3 ms·

Yeah, and you’re just a next-word-sayer.

by semiquaver 4mo ago

ofjcihen 4mo ago
I love this argument. Not because it’s true but because it betrays the posters doubt in their own sentience.
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago
  It's impossible for someone to doubt their own sentience. The literal act of doubting is enough to dissipate all doubt. Solipsism is essentially the one certainty that every mind out there has. Doubting the sentience of machines and even other humans is perfectly fine though. Only empathy allows people to make the leap and assume other humans have souls.
  - rexarex 4mo ago
    So you posit that humans are solipsistic by default, but some (most?) develop more and realize they’re not the only conscious being out there?
    - matheusmoreira 4mo ago
      "Realize" is too strong a word. You're the only one who can verify that you're the soul who's staring out at the world through your eyes. For all you know, everyone else could be just biological automatons, golems. Any leap beyond that is based on empathy. You have a soul, and you are human, therefore other humans could have souls too. It's a spiritual belief. Answers to questions that cannot be answered.
    - marmarama 4mo ago
      That's the standard Piagetian understanding of child development, yes. Humans do not start out with theory of mind, and are thus inherently solipsistic, but in most cases an understanding that there are other conscious beings with their own thoughts, goals and feelings develops between the ages of 2 and 7. Developing theory of mind is one of the key milestones in child development.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - teravor 4mo ago
    > It's impossible for someone to doubt their own sentience. The literal act of doubting is enough to dissipate all doubt. i never found this convincing. just because you can loop does not mean you are sentient/conscious. what would it look like if you didn't exist and there was just a system that interrogated neural inputs and produced neural outputs in a loop? if anything, LLM's as an existence proof made this more likely to be the actual case.
  - Zecc 4mo ago
    > Solipsism is essentially the one certainty that every mind out there has. Not I. I'm just a Boltzmann brain.
- solumunus 4mo ago
  I’m not sure what sentience has to do with it.
root_axis 4mo ago
This is wrong. Human thinking and speech isn't autoregressive like LLM inference.
- infinite_spin 4mo ago
  while the how is different, the what has many parallels. E.g. both the brain and LLMs appear to learn distributions of representations, they both develop a hierarchy of those representations, both have early layers that process simple features, with later ones processing more abstract concepts, both predict missing information...
  - root_axis 4mo ago
    The post I responded to stated that the commenter was just a next-word-sayer, but that's wrong. The similarities you draw aren't really relevant to my reply.
    - infinite_spin 4mo ago
      no disrespect intended, however I think my response is relevant, because the broader topic here is whether LLMs and the human mind share similar functions. They both do in fact have a lot of overlapping features, and a fundamental one is predicting next-thing, be that a word, image, or otherwise.
      - root_axis 4mo ago
        It's not relevant. However, if you want to talk about a broader point, that's ok. > LLMs appear to learn distributions of representations, they both develop a hierarchy of those representations, both have early layers that process simple features, with later ones processing more abstract concepts, both predict missing information. This type of superficial comparison isn't very meaningful, it's trivial to liken anything to a human biology in this manner. A plane and a bird both use wings to produce lift, it doesn't then follow that a bird and a plane are meaningfully similar.
moezd 4mo ago
Chinese whispers, simulacra... I don't have the energy to argue after being name called, but you get the point. Yes LLMs are useful in building automatic telling machines, but ask it to do anything more substantial and all you are doing is burning tokens at the altar of Anthropic and hope. That just doesn't fly in regulated industries.
dofm 4mo ago
I mean, conversationally, of course we work a little more like that (I tend to think in whole sentence blocks before I say them but I suppose they assemble themselves largely word-by-word, or word-by-word with a bit of editing). But right now I am trying to design something -— a physical mechanism with a particular enclosure — that I cannot clearly describe (this makes it hard to research). I designed a previous version without even knowing the words that do, in fact, describe that. I have a theory about it, animated in my mind, that I can only test by making it. If I want you to know about it, I can either show you it or work out words to describe it, which will be inadequate to describing it. The idea for it came from seeing things nobody has ever put into words for me. "Next-word sayer" doesn't describe any of this process, does it? (This is also why text-to-CAD is a bullshit idea)

Yeah, and you’re just a next-word-sayer.

ofjcihen 4mo ago

I love this argument. Not because it’s true but because it betrays the posters doubt in their own sentience.

matheusmoreira 4mo ago
It's impossible for someone to doubt their own sentience. The literal act of doubting is enough to dissipate all doubt. Solipsism is essentially the one certainty that every mind out there has. Doubting the sentience of machines and even other humans is perfectly fine though. Only empathy allows people to make the leap and assume other humans have souls.
- rexarex 4mo ago
  So you posit that humans are solipsistic by default, but some (most?) develop more and realize they’re not the only conscious being out there?
  - matheusmoreira 4mo ago
    "Realize" is too strong a word. You're the only one who can verify that you're the soul who's staring out at the world through your eyes. For all you know, everyone else could be just biological automatons, golems. Any leap beyond that is based on empathy. You have a soul, and you are human, therefore other humans could have souls too. It's a spiritual belief. Answers to questions that cannot be answered.
  - marmarama 4mo ago
    That's the standard Piagetian understanding of child development, yes. Humans do not start out with theory of mind, and are thus inherently solipsistic, but in most cases an understanding that there are other conscious beings with their own thoughts, goals and feelings develops between the ages of 2 and 7. Developing theory of mind is one of the key milestones in child development.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- teravor 4mo ago
  > It's impossible for someone to doubt their own sentience. The literal act of doubting is enough to dissipate all doubt. i never found this convincing. just because you can loop does not mean you are sentient/conscious. what would it look like if you didn't exist and there was just a system that interrogated neural inputs and produced neural outputs in a loop? if anything, LLM's as an existence proof made this more likely to be the actual case.
- Zecc 4mo ago
  > Solipsism is essentially the one certainty that every mind out there has. Not I. I'm just a Boltzmann brain.
solumunus 4mo ago
I’m not sure what sentience has to do with it.

root_axis 4mo ago

This is wrong. Human thinking and speech isn't autoregressive like LLM inference.

infinite_spin 4mo ago
while the how is different, the what has many parallels. E.g. both the brain and LLMs appear to learn distributions of representations, they both develop a hierarchy of those representations, both have early layers that process simple features, with later ones processing more abstract concepts, both predict missing information...
- root_axis 4mo ago
  The post I responded to stated that the commenter was just a next-word-sayer, but that's wrong. The similarities you draw aren't really relevant to my reply.
  - infinite_spin 4mo ago
    no disrespect intended, however I think my response is relevant, because the broader topic here is whether LLMs and the human mind share similar functions. They both do in fact have a lot of overlapping features, and a fundamental one is predicting next-thing, be that a word, image, or otherwise.
    - root_axis 4mo ago
      It's not relevant. However, if you want to talk about a broader point, that's ok. > LLMs appear to learn distributions of representations, they both develop a hierarchy of those representations, both have early layers that process simple features, with later ones processing more abstract concepts, both predict missing information. This type of superficial comparison isn't very meaningful, it's trivial to liken anything to a human biology in this manner. A plane and a bird both use wings to produce lift, it doesn't then follow that a bird and a plane are meaningfully similar.

moezd 4mo ago

Chinese whispers, simulacra... I don't have the energy to argue after being name called, but you get the point. Yes LLMs are useful in building automatic telling machines, but ask it to do anything more substantial and all you are doing is burning tokens at the altar of Anthropic and hope. That just doesn't fly in regulated industries.

dofm 4mo ago

I mean, conversationally, of course we work a little more like that (I tend to think in whole sentence blocks before I say them but I suppose they assemble themselves largely word-by-word, or word-by-word with a bit of editing). But right now I am trying to design something -— a physical mechanism with a particular enclosure — that I cannot clearly describe (this makes it hard to research). I designed a previous version without even knowing the words that do, in fact, describe that. I have a theory about it, animated in my mind, that I can only test by making it. If I want you to know about it, I can either show you it or work out words to describe it, which will be inadequate to describing it. The idea for it came from seeing things nobody has ever put into words for me. "Next-word sayer" doesn't describe any of this process, does it? (This is also why text-to-CAD is a bullshit idea)