[eternalban]

That conflates perception with perceiver. LLMs have only internalized [/encoded] our perceptions and expressions. From a model of the mind pov, the 'self' that we sense has an internal LLM-like tool. And it is that self that understands and not the tool.

[TeMPOraL]

> That conflates perception with perceiver.

I'm not sure I understand. Can you elaborate?

> From a model of the mind pov, the 'self' that we sense has an internal LLM-like tool. And it is that self that understands and not the tool.

I'm starting to think it's the other way around. I think it's somewhat widely accepted that our brains do most of the "thinking" and "understanding" unconsciously - our conscious self is more of an observer / moderator, occasionally hand-holding the thought process when the topic of interest is hard, and one isn't yet proficient[0] in it.

Keeping that in mind, if you - like me - feel that LLMs are best compared to our "inner voice", i.e. the bit on the boundary between conscious and unconscious that uses language as an interface to the former, then it's not unreasonable to expect that LLMs may, in fact, understand things. Not emulate, but actually understand.

The whole deal with a hundred thousand dimensional latent space? I have a growing suspicion that this is exactly the fundamental principle behind how understanding, thinking in concepts, and thinking in general works for humans too. Sure, we have multiple senses feeding into our "thinking" bit, but that doesn't change much.

At a conceptual, handwavy level (I don't know the actual architecture and math details well enough to offer more concrete explanations/stories), I feel there are too many coincidences to ignore.

Is this coincidence that someone trained an LLM and an image network, and found their independently learned latent spaces map to each other with a simple transforms? Maybe[1], but this also makes sense - both network segmented data about the same view of reality humans have. There is no reason for LLMs to have an entirely different way of representing "understanding" than img2txt or txt2img networks.

Assuming the above is true, is this coincidence that it offers a decent explanation for how humans developed language? You start with a image/sound/touch/other senses acquisition and association system forming a basic brain. Predicting next sensations, driving actions. As it evolves in size and complexity, dimensionality of its representation space grows, and at some point, the associations cluster in something of a world model. Let evolution iterate some (couple hundred thousand years) more, and you end up with brains that can build more complex world model, working with more complex associations (e.g. vibration -> sound -> tone -> grunt -> phrase/song). At this level, language seems like an obvious thing - it's taking complex associations of basic sensory input, and associating them wholesale with different areas of the latent space, so that e.g. a specific grunt now associates with danger, a different one with safety, etc. and once you have brains being able to do that naturally, it's pretty much straight line to a proper language.

Yes, this probably comes as a lot of hand-waving; I don't have the underlying insights properly sorted yet. But a core observation I want to communicate, and recommend people to ponder on, is continuity. This process gains capabilities in a continuous fashion, as it scales - which is exactly a kind of system you'd expect evolution to lock on to.

--

[0] - What is "proficiency" anyway? To me, being proficient in a field of interest is mostly about... shifting understanding of that field to unconscious level as much as possible.

[1] - This was one paper I am aware of; they probably didn't do good enough control, so it might turn out to be happenstance.

[eternalban]

[I may have to take you up on your profile offer of out of band continuation of this as there is a lot here to delve into and it would make for interesting conversation.]

The model of the psyche that I subscribe to is ~Jungian, with some minor modifications. I distinguish between the un-conscious, the sub-conscious, and consciousness. The content of the unconscious is atemporal, where as the content of the (sub-)conscious is temporal. In this model, background processing occurs in the sub-conscious, -not- the un-conscious. The unconscious is a space of ~types which become reified in the temporal regime of (sub-)consciousness [via the process of projection]. The absolute center of the psyche is the Self and this resides in the unconscious; the self and the unconscious content are not directly accessible to us (but can be approached via contemplation, meditation, prayer, dreams, and visions: these processes introduce unconscious content into the conscious realm, which when successfully integrated engenders 'psychological wholeness'). The ego -- the ("suffering") observer -- is the central point of consciousness. Self realization occurs when ego assumes a subordinate position to the Self, abandons "attachment" to perceived phenomena & disavows "lordship" i.e. the false assumption of its central position, at which point the suffering ends. This process, in various guises, is the core of most spiritual schools. And we can not discount these aspects of Human mental experience, even if we choose to assume a critical distance from the theologies that are built around these widely reported phenomena. I am not claiming that this is a quality of all minds, but it seems it is characteristic of human minds.

The absolute minimum point that you should take away from this (even if the above model is unappealing or unacceptable or woo to you /g) is that we can always meaningfully speak of a psychology when considering minds. If we can not discern a psychology in the subject of our inquiry then it should not be considered a mind.

I do -not- think that we can attribute a pyschology to large language models.

~

Your comment on the mapping of the latent spaces is interesting, but as you note we should probably wait until this has been established before jumping into conclusions.

And also please excuse the handwavy matter in my comment as well. We're all groping in the semidarkness here.