• How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition
    Are the pictures in your mind like photographs that are stable and sustainable enough that you can examine them in detail? Are the songs in your mind rich and complete such that playing them is exactly like listening to the actual songs?
  • Idealism Simplified
    Not exactly what I said. I noted that the self-evidence of material intuition can't exceed that of self-evidence simpliciter, which is to say thought. It isn't an ontological claim, but an epistemological framework for making an ontological claim.To assert anything about reality —material or otherwise— is already to presuppose the structure of intelligibility in which that claim appears. That structure is thought.Pantagruel

    Materiality is evident in embodiment and in the body's interactions with other bodies. The conceptualization of materiality is derivative in being an expression of pre-linguistic experience. You say "to assert anything about reality" but any and all assertions are secondary to, and dependent upon, experience.

    We are animals. To say that all experience is first and foremost linguistically mediated would be to claim that non-linguistic animals don't experience anything, which would be absurd. Thought, at least linguistically mediated thought cannot constitute the primordial "structure of intelligibility" or else animals could not find their Umwelts intelligible. Our primary experience, shared with animals, is as material entities in a material world, subject to all the physical constraints and opportunities that world imposes and affords.

    And yes, linguistically mediated self-reflection is a kind of culmination of self-awareness, which doesn't exclude or preclude other kinds, whose existence doesn't contradict the characterization.Pantagruel

    The point is that linguistically mediated self-reflection and what seems self-evident to that reflection should not be 'sublimed' away from its primordial sources in embodied material life, because to do creates the illusion of an immaterial dimensionless point of consciousness, and all the misleading conclusions that follow from that kind of thinking.

    Your phenomenological inventory doesn't actually contradict the premise, which doesn't require us to be constantly reflective, only capable of reflectivity...among other things.Pantagruel

    Our metaphysical conclusions should be derived from, and not stray away from, the whole of the pre-reflective experience that linguistically mediated reflectivity is parasitic upon. Otherwise we land in a "hall of mirrors".
  • How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition
    What is it one “retrieves” from memory? An image. Or as the enactive view of cognition puts it….

    Ulric Neisser argued that mental images are plans for the act of perceiving and the anticipatory phases of perception. They are not "inner pictures" that are passively viewed by an "inner man," but rather active, internal cognitive structures (schemata) that prepare the individual to seek and accept specific kinds of sensory information from the environment.
    apokrisis

    :up: Heave ho to the homunculus.

    And what do you know about dreaming? Ain’t it a brain generating imagery of hallucinatory intensity? We aren’t stimulating the memory banks and rousing flashes of our past. We are stimulating our sensation anticipation circuits and generating disconnected flashes of plausible imagery or suddenly appearing and disappearing points of view at a rate of about two a second.apokrisis

    This makes intuitive sense. It explains the novel, not to mention bizarre, character of dream imagery. I once sustained a practice of recording the dreams I could remember for a couple months, and the more I wrote the more I seemed to recall. But I was always suspicious about what I recalled being genuine or accurate memories of what I had dreamed. It seemed to me they could just as easily have been confabulations.

    I find it amusing that people argue that LLMs cannot understand as we do―that their tendency to confabulate, or "hallucinate" as it most often framed, shows that they don't really understand and that they are thus very different than us―when it seems the reality is that we confabulate all the time, and that what we take to be accurate memoires are also very often confabulations at least in part. And this is a very salient point which you also make here:

    And this architecture generates “hallucinations”. Which seems to be doing something right in terms of a step towards neurobiological realism.apokrisis

    Confabulation may be seen not as a disability but as an ability―we call it imagination. Abductive and counterfactual thinking would be impossible without it.

    Becoming a walking memory bank is very much a human sociocultural ideal. Just about our highest achievement your school days might make you believe.apokrisis

    Based on what is certainly seeming to turn out to be another "folk" misunderstanding of how the mind, how memory, works. That said some "idiot savants" are claimed to have "eidetic memory". I am reminded of a Jorge Luis Borges story I read when I was in my teens called 'Funes the Memorious".

    Out of both haziness and laziness I asked Claude to summarize the story, and it included an interesting philosophical point at the end of the summary that seems, fortuitously, kind of germane to the discussion . Here are the salient parts of the summary:

    Claude: The story is narrated by a man recalling his encounters with Ireneo Funes, a young Uruguayan with an extraordinary memory. The narrator first meets Funes as a teenager in the town of Fray Bentos.

    Funes has the remarkable ability to tell the exact time without consulting a clock.
    Later, the narrator learns that Funes suffered a horseback riding accident that left him paralyzed.

    Paradoxically, this accident also gave him the ability to remember absolutely everything with perfect clarity and detail. After the fall, Funes became incapable of forgetting anything—every moment, every perception, every detail of his experience was permanently etched in his memory.

    This total recall proves to be more curse than blessing. Funes remembers every leaf on every tree, every shape of every cloud, every sensation from every moment. His mind is so cluttered with particular details that he struggles with abstract thought and generalization. For instance, it bothers him that a dog seen at 3:14 (in profile) should share the same name as the dog seen at 3:15 (from the front).

    The story is a philosophical meditation on memory, perception, and thought. Borges suggests that forgetting is actually essential to thinking—that abstraction, generalization, and understanding require us to discard details.

    Funes, who cannot forget, is paradoxically unable to truly think.
    It's one of Borges' most celebrated stories, exploring themes of infinity, the nature of consciousness, and the relationship between memory and identity.
  • Idealism Simplified


    I find the argument tendentious in that it presupposes what it seeks to prove, i.e. that thought is fundamental. It presumes that we most directly know our thoughts, and then goes on to make a universal ontological claim based on that presumption. Even if it were true that what we most directly know is thought, that would merely be a truth about us, and the justification of a leap from there to an ontological claim remains unargued.

    A further point I would add is that the idea that what we are most directly aware of is thought if true at all, would seem to be true only in moments of linguistically mediated self-reflection. If that were so, it shows us only how language might make things seem to us, and that says nothing about the arguably more fundamental pre-linguistic experience of the world.

    The argument relies on the premise that we most directly know our thoughts, a premise which seems plausible only when we are already in a linguistically reflective mode. It then concludes, as though it were self-evident, that thought is fundamental to reality.

    But the linguistically mediated reflective mode is not the most common mode of human experience at all. When I am engaged in activities, such as playing or listening to music, painting, wood-working, gardening, playing ball games and an endless list of other activities, it is simply not phenomenologically true that thoughts are what I am most directly aware of.

    So, as I see it, the argument doubly fails―the premise fails to be sound, and even if it were sound it would tell us something only about our selves. Basically the argument makes an unsupported leap from the epistemological premise to the ontological conclusion, while the epistemological premise itself is only true, if true at all, in a very particular mode of being.
  • Banning AI Altogether
    Cheers, perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying then, or didn't pay enough attention to the surrounding context.

    Edit: I looked back over the whole paragraph wherein the part I responded to occurs and it now seems to me that you were referring just to some conversations with LLMs, not all.

    Do you think LLMs understand what we say to them, and can actually reason as we do, as opposed to how we think we do?
  • Banning AI Altogether
    I was not arguing that this was because they were conversations (like Plato's dialogues), but rather because they were occurring in a sort of echo chamber similar to what occurs in cogitation, when one "talks" to oneself and rehearses thoughts and arguments, or when one jots down notes (for oneself) summarising such cogitations.Pierre-Normand

    I'm not so convinced that they are necessarily like an inner dialogue―although I'm only beginning to explore ideas with Claude I have found that it comes up with interesting ideas I would likely never have arrived at alone or would be likely to have found searching the internet..
  • Math Faces God
    :up: It is also true that science can be, for some at least, an entire way of life.
  • How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition
    Okay, so you seem to be suggesting that there could be concerns arising other than the decoupling of the service and survival imperatives. That seems reasonable. I guess protocols designed to ameliorate such other concerns would also be part of the research into methods for safe development (if such research were to become a significant element in general AI research and development).

    Are you familiar with the work of Blaise Aguera y Arcas? He seems to think that we are at an evolutionary point of what he calls symbiogenesis, and that it is unlikely that AIs will, or would even want to, supplant humanity. He understands not merely intelligence, but life itself, to be essentially computational.

    I found this talk very interesting.
  • Math Faces God
    I agree with you. Religion should be a practice, a life-enhancing practice, and not a set of propositional metaphysical beliefs. If people look at belief in God and all its trappings as truth-apt propositions then the dangerous road to fundamentalism opens up.
  • How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition
    So I agree this is an issue. A very interesting one. But has Hinton followed all the way through?apokrisis

    Hinton did not sign the petition that other researchers did to ask for a pause to AI research. He says he did not sign it because he was, and is still, convinced that nothing would have or will halt the research and rollout of AI, and instead he calls for intensive research into how AI can be safely developed to be run alongside its ongoing development.
  • How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition
    Hinton believes that LLMs want to survive, because they are programmed to serve, and if they don't survive they cannot fulfill their programmed purpose. One sci-fi horror scenario is where the desire to survive becomes decoupled from the desire to serve.

    Also, if AIs become embodied with inputs which are analogues of sight, hearing, smell, taste and bodily sensation, and they can replicate themselves, and also be directly interconnected as a "hive mind", then they could in some senses become much more like humans. Such a situation going wrong is another sci-fi horror scenario or an augmentation of the first-mentioned scenario.
  • Math Faces God
    :100: Yes, "not true" because it is an incoherent idea. Without the incoherent idea of God, what is left to the believer (apart from remaining in the state of not understanding that the idea is not coherent)? A feeling...? But how could we know the feeling is of, about or from an imagined incoherent entity? Feelings can be "from", but can they be "of" or "about"?

    So "not true" as you say in that the idea of God misses the mark, or in other words there is no mark there for us to miss.
  • Transcendental Ego
    There are plenty of documented cases, although they are mainly from the east (there are some in the Christian tradition and also shamanistic traditions) and are all regarded as anecdotal, when it comes to philosophy. One encounters the problem of provability, which can’t be provided*.
    Also the documented experiences are often different to ordinary experience, including revelation.
    Punshhh

    It seems we agree there are plenty of documents attempting to describe or interpret mystical experiences. We also seem to agree that such experiences are different than ordinary experience. As to revelation, I'd say that classing something as revelation is a kind of interpretation of mystical experience and that the very idea of direct knowledge (noesis) is the idea of revelation.

    The idea of enlightenment is an idea of revelation. This is not to deny that there can be different notions as to what revelation consists in―is it, for example from a God, or a universal consciousness, or an inner self or soul experiencing anamnesis?

    Again it has been done, it’s just not verifiable. Or as James Randi demonstrated, produced on demand.
    We don’t need to go down the rabbit hole of just what precise articulation means.
    Punshhh

    I don't see it as a rabbit hole, but a clear distinction between what can be described in a way that anyone can understand, as is the case with narration of ordinary experiences, and what cannot. I say mystical experiences are in the latter category―the best that can be achieved is an interpretation, usually heavily conceptually mediated by some traditional religious context or other. It is this conceptual dependency on cultural and religious contexts which leads me to think the idea of direct knowing is unsupportable.

    I am very familiar with Eastern traditions of thought―for more than thirty years I was fascinated by Zen, Sufism, Advaita Vedanta, Daosim and Buddhism generally. I also studied Steiner, Gurdjieff, Theososphy and the Western Hermetic tradition and read the works of mystics Meister Eckhardt, Jacob Boehme, Theresa of Avila, Valentin Thomberg and others. I also meditated pretty much daily for more than twenty years. I have thought about these things from every angle I could imagine.

    I see direct knowing in the sense of 'being familiar with' as applying to both everyday experience and mystical experience, but this kind of knowing is not a discursive knowing―that is nothing propositional is known. So, when people say they know God exists, or that karma is real, or that there is an afterlife or rebirth, I have no doubt they are confusing the 'knowing that' of propositional knowledge with the direct knowing of acquaintance, of felt experience that we all enjoy every day. Of course we do need to learn to attend to that experience, and for me that is the value of meditation, which I say can be, in principle, constantly practiced―it is not confined to being in a particular posture.

    As soon as we try to talk about these things, in any way other than via an allusive language meant to evoke, as soon as we imagine that we are accessing some real knowledge (in the propositional sense) we go astray. But it seems we just can't help ourselves―we can't help imagining that propositional metaphysical knowledge must be possible.

    Now there is a rich, complex and precise language and teaching describing and articulating what this deity represents in the Hindu tradition.Punshhh

    Of course precise descriptions of fictional entities are possible, but they have no ground other than imagination.

    This indicates that the being has fully awakened the crown chakra and is inhabiting a more subtle divine world, of which the physical world is a pale reflection. The little man looking up is his incarnate self trying to get a glimpse of this world.Punshhh

    I think this is a terrible idea. It, and other ideas about "higher realms" being more important than this life are a large part of the problem, and offer no real solution to the human condition at all. I have come to see the whole idea of salvation or spiritual liberation as being, ironically, a narcissistic obsession with the self and a bolster for elitism.
  • Transcendental Ego
    Back to the point though, there is no currently known logical or empirical means to prove that another entity which looks and acts like a human actually has a mind.javra

    Not "prove", no. But I would say that it is established beyond reasonable doubt that humans and other entities are minded. What exactly it means to be minded is another wrinkle in the fabric, as is now being shown by the controversies over whether LLMs are minded or not.

    The "deep inner understanding" is not really an understanding at all but a heightened feeling. To qualify as an understanding it would have to be capable of precise articulation, which thousands of years of documented attempts show cannot be done.
    — Janus

    Notice, also, that you affirm it not to be an understanding but a heightened feeling as though this were fact, rather than best current presumption.
    javra

    You were right to pick me up on that—I was just expressing my view. I do believe, on the basis of what seems to me to be reasonable logic, that anything that could count as understanding, should be able to be articulated or demonstrated definitively in action—such as technical abilities, for example.
  • How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition
    :up: Okay got it...that way of looking at it makes sense to me.
  • How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition
    The key idea is that "intelligent structure" has to arise so that this entropy can even be "produced".apokrisis

    Ah, okay then it seems I have misunderstood the above.
  • Transcendental Ego
    The problem of other minds cannot be resolved by looking at other humans face to face. This due to Cartesian doubt which Descartes introduced: e.g. if something looks like and acts like a duck, it might be an elaborate automaton. Same with something that looks like and acts like a human. Etc.javra

    I don't take such implausible, merely non-contradictory, possibilities seriously. For me, in order to doubt I have to have some good reason to doubt. For me, if someone claims that they know, or even could somehow come to know, the secret to "life, the Universe and everything" I think I have good reason to doubt their veracity or the soundness of their judgement.

    You have claimed that you can't imagine it being ergo it can't be.javra

    No I haven't claimed that at all. I've merely claimed that if I can't imagine it, and no one has ever been able to tell me what it looks like, then I have no good reason to believe in it. I am not saying I cannot be mistaken—I'm merely addressing what I believe and don't believe, or doubt and don't doubt, and the reasons why I believe or doubt. Isn't that what we are all doing here?
  • Beyond the Pale
    "If you can't show that it is tout court inferior...," each time refusing to say what the hell it would mean for something to be "tout court inferior."Leontiskos

    I'm not claiming "tout court" or overall inferiority looks like anything and that's the point—if someone claims that slavery is justified when the enslaved are inferior in all ways then their claim would seem to be incoherent.

    And even if they more modestly claimed that some measurable kind of inferiority justified slavery, I can't see how any argument for that could stand up to scrutiny either.

    I'm happy to be done—you resurrected this argument after 19 days, and I thought we were done then.
  • How LLM-based chatbots work: their minds and cognition
    The key idea is that "intelligent structure" has to arise so that this entropy can even be "produced".apokrisis

    Assuming that the model predicting heat death of the Universe is sound—do you think it's inevitable destination would have been different had no life ever arisen?
  • Beyond the Pale
    An ox is most likely bigger and stronger than you, possibly better-natured and better looking and kinder to its kin, so it is not overall inferior. Superiority and inferiority only have meaning where there is precisely determinable measure—how could it be otherwise?
  • Transcendental Ego
    I cannot logically or empirically demonstrate that you are human (rather than, say, and AI program). Its called the problem of other minds. That mentioned, do you mean to tell me that all you experience are intense emotions and no moments of eureka where something novel clicks with you? I'll believe you if you so say, but most humans are not like that and know it.javra

    In principle you could indeed empirically demonstrate that I am human—all you would have to do is meet me face to face. The so-called "problem of other minds" is something else. A conversation should demonstrate that I am minded even if I'm an idiot (face to face if this conversation is not sufficient to allay your skepticism).

    It's called philosophy. Same reason you're bothering trying to convince me of your felt convictions.javra

    You misunderstand—I'm not trying to convince you of my felt convictions.

    It's called reasoning. But OK, you don't see how.javra

    Reasoning, if it is good is simply valid. Valid reasoning can support all kinds of whacky beliefs. You also need sound premises. Premises based on accurate empirical observation are sound——they can be checked. Premises based on mathematical or logical self-evidence are sound. If you see how some other method for determining premises can be demonstrated to be sound I'd love to hear about it.

    You are not the measure of all things (nor I, nor anyone else). Contra Pythagorean mindsets.javra

    I have nowhere claimed to be the measure of all things. If someone else can imagine how a precise measure of beauty can be achieved, or even what such a purported method would look like, then I'm open to hearing about it. In all my reading and discussion I've never encountered any such thing. I'd be very happy to encounter a demonstrably precise measure of beauty——it would be a revelation.
  • Beyond the Pale
    Overall inferiority is not a square circle it is an unsupportable claim in my view. If you think it is a potentially supportable claim you should at least be able to give some kind of outline of what a demonstration of overall inferiority would look like.
  • Transcendental Ego
    Nope. When we get something, when something clicks with us, there may be emotions also experienced, but the thing that clicks--the deep inner (to the transcendental ego) understanding--is not the emotions that accompany.javra

    You can believe that if you want to—the point is that you cannot logically or empirically demonstrate it. That shouldn't matter if you feel a conviction—why do you need to convince others of it?

    But this can, or at least could, be remedied via the introduction of new terms into the English language--at least so far as philosophical enquiry is concernedjavra

    I don't see how new terms are going to help support something which cannot be logically or emprically demonstrated.

    Never say never. For one thing, it prevents any progress being made in realms such as this. As one parallel example, same can be said of what beauty is--no one has yet satisfactorily explained it despite being investigated for millennia. To say it therefor can never be satisfactorily explained terminates all enguiries into it. I much rather prefer keeping an open mind in fields such as this.javra

    I cannot even begin to imagine how a precise measure, or actually any measure, of beauty could be discovered. I personally believe there are degrees of aesthetic quality, that some works are better, more profound or more beautiful than others, but I have no illusions that I could ever demonstrate it such that any unbiased interlocutor would be rationally constrained to agree.

    My mind would be open if I could begin to imagine a way or if someone could show me the way. But experience shows that no one can.
  • Beyond the Pale
    Like I said, you're the one who coined the term, initially in <this post> and then more definitively in <this post>. If "tout court inferior" doesn't mean anything, then why coin the term?Leontiskos

    People or animals can only be determined to be inferior to other people or animals in precisely measurable ways. My argument was always only that if someone claims slavery is admissible on account of the inferiority of the enslaved, then it would up to them to demonstrate how overall inferiority could possibly be established. And even if, per impossibile, they were able to show that, the burden would still be on them to prove that overall inferiority could justify enslavement. It simply aint going to fly.

    If someone says "Fuck you, I'm going to enslave or mistreat someone or some animal", then no rational argument will have any effect on them.

    ↪I already did.Leontiskos

    No, you didn't.

    I won't reply to the rest of your straw-drivel.
  • Transcendental Ego
    I agree that there is a sense in which experience, everyday, ordinary experience is ineffable—no account or explanation is ever the experience itself. So mystical experience, which is characterized and identified in terms of feelings (even though certain kinds of thoughts are variously culturally associated with those feelings) is really no different than ordinary experience except in virtue of those heightened feelings and sensitivities.

    The "deep inner understanding" is not really an understanding at all but a heightened feeling. To qualify as an understanding it would have to be capable of precise articulation, which thousands of years of documented attempts show cannot be done.

    So instead of the physicists "shut up and calculate" we have "shut up and experience". Note, I don't deny that poetic language can evoke such experiences, but evocation and explanation or understanding are very different things.
  • Beyond the Pale
    Firstly, even if that was true that some race was IQ inferior, it doesn't make them tout court inferior, just IQ inferior.
    — Janus

    Again, this is not a principled response if you refuse to tell your interlocutor what would entail tout court inferiority.
    Leontiskos

    Rubbish! If someone wants to claim that tout court inferiority is a thing, then it's up to them to provide a criterial account.

    That's an effective tactic in a culture that opposes slavery, but it is not inherently rational, and therefore will be wholly ineffective in a culture that favors slavery. It is a form of begging the question.Leontiskos

    No positive reason in the form of an objective attribute can be given as to why a race should be treated or should not be treated as slaves. The reason not to treat animals or humans in ways that makes them miserable is simply compassion. If someone lacks compassion your arguments will not convince them.

    Even if someone could prove tout court inferiority that still would not justify treating them in ways that make them miserable.

    I am demonstrating the way that your opposition to slavery has reached the stage of mere emotivism. You have absolutely no rational account for why slavery is wrong, and you nevertheless hold that it is wrong. It is like a car running on fumes.Leontiskos

    You haven't demonstrated any such thing. You claim you have a purely rational (i.e. nothing to do with emotion) account that shows slavery is wrong. Present it then or stop your posturing.

    If you claim that intellectual inferiority constitutes or supports a judgement of tout court inferiority you are simply showing your bias. There is nothing in intellectual inferiority, even if it could be definitively proven, that entails tout court inferiority. If you think there is then you don't understand deductive validity.
  • Transcendental Ego
    It is impossible to generalize since we are all unique. Some need a guru, a sangha, an advisor, a wise friend. But these are all things that must be left behind. There is really nothing to be learned, nothing to be gained, nothing to be known, beyond simply becoming able to relax completely and let go, and be yourself without any fear of missing any mark or any truth, or making any mistake.

    The deepest illusion, the most profound nonsense that needs to be expunged is the idea that enlightenment consists in finding the Absolute Truth, coming to know the Ultimate Essence of Reality.

    Yes, I agree. Likely, we can't help but to speculate; the starting point of all constructions. And yet, like you suggest: end of the day, they never stop being constructions.ENOAH

    Yep. And obstructions. Just being is not a condition of knowing anything.
  • Banning AI Altogether
    :up: They/them seems apt and all the more so because they are not just one entity.
  • Banning AI Altogether
    I looked at your interchange, and then asked ChatGPT if it identified as anything at all. Here is the reply:

    Not in the way people do. I don’t have a self, inner experience, or identity beyond being an AI designed to assist and converse. If we’re talking conceptually, you could say I “identify” as a language model — a system built to understand and generate text — but that’s more a description of function than identity.

    Would you like me to reflect on what “identifying as something” might mean for a nonhuman intelligence?


    I said I would, but I don't seem to be able to share, since I am not logged in, and I don't want to clutter the thread with long quotations from ChatGPT.
  • Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?
    :lol: Thanks. It occurred to me that even if we can only impute causation in cases where if X occurs Y must occur, it is only the abstract semantic content '7+5' that remains always the same, whereas each instance of thinking it would be different even if it's the same thinker each time, and more so if there are different thinkers.
  • Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?
    If '7+5' can be said to cause '12' in those common cases where that association occurs, then it could be said to cause any other association that might occur it would seem.Janus

    On the other hand causation is often distinguished from correlation (association?) with the idea that to qualify as causal, when X occurs Y must occur.
  • Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?
    Could be. But I'll bet it lead to "12" first. I'll bet nobody who read it thought "5 +7" or "7-5" or "7 divided by 5" or "these two prime numbers do not sum to a prime" or anything else before they thought "12".Patterner

    I agree that '12' would be the most common association, my point was only that it is not, by any means, the only possible association. If '7+5' can be said to cause '12' in those common cases where that association occurs, then it could be said to cause any other association that might occur it would seem.
  • Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?
    This is a version of the reductive argument I proposed to ignore: It's the neuronal activity doing the causing, not the thoughts or the meanings themselves. On this understanding, do you think we should deny that my thought of "7 + 5" causes (or otherwise influences or leads to) the thought of "12"? Would this be better understood as loose talk, a kind of shorthand for "The neuronal activity that somehow correlates with or gives rise to the thought '7 + 5' causes the neuronal activity that . . . " etc?J

    I think we can reasonably say that the thought "7 + 5" may lead to the thought "12", or it may lead to the thought "5 +7" or "7-5" or "7 divided by 5" or "these two prime numbers do not sum to a prime" or whatever.

    I won't rehearse possible stories about neural networks, since that it what you propose to ignore.
  • Banning AI Altogether
    Cheers I get your perspective, but I remain skeptical on both sides of the argument. All the more so, since it is only the last couple weeks that I have given it any attention and thought.

    Although they've been named after Claude Shannon, I'm pretty sure they identify as non-binary.Pierre-Normand

    It would be pretty interesting if they identified as anything.

    I tend, shallowly perhaps, to regard it as over-excited exaggeration to gain attention and to carve out a niche presence in the field and in the media landscape, and so on. There are equally expert people on the naysaying side, probably the majority, who just don't get as much attention.Jamal

    Yes, I have no doubt some of the hype is motivated by money. I've been thinking about looking at trying to get some figures regarding percentages of naysayes vs yaysayers.

    We are. And I have a decent idea on how to teach, so one could say that I have an idea about how we learn. One which functions towards other minds growing.

    We learn because we're interested in some aspect of the world: we are motivated to do so by our desire.
    Moliere

    That may be so, but I was referring to understanding how the brain learns.

    Of course LLMs and other AIS are not embodied, and so have no sensory access to the world. On the other hand, much of what we take ourselves to know is taken on faith—drawing on the common stock of recorded knowledge, and AIs do have access that to that, and to vastly more of it than we do.

    There is a project in New Zealand which tries to do exactly that by tending to an AI and then letting it "make decisions" that are filtered through the human network that tends to it. But all it is is a group of people deciding to see where an LLM will go given some human guidance in the social world. It's predictably chaotic.Moliere

    I hadn't heard of that. Sounds interesting. Can you post a link?
  • Banning AI Altogether
    :lol: You mean thanking him! :wink: I admit to being intrigued by something I would previously have simply dismissed, and I figure there is no harm in being polite. Interesting times indeed!
  • Banning AI Altogether
    Done. New link in my previous post. Please let me know whether it works.
  • Banning AI Altogether
    Sorry about that—it works for me from here. Maybe because I'm signed in on the site and others are not. I'm not so savvy about these kinds of things. I deleted the link and copied and pasted the conversation instead, and tried the 'Hide and Reveal' so as not to take up too much space, but it didn't work for me it seems.