I'm probably way off the mark here, but my instinct tells me there's nothing intrinsic about the human condition that makes it the exclusive vessel of thought.
It is theoretically possible, after all, to simulate a human brain at a subatomic level. Sure, the complexity is absurd and interface required to measure it seems far fetched, but technically there's no restriction.
Because of this I believe what we know as "thought" or consciousness exists in the space between the physical world. It's just a way to represent the world around us, with the ability to reference the past and systems to predict the future.
LLMs to me are like a simplified version thats stretched across the domain of active memory. The "thought" process is the same, an active state (current token) guided by the past state (previous tokens).
I think the next step is to reduce what a token is. Right now they are vectors that are linked to words. If instead of words we fed it direct video and audio, and a way to translate the raw data into something resembling the information passed from our eyes and ears in real time, and train it like a child learns from its parents, it's hard to draw the line on where thought begins.
It's an interesting experiment, but I still consider it anti-human.
In the future, when we have "robot" rights for robots that identify as humans, you'll find me on the side of "they aren't a real human". We'll be called bigots, and I'm okay with that.
Made some updates to my post but glad you brought up simulation: today when we simulate the brain, at whatever resolution, we do so in digital systems that have the Von Neumann bottleneck. Processing and memory are separated.
In humans and all of biology, these things overlap instead. And that’s where simulations ultimately fail. They are out of step with real time in a way biology is not, because biology is attuned to the environment, and down to the molecular level, is actually enacting a physical process distributed across many cells that track the periodicities in various external signals, then anticipate them.
Does Danny Hillis' Connection Machine have a von Neumann bottleneck? Do transputer arrays separate processing and memory?
When custom silicon is made to speed up LLM behaviour doesn't that operate fully parallel with mixed memory and processing?
When real time remote sensing signal processing pipelines are built isn't it possible to parallel in the kinds of filters that "anticipate" the expected future (and highlight deviations from the expected).
Yes... when these things are done, we can talk. Which is why I said "I believe machines could be made that think". They can be. We just haven't done it yet.
> Yes.
To which question?
The Connection Machine CM-2 (1987) has a non von Neumann architecture and mixes memory and processing .. so that's been done, 40 years ago.
Anticipating the future in real time remote sensing signal processing pipelines has been about for at least [redacted] decades.
>I'm probably way off the mark here, but my instinct tells me there's nothing intrinsic about the human condition that makes it the exclusive vessel of thought.
I'm in your boat. Molecular biology looks quite analogous to something like Conway's Game of Life, but a particle automaton with freedom in 3D space rather than cells in a fixed 2D aetheric grid.
Conway's Game of Life is Turing complete, the fundamental laws/algorithms are simple. Per Wolfram (NKS), you don't need complex algorithms in order to exhibit complex behavior. GoL is just four rules and a[n infinite] grid. Wolfram's automata are simpler.
I will go even further out 'there' and state that we are the equivalent to Greek "city-gods" which arise out of the polity/demos composing them, except our polities are little biological von Neumann machines acting in concert to emerge us in their aggregate. What most people think of as 'god' being some top-down omniscient/omnipotent creator entity, I think is wrong and reverses the true heirarchy of nature. The fabric of spacetime, the quantum field, or whatever emerges it from a lower level with its fixed simple rules, is the primary force driving the universe's [and our] existence. If there are gods, we are categorically much closer to them in form than the pious fanatics say!
(Disclosure: I am petulantly Atheist.)
>Its design is not based on executing best algorithms, but rather finding good enough solutions among many time constrained but interlinked signal cascades.
That's known as optimization algorithm, and genetic algorithm is known to produce good enough results fast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
Computers are time constrained too and cut such corners just like humans.
> They do not experience time. They can check the clock.
Humans experience time because they check biological clock. And sometimes humans forget about time just fine, when they don't check the clock.
Machines already do think.
Any reasonable definition of "thinking" includes what LLMs do. One would have to craft a rather arbitrary and tortured definition of "thinking" to include human thinking but exclude LLM thinking.
This is basically Christian apologetics. We've collectively thought we were special for so long that must now go through increasingly complex mental gymnastics to prove to ourselves that we are somehow uniquely sentient, despite increasing evidence to the contrary.
This is neuroscience. I don't give a damn about Christianity. And nothing here says humans are special. Only that biology broadly is different than computing.
Yet, evolution, the foundation of modern biology is easily simulated by any decent coder in 10 minutes - lookup weasel program.
The audacity to still claim biology is broadly different than computing is commendable.
Evolution is very far from just being natural selection. It’s a quite complicated field with many mechanisms. And when simulated on a computer we have not gotten anything similar to real biology yet. So we have more to learn.
No. Only 3 mechanics: replication, mutation and natural selection.
Write a weasel program and you will see for yourself.
current = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
target = "THE LORD OF THE RINGS"
loop {
replicas = replication(current)
replicas = mutation(replicas)
current = naturalSelection(replicas)
print("generation", i, current)
if (current == target)
break
}
You can thus make "Dog" turn into a "Cat". I rest my case :)
There have been experiments in "digital primordial soup", where primitive programs are cultivated under conditions with evolutionary pressure.
Computational Substrates: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction - https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19108
Brainfuck, Forth, Subleq, and most recently Z80 assembly programs with mutations, interactions, and self-modification. Z80 has an LDIR instruction that copies a block of data from one location in memory to another, which allows the "organisms" to reach/discover reproduction quicker and more reliably in repeated experiments. As soon as that happens, it inevitably takes over the "world".
Hm, sounds more like "Lord of the Flies" than Rings.
The Paper's Scope: Abiogenesis (how self replicating programs emerge).
My Scope: Evolution proper (what happens after a replicator exists).
Once a self-replicating entity exists, the Weasel loop takes over. Conflating the origin of replicators with the mechanics of evolution itself mixes up two different things.
Laws of logic dictates if you can demonstrate E with R, M and N, then any additional variable is neither sufficient nor necessary.
From a strict theory-of-computation standpoint, if the core loop can be executed in code, then biological evolution is fundamentally an informational process, not a mystical "biological-only" phenomenon.
> As soon as that happens, it inevitably takes over the "world".
Agreed :). Looking forward to an epic battle of the pelennor fields.
> sounds more like "Lord of the Flies" than Rings.
Thats hilarious. "Lord of the Flies" it shall be henceforth :))
I agree that it's a bit reductionist to boil this down entirely to "Christian Apologetics," I think you'd have to do some serious rationalizations to see how the notion of human finitude, time as the limit of cognition, is not originally a Christian notion, or at least is not informed by secular interpretations of theology such as the first place where this claim is made, Being and Time. Which is even more interesting because even Heidegger moved away from time as binding finitude and eventually came to the position that cybernetics would replace philosophy, that fundamental ontology would not withstand technological advancement.