Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I understand how these models work under the hood as well as any lay person can. I worked through Andrej's video series and built my own toy model.

Your argument is missing the whole concept of emergence, which is what is at question here. How does emergence come about, under what circumstances, and what is possible in those circumstance? It's an open question.

Following your logic, one could argue that physics is basic and follows well understood rules. We can do some fancy math to predict what will happen in a given particle interaction. How would these basic particles ever give rise to life and minds with reasoning ability?

Well you and I are an existence proof that basic rules when followed on massive systems can give rise to emergent behavior.

View on HN

Can you explain emergence then please? Because the way you're using it, and the way people tend to use it to present this argument is as a stand in for magic and another way of saying "if we don't understand it, then anything is possible, man!".

We can probably simplify it. If we have a system and move one level up it becomes a completely different thing. For example: one molecule in space has some properties like mass, velocity, position. But move a level up and you get pressure, flow, temperature, etc.. It's a completely different thing.

The same with models. On low level there are weights, gradients, matrices. But move up and (wow!) It's nothing like it. It's coherent text or actions. Commands and responses. Put together and you have image recognition and generation from description. It's something new with it's own laws and properties. Just a bit up and we'll get coherent behavior and social creatures. For them we need 'generic' component. It's like soul for life. And LLMs could be it. At least they are the best candidates today.

Consciousness may not be emergent, it could be like the panpsychists argue. Or other forms of consciousness dualism.

My argument is an attempt to explain where emergence itself comes from. Prove me right or wrong, and you have answered your question. Until then, as you said, the question is open. Why should I pretend otherwise, and claim that the LLM is definitely intelligent? Such a position is no more than vanity.

Following your logic, the million monkeys hammering randomly on typewriters that eventually produce the full works of Shakespeare, did so not through pure randomness, but by actually understanding the plight of Romeo and Juliet and the motivation behind Hamlet.

Edit since I can't reply: "I don't like your answer, therefore you aren't engaging in good faith." lol

I am aware of the thought experiment you are referring to, but if I witnessed a group of monkeys write the full works of Shakespeare in my lifetime then yes, I would actually consider it something worthy of investigating.

However I can see you are not engaging in this conversation in good faith so I don't think there is anything else to discus with you.

> However I can see you are not engaging in this conversation in good faith...

What if this "categorize and ignore/forget" is causing humans to miss something extremely important in their midst? Bad faith is certainly possible here, but also possible is that this person genuinely believes what they say.

> However I can see you are not engaging in this conversation in good faith so I don't think there is anything else to discus with you.

From my perspective, it seems pretty clear that you are the one arguing in bad faith. People are allowed to disagree with you. This person presented a thoughtful critique of your argument. It made plenty of sense to me.

> the million monkeys hammering randomly on typewriters that eventually produce the full works of Shakespeare, did so not through pure randomness, but by actually understanding the plight of Romeo and Juliet and the motivation behind Hamlet

The funny thing 'yes'. Million monkeys cannot do it by randomly typing. They cannot even randomly type at all. Each monkey is intelligent creature, they will follow some patterns. If they did manage to produce Shakspeare they definitely understood something.

Today it's easy to programmatically simulate 1m monkeys typing randomly 10 keys per second. Try it ;)

Then it's the thought experiment that needs re-framing. I'll give it a shot:

At nearly every point in the universe, there is a noise: Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.

What if you listened to the CMBR at a specific point in space, converted that signal into Unicode text, and it just happened to write Romeo and Juliet? Is that intelligence? No. That's selection bias.

So why is ChatGPT able to quote Shakespeare when asked? Because the entire text of the play is in its training corpus, and the infinite permutations of nonsensical CMBR noise is not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com