[d1sxeyes]

When you describe the taste of chocolate, unless you are actually currently eating chocolate, you are relying on the activation of synapses in your brain to reproduce the “taste” of chocolate in order for you to describe it. For humans, the only way to learn how to activate these synapses is to have those experiences. For LLMs, they can have those “memories” copy and pasted.

I would be cautious of dismissing LLMs as “pattern matching engines” until we are certain we are not.

[idiotsecant]

The difference is that I had a basic experience of that chocolate. The LLM is a corpus of text describing other people's experience of chocolate through the medium of written language, which involves abstraction and is lossy. So only one of us experienced it, the other heard about it over the telephone. Multiply that by every other interaction with the outside world and you have a system that is very good at modelling telephone conversations but that's about it.

[d1sxeyes]

Arguably, your memories are also lossily encoded abstractions of an experience, and recalling the taste of chocolate is a similar “telephone conversation”.

[only-one1701]

What's your point? Spellcheck is a pattern matching engine. Does an LLM have feelings? Does an LLM have opinions? It can pretend it does, and if you want, we can pretend it does. But the ability to pattern match isn't the acid test for consciousness.

[d1sxeyes]

My point is, what level of confidence do we have that we are not just pattern matching engines running on superior hardware? How can we be sure the difference between human intelligence and an LLM is categorical, not incremental?

[only-one1701]

Are you familiar with Russell’s Teapot?

[d1sxeyes]

Isn’t it up to you to prove it exists, rather than me to be familiar with it?

[only-one1701]

lol very well done