's just a program. Do weights on a hard drive have consciousness? Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness? It doesn't make any sense.
- arcfour 6mo agoThere are robots with AI controlling them, so it doesn't hold that they don't all have bodies. They can see, they can move. (I'm still not sure that that makes them conscious, or if we can even determine that at all, but I don't think that's a fair argument.)
- AlecSchueler 6mo ago> They don't have senses because they don't have a body Surely "having senses" is predicated more on "being able to sense the world around you" than "having a body." > Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness? Can your installation of StarCraft take in information about the world and then reason about its own place in that world?
- digitaltrees 6mo agoBodies aren’t necessary for senses. I can send a picture to Claude. I can send a series of pictures. That’s usually called a sense of vision. I could connect it to a pressure sensor and that would be touch.
- digitaltrees 6mo agoThe weights on your hard drive might have consciousness if they can respond to stimuli in ways other conscious brains do. That’s the whole point of the Turing test, it’s a criteria for when the threshold of reasonable interpretation is crossed.
- vidarh 6mo agoHow do you measure this consciousness?
- vidarh 6mo agoHow do you imagine a brain can distinguish data from a real sense and data from another source?
- digitaltrees 6mo agoNeural networks can have senses. Hook an LLM up to a thermometer and it will respond to temperature changes.
- brookst 6mo agoNo, it will respond to tokens telling it about a temperature change. It has no sense of warmth. It cannot be burned. Conflating senses with cognitive awareness of sensory input is a mistake.
- tonyarkles 6mo agoI’m not sure I fully understand the distinction you’re making, or if I do I’m not sure I agree. Concretely, I agree that these are very different mechanisms. Abstractly… I agree that an LLM cannot be burned. I’m not sure I agree, though, that there is a significant conceptual difference between thermoreceptors in the skin causing action potentials to make their way up the spinal cord to the brain is all that different than reading a temperature sensor over I2C and turning it into input tokens. Edit: what they don’t have, obviously, is a hard-coded twitch response, where the brain itself is largely bypassed and muscles react to massive temperature differentials independently of conscious thought. But I don’t think that defines consciousness either. Ants instinctively run away from flames too.
- digitaltrees 6mo agoThe human Brain is a neural network. Your sense of “knowing what warmth is” reduces down to the weights of connections between neurons in an analog of LLMs. What is different about the human brain that warrants saying that the same emergent characteristics for one network are inaccessible to another?
- brookst 6mo agoYou really don't think there's an experiential difference between putting your hand on a hot stove, versus reading the text "the stove is 200c, and will hurt if you touch it"?
- kortex 6mo agoHow do you know the sensation of a red photon hitting a cone cell, transduced to the optic nerve through ion junctions and processed by pyramidal neurons, is any more or less real than the excitation of electrons in a doped silicon junction activating the latent space of the "red" thought vector? Cause we are made of meat?
- digitaltrees 6mo agoYou’re arguing against the opposite of my position. I am arguing that LLMs have a reasonable basis to be seen as conscious because there is nothing special about biological neural networks.
- kortex 6mo agoYa, I seem to largely agree with your comments on this article. I was replying to brookst, did you mean to reply on a differnt thread?
- digitaltrees 6mo agoI have a 7 month old so my neural network is running on one gpu in a manner of speaking.