| > To draw an analogy to humans requires that humans are similarly statistical. Prove they are not. > Are you suggesting the code behind the LLMs is just, like, ineffable or something? No, the argument is quite simple. We understand the mathematics of transformers and LLMs, therefore they seem obvious and not at all magical. By contrast, we do not understand the mathematics behind human cognition, therefore it seems complex and mysterious, and we have only non-rigourous folk concepts like "thoughts" and "feelings" to describe mental phenomena. Therefore you cannot intuitively fathom how to bridge the gap between mathematics and your folk concepts, and so any comparison seems absurd, but note that the absurdity is purely a product of our ignorance of the mathematics of mind. This is a classic god of the gaps fallacy. Here's how you can logically bridge that gap from a different direction: per the Bekenstein Bound, any finite volume contains finite information; a human is a finite volume, therefore it contains finite information; any finite system can be described by a finite state machine; therefore a human can be described by a finite state machine, which is a mathematical model. Therefore whatever a "thought" or "feeling" is, will correspond to some mathematical object. Now exactly what kinds of mathematical objects they are is unknown. However, transformers learn to reproduce a function by learning how to map inputs to outputs. The function mapping inputs to outputs is the human brain's function for producing intelligible human text. Therefore, LLMs are at least partially learning the human brain's function for producing intelligible text. Whether this requires "thoughts" and therefore LLMs fully or partly reproduces what we refer to as "thoughts" is not yet clear, but what is clear is that we have no basis to claim they have no thoughts, because we don't really know what thoughts are. |
I already asked for a proof that they are. Asking for a negative proof in response demonstrates either an inability to justify the claim or a lack of desire to engage in good faith.
This stuff is so tiring. Y'all are really bent on misrepresenting things to convince people that LLMs either are capable of thought or else put us, like, only a couple steps away from programs that will be capable of thought. The AI Singularity is nigh!
But it's all bullshit. It's just pseudoscientific postulation and sufficiently obfuscated leaps in logic — and it works to dupe layfolk who don't know any better. It's irresponsible, reprehensible, and immoral. Go find someone else to sell your philosophical snake oil to.