| The question then is "what are you?" Our Storytelling Minds: Do We Ever Really Know What's Going on Inside? - https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/our-s... There's a school of thought that says that "you" (the thing that says "I" when you think) is part of your brain that is making up an ongoing story about the input that it sees from one instant to the next to try to make it into a cohesive story/timeline that is fed back into itself to give it continuity. This can be seen when there's a severed brain (done to control epilepsy) so that the two halves of the brain are no longer able to communicate... but one half still sees with one eye and the other half sees with the other... and one half has control of one hand and the other half has control of the other hand... and one half can control what is said. -- So... what are you? Your Brain Is a ‘Prediction Machine’: It Predicts What the Other Person Is Going to Say - https://www.learning-mind.com/your-brain-is-a-prediction-mac... You Took the Words Right Out of My Brain https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2014/april/... The "get the full input, process it, and do something" isn't fast enough for how you think. Your brain is trying to predict what is happening before it happens. Goalies in hokey and batters in baseball are examples of this - they are acting before a full set of information can be processed. They are predicting the future state of the world. With words, two people can get into the same mental state and be able to predict the word that the other will say next. Twins, spouses... and even strangers in the right circumstance can have this happen. We are "next word predictors" in that sense - and there have been experiments that demonstrate that (the two articles on the same one above). --- And so while the story that you tell yourself about how you think doesn't match a next word predictor (and mine doesn't either) - that is a model of how the mind and brain work that has... well, predictive power. The interesting part with GPT (to me) is that as this "next word prediction" gained more abilities to properly predict the next word it also gained a world model. On the left is GPT-3.5. On the right is GPT-4 :: https://twitter.com/d_feldman/status/1636955260680847361 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35214218 The question of "is there a world model that is contained within the language model that can be used?" is a rather interesting one. I find the image, prompt and response set with the balloons and "what would happen if the strings were cut?" to be rather fascinating. https://youtu.be/7VSWyghVZIg also goes into this. I believe you're getting too hung up on the "word" of "next word prediction". But instead consider the question: "does language enable thought?" Consider examples such as Koko the gorilla, Bunny the dog and Billie the cat. Do they think? Were they able to think before they had language? If you've got a program that can manipulate language as convincingly as a human - can it think for some definition of the word "think"? |