[yobbo]

> Does a calculator truly understand math when it spits out a correct answer?

I doesn't seem implausible that some of the first civilians who were exposed to calculators could have been convinced that they were capable of intelligent thought.

And 60s/70s science fiction is full of stuff that they imagined computers would do. Like asking questions and receiving answers that require both inference of facts and deduction like "computer, tell me what happened to this planet".

[version_five]

Eliza is the apt analogy. It's transparently just some if statements substituting phrases into the input, but laypeople that don't understand how it works read into it way more deeply.

Chatgpt is literally just a scaled up version of this. And there's been some kind of eternal September of people who don't understand how a computer works believing all sorts of stuff about it.

[shagie]

Is humanity not just scaled up sea squirts? At some point between the tunicate and Homo sapiens, something emerged.

Popularized by Pink Floyd ( https://youtu.be/wbOTkDn49qI )

> For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

(Original: https://youtu.be/du_iG7Veupc )

We can see with our own minds and that of animals that there is something greater that emerges with the additional size and complexity of the mind that wasn't there in simpler approaches.

Is not not unreasonable to consider that between Eliza and GPT-4 that something greater has emerged that is able to maintain a consistent world model rather than the just playing with words.

Weizenbaum took a "short cut" for the world model by going down the path of a Rogerian psychotherapy which allowed him to intentionally avoid the need for a world model in order to work with the words that are fed in.

GPT-3 and even more so, GPT-4 has a world model that it is able to work with and interact with.

If we are going to call GPT "just an advanced chat bot" then I would contend it is equally appropriate to call a human "just an advanced sea squirt."

[bobbylarrybobby]

Are people not just a scaled up version of chat GPT? It's not like there's some magical substance floating around in our brains that's responsible for consciousness or intelligence or anything else. It's all just more or less deterministic chemistry.

[ryandrake]

I think this is the key question that hasn't been kicked around enough through all these discussions about AI. Whether or not ChatGPT is sentient or intelligent is kind of boring, and obviously the answer is currently no.

But are humans just slightly more advanced, chemical-based AI? I don't know. Certainly through the Internet, they seem like it. Go to Reddit and look at the comment section. Especially in political discussions. I'm not convinced the "humans" posting there are not just the dumb output of language models--certainly not much more advanced than ChatGPT. When you [think you] have an opinion about something, how do you know it's actually an original thought, and not just the algorithmic output of your brain's many years of "model training". The word I type next in this comment may, when you peel back all the superstition about "souls" and "free will", simply be my language model's nextWord() function. What is original art? If I paint a picture or compose music, it's not original. It's based on my many years of observing the world, looking at other art, listening to other music. What hubris to think that just because it leapt from human fingers onto a canvas that it's somehow imbued with originality!

[andrepd]

I'm pretty sure brains aren't token-prediction transformers, no.

[xyzzyz]

Human mind as prediction machine is actually pretty popular theory. See for example “Surfing Uncertainty. Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Cognition” by Andy Clark

https://www.amazon.com/Surfing-Uncertainty-Prediction-Action...

[shagie]

Yuo cna porbalby raed tihs esaliy desptie teh msispeillgns.

Humans are pretty good at the next word prediction.

(that passage is from Why Your Brain Can Read Jumbled Letters - https://www.treehugger.com/why-your-brain-can-read-jumbled-l... )

From Your Brain Is a 'Prediction Machine': It Predicts What the Other Person Is Going to Say (2014) https://www.learning-mind.com/your-brain-is-a-prediction-mac...

> Until now scientists believed that our brain processes the stimuli received from the environment from the “bottom-up”, that is, when we hear someone speak, the auditory cortex of the brain processes the sound first and then activates other areas that are responsible for speech comprehension.

> However, more and more neuroscientists seem to support the theory that the brain ultimately analyzes the external stimuli from the “top-down”, which makes the brain a kind of “prediction machine”.

> As reported by U.S. researchers, our brain anticipates constantly in order to be able to respond lightning-fast and accurately to anything that is going to happen. For example, it is able to predict words and sounds from the context. From the phrase “grass is…” we can easily predict the continuation – it is probably the word “green”.

> > “Our findings show that the brain of both the speaker and the listener uses the process of language prediction. This results in similar brain patterns in both interlocutors,” said the study’s senior author Dr. Suzanne Dikker from the Department of Psychology, University of New York. “This happens even before the speaker utters the phrase he is thinking“.

[nemo]

Again, human brains are not token-prediction transformers. You can see one part of cognition and see that it has a somewhat analogous relation, but that's only one part of human cognition. Labeling a brain a scaled up GPT is mistaking a model for reality, and it's also mistaking a part for a whole.

[shagie]

The challenge then would be to create a test - one that GPT would fail and a hypothetical average Steven Hawking would have passed?