The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

>I think that Wittgenstein had it right when he said: "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him."

Why would we not? We live in the same physical world and encounter the same problems.

I understand the temptation to compare LLMs and computer vision, but I think it’s misleading to equate generative AI with feature-identification or descriptive AI systems like those in early computer vision. LLMs, which focus on generating human-like text and reasoning across diverse contexts, operate in a fundamentally different domain than descriptive AI, which primarily extracts patterns or features from data, like early vision systems did for images.

Comparing their 'real-world accuracy' oversimplifies their distinct goals and applications. While LLMs drive economic value through versatility in language tasks, their maturity shouldn’t be measured against the same metrics as descriptive systems from decades ago.

"We have documented cases of humans leading normal lives with little to no brain beyond a cerebellum" -- I take this to mean that these are humans that have a cerebellum but not much else.

Your npr.org link talks about the opposite -- regular brain, but no cerebellum.

Your irishtimes.com link talks about cerebrum, which is not the same as cerebellum.

Your biology.stackexchange.com link talks about Cerebral Cortex, which is also not the same as cerebellum.

And the cbc.ca link does not contain the string "cere" on the page.

Your first example is someone without a cerebellum which is not like the others.

The other examples are people with compressed neural tissue but that is not the same as never having the tissue.

A being with only a cerebellum could not behave like a human.

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Exactly. It’s been stated for a long time, before llms. For instance this paper https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/searle.mind... Describes a translator who doesn’t know the language.

In abstract we do the exact same thing

It's a dog eat dog world for sure. It does in fact seem that a part of intelligence is using it to compete ruthlessly with other intelligences.

Are there any cases like that? I've never heard of someone functioning normally with little or no brain beyond a cerebellum.

Why not? Consciousness is a state of self-awareness.

> If you simulated a human brain by the atom,

That is what we don't know is possible. You don't even know what physics or particles are as yet undiscovered. And from what we even know currently, atoms are too coarse to form the basis of such "cloning"

And, my viewpoint is that, even if this were possible, just because you simulated a brain atom by atom, does not mean you have a consciousness. If it is the arrangement of matter that gives rise to consciousness, then would that new consciousness be the same person or not?

If you have a basis for answering that question, let's hear it.

The monkeys on typewriters saying is just a colorful way of saying that an infinite random sequence will contain all finite sequences somewhere within it. Which is true. But I don't see what infinite random sequences have to do with LLMs or human thinking.

> Do you see the difference

No? I'm not sure what you're getting at.

To be fair, we also trained the LLM on (among other things) shakespeare, and adjusted the weights so that generating shakespeare would be more likely after that training.

We don't claim a JPEG can paint great art, even though certain jpegs do.

This all sounds very irrelevant. Consciousness is clearly tied to specific parts of a substrate. My consciousness doesn't change when a hair falls off my head, nor when I cut my fingernails. But it does change in some way if you were to cut the tip of my finger, or if I take a hormone pill.

Similarly, if we can compute consciousness on a chip, then the chip obviously contains that consciousness. You can experimentally determine to what extent this is true: for example, you can experimentally check if increasing the clock frequency of said chip alters the consciousness that it is computing. Or if changing the thermal paste that attaches it to its cooler does so. I don't know what the results of these experiments would be, but they would be quite clearly determined.

Of course, there would certainly be some scale, and at some point it becomes semantics. The same is true with human consciousness: some aspects of the body are more tightly coupled to consciousness than others; if you cut my hand, my consciousness will change more than if you cut a small piece of my bowel, but less than if you cut out a large piece of my brain. At what point do you draw the line and say "consciousness exists in the brain but not the hands"? It's all arbitrary to some extent. Even worse, say I use a journal where I write down some of my most cherished thoughts, and say that I am quite forgetful and I often go through this journal to remind myself of various thoughts before taking a decision. Would it not then be fair to say that the journal itself contains a part of my consciousness? After all, if someone were to tamper with it in subtle enough ways, they would certainly be able to influence my thought process, more so than even cutting off one of my hands, wouldn't they?

> Imagine we assume that A.I. could be conscious. What would be the identity/scope of that consciousness

Well, first I would ask whether this question makes sense in the first place. Does consciousness have a scope? Does consciousness even exist? Or is that more of a name attributed to some pattern we recognize in our own way of thinking (but may not be universal)?

Also, would a person missing an arm, but having a robot arm they can control have their consciousness' "scope" extended to it? Given that people have phantom pains, does a physical body even needed to consider it your part?

> It's not a living thing inside the computer, it's just the inference building text token by token using probabilities based on the pre-computed model.

Sure, and humans are just biochemical reactions moving muscles as their interface with the physical word.

I think the model of operation is not a good criticism, but please see my reply to the root comment in this thread where I detail my thoughts a bit.

This is a bad take. We didn't write the model, we wrote an algorithm that searches the space of models that conform to some high level constraints as specified by the stacked transformer architecture. But stacked transformers are a very general computational paradigm. The training aspect converges the parameters to a specific model that well reproduces the training data. But the computational circuits the model picks out are discovered, not programmed. The emergent structures realize new computational dynamics that we are mostly blind to. We are not the programmers of these models, rather we are their incubators.

As far as sentience is concerned, we can't say they aren't sentient because we don't know the computational structures these models realize, nor do we know the computational structures required for sentience.

You cannot say, 'we know it's not thinking because we wrote the code' when the inference 'code' we wrote amounts to, 'Hey, just do whatever you figured out during training okay'.

'Power over your computer', all that is orthogonal to the point. A human brain without a functioning body would still be thinking.

> It carries all of the biases us humans have and worse the biases that are present in the information we chose to explicitly share online

This is going to be a huge problem. Most people assume computers are unbiased and rational, and increasing use of AI will lead to more and larger decisions being made by AI.

I have no way of measuring whether or not you experience feelings and sensations, or are just regurgitating statements to convince me of that.

The only basis I have for assuming you are sentient according to that definition is trust in your self-reports.

I’d say it’s possible to experience mental anguish/worry without the body participating. Solely a cognitive pain from consternation.

How does a body know what's going on? Would you say it has any input devices?

We have examples of non sentience everywhere already with animals. And then an example of sentience with humans. So if you diff our brains the difference lies within a module in our prefrontal cortex. It’s a black box of logic but I can ‘understand’ or be willing to accept that it’s owed to ‘just’ more grey matter adding the self awareness to the rest of the system.

But to me the big mystery is how animals have sensation at all to begin with. What gives rise to that is a greater mystery to me personally.

There are examples of people who have no ability to feel pain yet are still able to think. Now I wonder if they ever experience mental anguish.

> But doesn't this rely on the same thing you suggest we don't have, which is a working and definable definition of consciousness?

No, it's like saying we have no indication that humans have psychic powers and can levitate objects with their minds. The commenter is saying no human has ever demonstrated the ability to figure things out that aren't Turing computable and we have no reason to suspect this ability is even theoretically possible (for anything, human or otherwise).

No, it rests on computability, Turing equivalence, and the total absence of both any kind of evidence to suggest we can exceed the Turing computable, and the lack of even a theoretical framework for what that would mean.

Without that any limitations borne out of what LLMs don't currently do are irrelevant.

My point exactly. The person I replied to did just that.

Consider the river metaphor: water carves the banks, banks channel the water. At any moment water and banks have the same shape.

Model/algorithm is the banks. Water could be the experiences. Maybe the algorithm does not have consciousness, but it is part of it.

They co-create each other. They are part of a recursive loop which cannot be explained statically, or part by part in isolation.

Yes! If algorithm is conscious (without being alive) then the eaten magic mushroom is also very conscious, judged by it's effect on the subject.

Unless you can show me you can exceed the Turing computable, there is no reason to consider you any more than an algorithm.

I already answered under the other comment asking me why and if your curious I suggest looking for it.

Very short answer is Karl Friston's free energy pricniple

Karl Friston's free energy principle is probably roughly 80% of my reasons to think they're coupled. The rest comes from studying integrated information theories, architecture of brains and nervous systems and neutral nets, more broadly information theory, and a long tail of other scientific concepts (particle physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, emergence, etc...)

It's hardly an unreasonable supposition: the one definitely conscious entities we know of are also the apex intelligence of the planet.

To put it another way: lots of things are conscious, but humans are definitely the most conscious beings on Earth.

> I'm so baffled when I see this being blindly asserted. With the reasoning models, you can literally watch their thought process.

Not true, you are falling for a very classic (prehistoric, even) human illusion known as experiencing a story:

1. There is a story-like document being extruded out of a machine humans explicitly designed for generating documents, and which humans trained on a bajillion stories humans already made.

2. When you "talk" to a chatbot, that is an iterative build of a (remote, hidden) story document, where one of the characters is adopting your text-input and the other's dialogue is being "performed" at you.

3. The "reasoning" in newer versions is just the "internal monologue" of a film noir detective character, and equally as fictional as anything that character "says out loud" to the (fictional) smokin-hot client who sashayed the (fictional) rent-overdue office bearing your (real) query on its (fictional) lips.

> If that's not thinking, I literally don't know what is.

All sorts of algorithms can achieve useful outcomes with "that made sense to me" flows, but that doesn't mean we automatically consider them to be capital-T Thinking.

> So I have to ask you: when you claim they don't think -- what are you basing this on?

Consider the following document from an unknown source, and the "chain of reasoning" and "thinking" that your human brain perceives when encountering it:

    My name is Robot Robbie.
    That high-carbon steel gear looks delicious. 
    Too much carbon is bad, but that isn't true here.
    I must ask before taking.    
    "Give me the gear, please."
    Now I have the gear.
    It would be even better with fresh manure.
    Now to find a cow, because cows make manure.

In other words, the reasoning is illusory. Even if we accept that the unknown author is a thinking intelligence for the sake of argument... it doesn't tell you what the author's thinking.

Brains are pretrained models, change my mind. (Not LLMs obviously, to be perfectly clear)

LLMs ingested a lot of high-quality code during their training, plus LLMs being capable of programming is a huge commercial use case, so no wonder that they are good at coding.

My experience, though, is that they aren't good at defining the task to be coded, or thinking about some unexpected side-effects. Code that will be left for them to develop freely will likely become bloated quite fast.