[coldtea]

>These machines do not think and they do not have a mind

Well, they do think, in that they produce output that is indistinguisable from thinking. If a person produced the same output to the same questions, we'd considered them thinking, maybe dumb sometimes, or paranoid at others, but still a thinking person.

We can argue about the quality and depth of the thinking that LLMs do (and we can say it's much cruder than a human thinking architecture, and of course not real time), but an LLM quacks like a thinking duck and looks like a thinking duck.

[operatingthetan]

Indistinguishable output does not mean thinking occurred. It simply means you have the appearance of thinking. I believe thinking requires agency, which the LLM does not possess. As in, it has zero stakes.

It does not receive dopamine as a result for a good answer, and a split second after finishing your answer the very same GPU is probably translated french or something for someone in another state. This is a language generator which has a corpus of information and has been tuned to appear correct.

[coldtea]

>Indistinguishable output does not mean thinking occurred.

It does for all intents and purposes. The rest is semantics and metaphysics.

That how we know another person is thinking too. By their output. We don't put a debugger into their brain.

[operatingthetan]

What then is your LLM "thinking" about between answers? The answer is nothing. Your definition of thinking does not match the one humans normally use.

>That how we know another person is thinking too. By their output. We don't put a debugger into their brain.

We know thoughts exist in their brain between the ones they choose to verbalize. Avoiding the distraction of solipsism.

For the LLM the "thinking" phase is just a preamble output for creating the answer. It just gets appended to the context window. Remove the context windows from your models and you will see how much of a mind they truly have. None.

[ofjcihen]

We actually can and do have a way to investigate brain activity in humans. Allow me to introduce you to the Electroencephalogram.

When there’s no activity we declare them brain dead.

[bombcar]

That’s the problem - it seems like a mind but it doesn’t operate like the ones we’re used to.

Even a dog will learn from recent stimuli, these things don’t. The prompt just modifies.

[operatingthetan]

Yep, the only way these things can have "memory" is by shoving previous conversations into the context window.

[whstl]

I don't think that's a problem here at all.

The problem here is not doing tasks and outputting garbage output.