[fluoridation]

>if all you're positing is access to some inert but hidden state then that feels like a Toaster-Enhanced Turing Machine

I thought it was pretty clear, given the context. What I'm saying is that humans are capable of limited introspection in ways that LLMs are not. They can remember their thought processes and review them ex post facto to answer questions that LLMs cannot. An LLM fundamentally cannot truthfully answer questions such as "why did you do this?" because its entire working memory is held in the context window. It doesn't know to any greater degree than you because it has no more information than you do; just like they are for you, its internal workings are a mystery. I'm not saying LLMs conceptually could not be designed with capabilities similar to a human's in this regard, with some symbolic memory that's capable of some bookkeeping, I'm saying none of the current ones have them.

[lmm]

> I didn't talk about subjective experience, just about internal state. There's no question about whether other people have internal states. I can show someone a piece of information in such a way that only they see it and then ask them to prove that they know it such that I can be certain to an arbitrarily high degree that their report is correct.

> What I'm saying is that humans are capable of limited introspection in ways that LLMs are not. They can remember their thought processes and review them ex post facto to answer questions that LLMs cannot.

But now you're making a much stronger claim than merely saying that internal state exists. Humans are capable of telling you a story about what their thought process was (as are LLMs). But whether that story will be accurate, much less contain new insights, is much harder prove.

[fluoridation]

>But now you're making a much stronger claim than merely saying that internal state exists.

It's not a different claim, it's the same claim. The reason humans are able to introspect is because they have that internal state.

>Humans are capable of telling you a story about what their thought process was (as are LLMs)

No. Humans can tell a story that's informed by introspection, while LLMs can only tell a story without any introspection. Humans may also lie and fabricate, but they are at least capable of introspecting, while LLMs are not.

>But whether that story will be accurate, much less contain new insights, is much harder prove.

If you're going to doubt the explanation then what's the point of asking the question? Necessarily it's going to be information that exists only in that person's mind, so at best you can check it for consistency with the person's own behavior and with the report itself, but some things you'll just have to either accept or ignore. Like, fundamentally you're asking the person to describe features of their own mind such as "he gets bored easily", "he can only hold so many facts at once", "he makes worse decisions under pressure", etc. If for example you're asking the question to improve something in the future (such as documentation or some procedure), it doesn't even make sense to distrust such reports, unless you believe a person like the one being described by the explanation doesn't and can't exist.

[lmm]

> It's not a different claim, it's the same claim. The reason humans are able to introspect is because they have that internal state.

> No. Humans can tell a story that's informed by introspection, while LLMs can only tell a story without any introspection. Humans may also lie and fabricate, but they are at least capable of introspecting, while LLMs are not.

There's still a gap here between "has some hidden internal state" and "that state can provide insight into to their thought process". If all you've shown is that knowledge that is public in LLMs is hidden in humans, there's no reason that should make the human better at introspecting (rather, it just makes the human harder to understand from outside).

> what's the point of asking the question?... If for example you're asking the question to improve something in the future (such as documentation or some procedure)

Indeed. If we knew that asking this kind of question of a human was more likely to provide insights that improved the process in the future than asking it of an LLM, that would be interesting. But it's quite a leap from "humans can have internal state" to that.

> unless you believe a person like the one being described by the explanation doesn't and can't exist

Meaning that a plausible explanation is valuable regardless of whether it's true? Wouldn't that apply just as well to an LLM's explanation?

[fluoridation]

>There's still a gap here between "has some hidden internal state" and "that state can provide insight into to their thought process".

No, because that internal state is part of the thought process. That's the whole point. You ask the human a question to learn something that you don't already know. It makes no sense to ask an LLM that because it knows nothing you don't already know; you and the LLM are privy to the exact same information. What's tripping you up about this?

>If we knew that asking this kind of question of a human was more likely to provide insights that improved the process in the future than asking it of an LLM, that would be interesting.

So, at this point I must ask: are you an NPC? Do you go through life just reacting to stimuli like a cockroach, with no understanding of why or how you do anything? If you're playing chess and someone asks you about a move you just made you are unable to explain, "I noticed such-and-such so I decided the best course of action was so-and-so to prevent this-and-that"? This is an alien concept to you? If so, then I'm sorry; most of us do not experience our own cognition in this way. We can perceive the formation of our own thoughts as well as the progressive retrieval of information.

>Meaning that a plausible explanation is valuable regardless of whether it's true? Wouldn't that apply just as well to an LLM's explanation?

See first paragraph.

[lmm]

> There's no question about whether other people have internal states. I can show someone a piece of information in such a way that only they see it and then ask them to prove that they know it such that I can be certain to an arbitrarily high degree that their report is correct.

> No, because that internal state is part of the thought process. That's the whole point. You ask the human a question to learn something that you don't already know.

If the internal state is entangled enough with in the thought process that it would help with providing insights, sure. But I don't know that humans have such state accessible to them, and the fact that humans can know facts that are not accessible from outside does not in itself convince me of that.

> It makes no sense to ask an LLM that because it knows nothing you don't already know; you and the LLM are privy to the exact same information.

OK but why does that mean that the LLM's explanation should be bad/useless, if the only difference is that I have more direct access to the LLM's information than I would to a human's information?

> So, at this point I must ask: are you an NPC? Do you go through life just reacting to stimuli like a cockroach, with no understanding of why or how you do anything? If you're playing chess and someone asks you about a move you just made you are unable to explain, "I noticed such-and-such so I decided the best course of action was so-and-so to prevent this-and-that"?

I can tell stories about my own cognition. Those stories feel real to me. But I'm aware that the best available scientific evidence suggests that they're indistinguishable from confabulations.