We’ve learned to make “machines that can mindlessly generate text. But we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.”
We’ve learned to make “machines that can mindlessly generate text. But we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.”
Interesting article, thank you for sharing.
I almost stopped reading at the octopus analogy because I think it’s pretty obviously flawed and I assumed the rest of the article might be, but it wasn’t.
A question I have. The subject of the article states as fact that the human mind is much more complex and functions differently then an LLM. My understanding is that we still do not have a great consensus on how our own brains operate - how we actually think. Is that out of date? I’m not suggesting we are all fundamentally “meat LLM’s”, to extremely simplify, but also I wasn’t aware we’ve disproven that either.
If anyone has some good reading on the above to point to I’d love to get links!
This is an incredibly complicated question. On a very basic level, the very physics of how decisions are made differ from a binary/coded system than how brains work (you don’t have 0/1 gates, you can have things encoded inbetween 0 and 1). On a slightly higher level, concepts like working memory don’t exist in LLMs (although they’ve started to include something akin to memory), LLMs hallucinate things because they don’t have a method to fact-check, so to speak, and there’s a variety of other mental concepts that aren’t employed by LLMs. On a much higher level there’s questions of what cognition is, and again many of these concepts just cannot be applied to LLMs in their current state.
Ultimately the question of “how our brains work” can be separated into many, many different areas. A good example of this is how two people can reach different conclusions given the same pieces of information based on their background, experiences, genetics, and so forth, and this is a reflection of diversity that affects everything from the architectural (what the physical structure of the brain looks like) to conceptual (how those might interact or what knowledge might inform differing outcomes).
How our brains operate and how we think are in ways two different things, but my understanding is that you’re correct to a large extent. Then there’s the whole question of what consciousness even is.
I was actually just reminded of a good article on consciousness, I’ll post it in !science@beehaw.org in just a mo
edit: https://beehaw.org/post/448653
At this point we’re in philosophy rather than biology!
You can’t get a theory of mind out of biology or neurology alone, you need philosophy to make sense of things and actually build a theory of why. See eg. cognition science
Yes, deep questions about things like minds often end up in philosophy.