[cauch]

Uh?

Human _can_ check themselves. They don't _always_ check themselves.

Motor _can_ move vehicle. They don't _always_ move vehicle.

LLM _cannot_ check themselves. They _never_ can. It is not that some don't, they just cannot, they are not a system complex enough to do so.

So, yes, it is a refutation. If you have something that _never_ can move a vehicle, this thing does not qualify as a motor, even if some motor, sometimes, don't move a vehicle.

And if your next argument is "yeah but I would argue you don't need to check yourself to be conscious or to understand things", then you just redefine the definition that is owned by your interlocutor. Your interlocutor is saying that this is a criteria they are expecting. Good for you if you are not expecting this criteria. But the problem is that the answer is not "this criteria is not expected", the answer is "I change the criteria from 'being capable to in some circumstances' into 'does always do it in any circumstances'".

[nomel]

> LLM _cannot_ check themselves. They _never_ can. It is not that some don't, they just cannot, they are not a system complex enough to do so.

All modern agentic harnesses can do this. Nobody uses raw LLM for anything remotely complex. There's always some external system in place. That system is part of the "thought process".

Adjacency doesn't matter here, only what the result of the system of pieces is.

[cauch]

Check themselves does not mean: do a loop.

It means having self-control on their action and being aware of them. If you ask a system, it will respond, it cannot choose to not respond (even if the response if "I don't want to response", it still "run", still do the work). If you don't ask a system, it will not respond.

Adjacency is the point of the thread here. Saying "you say X is important to decide if the thing is intelligent/understanding/conscious, so let me just change X in the middle of the discussion and say that X does not matter".

That is exactly my first comment in this thread: I don't care if AI think or whatever, my reaction was about these "counter-arguments" that totally miss the point and make the person who push them ridiculous. If you want to have a counter-argument, you first need to understand the interlocutor, not just spew whatever rebuttal you constructed that answer something unrelated to what the interlocutor brought to the conversation.

[nomel]

> Check themselves does not mean: do a loop.

I'm not sure I understand. How do you do it?

In my thought process, I quite literally stop myself, and say "ok, think about what you just said" to check myself. I literally initiate that loop. If I don't, then I'm not using my own mental agency, and just using my firm coded priors.

I will say that I do seem to have a stop, what you said is wrong logic check voice that pops up without me initiating it. But, it's unreliable, and not too much different than all the content monitoring system used for the streaming clients, that will terminate with "content violation" immediately after the "incorrect" words are sent. I don't think integration is important, just the behavior of the overall system.

[cauch]

There is no "loop" in the brain, it is all part of a same line of thought. This is visible because, while you can sometimes have a "two voices / dialectic" way of thinking, you can have the exact same thinking in one-go that does not look like a loop at all.

In fact, in the large majority of the time, you don't process "as a loop" at all, you just continuously progress in your reflection without needing a "second voice" to retrigger you. The fact that sometimes we do this is just something we can do, not the result of something needed for our brain to work. For AI systems, this is something needed because the "answering" part is not able to do the loop on its own. And building a bigger system that combine an "answering" part and a "loop" part does not fit this, does not create a self-reflective system, it just makes a non-self-reflective system and a workaround bundled together.

It's a bit like if the "answering" part was unable to provide only one answer and was always producing plenty of different possible answers, including contradictory ones. Then, you can add an external part that will just pick one answer (and add it to the context so the next large set of answer will not be inconsistent), without any intelligence to it. The whole system will look like a human. But we know that the system is not "living" and "aware", because a "living" or "aware" system has its own opinion, while this system is just generating convincing sentence without seeing any hierarchy or value or meaning in each one.

[nomel]

I would claim that, if you think without introspection (that loop), then there is virtually no self check. I'm not sure what "self check" you see that the brain has. Could you describe this "self check in a line of thought"? How do you perceive the check there? This is a genuine question. It definitely doesn't align with how I think about things. I ponder and talk to myself to iterate verify and test my understanding of my own thoughts.

[cauch]

Maybe a good analogy is "throwing a paper plane in real life" and "throwing a paper plane in a video game".

In real life, the paper moves "by itself". It does not need an external loop that update its position in a loop manner.

In the video game, you need an internal loop, a step-by-step tick, that update the plane position based on its current position and its momentum. And this is why a video game paper plane is not a real object. It is a very good simulation, it looks like it, but it is missing some intrinsic properties that we expect from a real object.

Yet you can analyse the paper plane trajectory and see it as a Markov chain, with quantified step-by-step progress (for example one position point every 0.1 second). The same way you can look at your though process and identify a step-by-step progression. But it does not mean that it works like that intrinsically, it does not mean that the paper plane "jumps" from position point at time T1 to position point at time T1+0.1 second.

For the human brain, there is no "loop centre" in the brain. There is no one (to my knowledge) who got a brain injury and suddenly were unable to keep a single line of thought without having someone else having to feed them the previous thought in order to feed the next thought.

In the brain, the fact that the previous thought feeds the next thought is "how it works", it is intrinsic, it is by design. And this mechanism of thoughts feeding the next thoughts is what creates "consciousness" or "awareness": self-reflection is based on the fact that thoughts are intrinsically linked together, that they "flow" continuously, without needing an external system to update them.

You cannot take away the "loop" part of the paper plane so that it suddenly would be unable to move on its own once thrown away.

Now, you can always say "well, the paper plane in the video game is a very good simulation, it does not matter if it is a real object or not", and that is fair enough. But in this discussion, some people have arguments to support that this property matters, that it is one condition for consciousness or awareness.

[twobitshifter]

The OP said: nozzlegear 19 hours ago [–]

Yes, LLMs don't think on their own, for one; they think when you invoke them.

My rebuttal is that people only think when invoked just the same and can enter states where there is no consciousness just the same. The OP has already accepted that LLMs think, but it seems that you are arguing they do not? This car business is confusing and the LLMs not checking themselves is also wrong, there’s even a benchmark for this https://correctbench.github.io/

[cauch]

No.

OP says: LLMs never think when not invoked.

What you said: I have example where, sometimes, human think when invoked.

That's the difference: human brains are intrinsically different because they are built to be able to think without being invoked, even if there are situations where they think when invoked.

There are tons of obvious examples of human thinking without being invoked. Just take a bath and you will see :)

[nozzlegear]

To be clear: the person I was replying to asked if the way a human thinks was any different from an LLM with a context window. That's the context of my answer. An LLM is a machine, it can't do anything unless we invoke it or give it the instructions and capabilities to do so. It has no free will, it can't just decide to compose a symphony one day unless those are part of its instructions. It can't do anything unless we tell it to do so and give it the capabilities to do so, it doesn't even exist unless it's loaded into memory. That's obviously different from human consciousness, and that's the whole of the point that I'm making.

You can argue that humans are just biological machines reacting to external stimuli, but that's a philosophical argument that I'm not interested in having and frankly, I think it'd be selling yourself short a little bit.

[twobitshifter]

Thank you I appreciate your opinion. I do think that we are reacting to external stimuli even though our ego is uncomfortable with being deterministic in any way, which is the free will point that you hit on. I think that is likely to be the point that keeps the argument going as it’s not a settled debate absent any AI, which we clearly all see as either deterministic or semi-random when the temperature gets turned up.

As far as the argument about being loaded in memory, if there’s any consciousness in AI, it’s obviously in different form than a biological consciousness. We’d have to agree that consciousness does not require a body to get past this.