If these networks were only being used to model other systems, like protein folding or something like that, people wouldn't be mistaking them for anything other than clever prediction engines.
Since they're modelling our own languages, people get spooked and start bringing up theory of mind.
As far as I can tell from the above conversation the OP never mentioned anything about their brain. You have introduced their brain, and its functioning, to the conversation.
In view of that, could you please clarify: are you saying that the OP's own brain is doing something that could be represented with a "matrix multiplication"?
I am saying that GP's claim of "just because it only uses some basic math, it cannot be sentient/conscious/intelligent" does not seem valid to me. The only way such a claim could be made, as far as I can see, would be to point to a specific mechanism that is needed for sentience/consciousness/intelligence to arise, which goes beyond the mechanisms a neural network uses.
I.e., they could only make that claim if they knew that their own brain (which is presumably the only verifiable instance of consciousness they know of) did something that couldn't be done with "matrix multiplications".
Searching this thread for the string "just because it only uses some basic math, it cannot be sentient/conscious/intelligent" I can only find it in your comment. That's your interpretation of what the OP said, not what they said, is that correct?
I think you should not try to interpret in that way and only stick to what the other person has said, otherwise we will all lose the thread of the conversation.
In any case, nobody here has said anything about brains having, or not having, to do something with matrix multiplication, except for your comment, so I still don't understand what you are saying.
Are you saying that the OP's brain is doing "something that couldn't be done with "matrix multiplications", or are you saying it isn't doing something like that?
> Are you saying that the OP's brain is doing "something that couldn't be done with "matrix multiplications", or are you saying it isn't doing something like that?
He is saying neither. He is observing that OP has introduced the assumption that their brain is doing something that can't be done with matrix multiplication and is pointing out that there is no evidence to back such an assumption up.
> but now somehow the collective has moved on to believing that matrix multiplication is sentient
The OP clearly feels that matrix multiplication is insufficient for sentience. Presumably the OP views themselves and other humans as sentient. Therefore the OP is implying that human brains do things which cannot be reduced to or wholly represented by matrix multiplication (plus the various nonlinear activation functions and other implementation details of current ML models).
>> He is saying neither. He is observing that OP has introduced the assumption that their brain is doing something that can't be done with matrix multiplication and is pointing out that there is no evidence to back such an assumption up.
Where was this assumption, about the brain and matrix multiplication, introduced? As far as I can tell, "the brain" was introduced to the conversation by mckirk, not the OP.
>> That seems like a highly suspect assumption.
Which one? Can you please quote from the OP's comment? You and the other poster are constantly bringing up things that someone is supposed to have said, but that nobody has said yet, in this thread, and it is very confusing.
I'll respond only to draw the parallel between the kind of comment above and the typical religious "how do you know my untestable idea isn't true" type argument. Faith is fine, but it's not part of rational debate.
Honestly though, with no theory of mind or consciousness you have no way to assert in either direction.
To borrow the religion analogy, there's the opposite fallacy of claiming the negative case "I know for a fact God isn't real", by stating you know what these kinds of information processing systems are doing fundamentally cannot yield intelligence or some kind of consciousness.
Maybe we don't know it in the limit, but we've had langauge models for a very
long time and nobody ever said anything about, say, n-gram models, or Hidden
Markov Models, being "intelligent" or "conscious". Even the people who first
proposed the idea of language modelling (precisely as an alternative to trying
to model meaning, which we have no idea how to do) didn't propose them as
models of intelligence, or sentience, or anything like that; just models of
"language", which really means text, and even more precisely "text corpora".
Sorry that I don't have a reference for that, other than my private
conversations with my tutors when I was studying for my Master's (data science
with a heavy dose of neural nets and NLP).
In any case, at some point one has to observe that the people who are leaning
most heavily on agnosticism (the fact that we don't know what intelligence is)
are the ones who say that we can't say whether those LLMs are intelligent or
not because we don't know what intelligence is. In other words, agnostitism
itself is used as evidence: we can't define intelligence, the thinking goes,
therefore LLMs may be intelligent. There is no other evidence of any sort
that LLMs may be intelligent (or any number of synonyms).
Note that this is exactly Russel's Teapot:
Russell's teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand
Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies
upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting
the burden of disproof to others.
> There is no other evidence of any sort that LLMs may be intelligent
Other than all the downright uncanny output.
Personally I doubt current LLMs are sufficient for sentience but that's purely a hunch on my part. Many people such as yourself seem quite overconfident of something that feels like a form of human exceptionalism to me - the idea that such a simple bit of math couldn't possibly be sufficient for sentience. As far as I can tell such a belief is wholly unfounded.
I never said any of the things you say I seem to be overconfident about because they make no sense to me at all, at least not in the way you say them.
Instead of trying to guess what I think, why not ask me directly, and say what you think, also? Just throwing around weird accusations of half-explained "overconfidence", or "human exceptionalism" (what is that, now?) doesn't really help anyone understand what you are disagreeing with, or what you are agreeing with.
>> Other than all the downright uncanny output.
I don't find the output of ChatGPT, or any other of the language models that have exploded into the hype zone lately "uncanny". I've done plenty of language modelling and while the output of those recent LLMs is grammatically smoother than earlier systems, and they can handle longer-term dependencies, they are not anything new. Their output is "uncanny" only if you've never seen anything like that before. Which is, of course, the case with most people who didn't know about language modelling before they heard about GPT-something, and who are now posting in droves on the web to say how surprised they are.
I concur, which is why I find it funny that you brought religion into this in the first place. By asserting that "people entertaining the thought that this neural network could be sentient/conscious must be misguided, and the only explanation for their opinion is blind faith", I'd argue you've left the grounds of scientific debate.
You made a claim ("a model based purely on such simple math surely can't develop sentience/consciousness") without any proof, and while doing so ridiculed people that might believe otherwise.
Since they're modelling our own languages, people get spooked and start bringing up theory of mind.