Comment by stavros

Comment by stavros 4 hours ago

I keep hearing this non sequitur argument a lot. It's like saying "humans just pick the next work to string together into a sentence, they're not actually dutiful agents". The non sequitur is in assuming that somehow the mechanism of operation dictates the output, which isn't necessarily true.

It's like saying "humans can't be thinking, their brains are just cells that transmit electric impulses". Maybe it's accidentally true that they can't think, but the premise doesn't necessarily logically lead to truth

swatcoder 3 hours ago

There's nothing said here that suggests they can't think. That's an entirely different discussion.

My comment is specifically written so that you can take it for granted that they think. What's being discussed is that if you do so, you need to consider how they think, because this is indeed dictated by how they operate.

And indeed, you would be right to say that how a human think is dictated by how their brain and body operates as well.

Thinking, whatever it's taken to be, isn't some binary mode. It's a rich and faceted process that can present and unfold in many different ways.

Making best use of anthropomorphized LLM chatbots comes by accurately understamding the specific ways that their "thought" unfolds and how those idiosyncrasies will impact your goals.

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grey-area 4 hours ago

No it’s not like saying that, because that is not at all what humans do when they think.

This is self-evident when comparing human responses to problems be LLMs and you have been taken in by the marketing of ‘agents’ etc.

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stavros 4 hours ago

You've misunderstood what I'm saying. Regardless of whether LLMs think or not, the sentence "LLMs don't think because they predict the next token" is logically as wrong as "fleas can't jump because they have short legs".

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- Arkhaine_kupo 3 hours ago
  
  > the sentence "LLMs don't think because they predict the next token" is logically as wrong
  it isn't, depending on the deifinition of "THINK".
  If you believe that thought is the process for where an agent with a world model, takes in input, analysies the circumstances and predicts an outcome and models their beaviour due to that prediction. Then the sentence of "LLMs dont think because they predict a token" is entirely correct.
  They cannot have a world model, they could in some way be said to receive a sensory input through the prompt. But they are neither analysing that prompt against its own subjectivity, nor predicting outcomes, coming up with a plan or changing its action/response/behaviour due to it.
  Any definition of "Think" that requieres agency or a world model (which as far as I know are all of them) would exclude an LLM by definition.
  
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- stevenhuang 4 hours ago
  
  > not at all what humans do when they think.
  Parent commentator should probably square with the fact we know little about our own cognition, and it's really an open question how is it we think.
  In fact it's theorized humans think by modeling reality, with a lot of parallels to modern ML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
  
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  stavros 4 hours ago
  
  That's the issue, we don't really know enough about how LLMs work to say, and we definitely don't know enough about how humans work.
  
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Antibabelic 4 hours ago

> The non sequitur is in assuming that somehow the mechanism of operation dictates the output, which isn't necessarily true.

Where does the output come from if not the mechanism?

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stavros 4 hours ago

So you agree humans can't really think because it's all just electrical impulses?

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- Antibabelic 3 hours ago
  
  Human "thought" is the way it is because "electrical impulses" (wildly inaccurate description of how the brain works, but I'll let it pass for the sake of the argument) implement it. They are its mechanism. LLMs are not implemented like a human brain, so if they do have anything similar to "thought", it's a qualitatively different thing, since the mechanism is different.
  
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  socialcommenter 18 minutes ago
  
  Mature sunflowers reliably point due east, needles on a compass point north. They implement different things using different mechanisms, yet are really the same.
  
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samdoesnothing 3 hours ago

I never got the impression they were saying that the mechanism of operation dictates the output. It seemed more like they were making a direct observation about the output.

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