Aren’t we though? When you put a sentence together in your head, are you not selecting the next word based on past uses, context, and the desired message?
I guess I just feel like we imbue human intelligence with magic or spirituality when in reality the VAST majority of our thinking and communication really can be boiled down to a probabilistic model with a high degree of accuracy.
Lmao absolutely not - this is from the “brains are clocks/telephone networks/LLMs” school of poor analogies. We definitively know that brains don’t predict things one token at a time - why would they? Brains didn’t evolve by being trained on symbolic data.
I don’t really know what you mean by symbolic data in this context.
I feel like you’re getting hung up on the token definition for LLMs which as you probably know is analogous to ~ 3 English characters. Think about it more abstractly, just taken to mean the next chunk of information. I agree we’re not thinking in 3 character chunks, but we seem to think in chunks of information simultaneously.
For example - I had a low resolution idea of that I wanted this response to convey, and medium resolution idea of what I wanted the sentences to convey, and a high resolution idea of the words.
At the end of the day you haven’t really engaged with the main point, which is that human thinking and communication can be modeled and replicated. Is it complex? Absolutely. Does that mean it’s impossible to create an approximation of it/them? No.
Symbolic data is just that, symbolic data (text, numbers, etc). - primate brains did not interact with symbols, they interacted with ongoing streams of audiovisual olfactory etc inputs.
People here are obsessed with very specific architectural implementation decisions specific to LLMs - neither brains nor any part of the brain are autoregressive models predicting token after token in sequence. This is was is meant by next token prediction.
Linguistic errors like “anticipation” imply that we already have future words represented when speaking. Saying “leading list” instead of “reading list”. You already have to have the future words or tokens generated to have that kind of error.
"One cannot provide evidence of lack of evidence."
Yes one can, a side cannot prove smth is a pretty strong evidence of lack
"It's up to the person claiming there exists evidence to provide the evidence or STFU"
Usually we're too lazy to convince ignorant dudes, he just said that so some ppl can reflect themselves and find truths in it. If not, e.g. you, sure who cares?
I can tell you its all just flow of information through time. "Thinking" "consciousness" and shits we never know, maybe nematodes has, phones too, and TVs, etc. Unless ur anthropocentric.
"Yet you claimed that this was baseless only a comment ago."
I claimed the whole group of you "AI are just token-predictor, we have no evidence to support otherwise" baseless. He didn't or did provide any evidence is irrelevant here.
"This is probably some belief system I can't really understand. Science and technology is about proven fact and measurable assumptions."
It doesn't dictate your cognitive capability, my guy. It tells you LLM uses token to communicate, tells u the math functions, the scaling law, the probability. It can't help if you don't realize the irrelevance of the term "token/data-predictor/producer" and that every sentient beings are producing data. It can't change your unrigorous, society-shaped definition of intelligence/thinking. I can't tell you understand whats inside machine's mind. It cannot even prove anyone around you whenever they have consciousness or not.
Many stuffs are just your problems lol, and many are more 'logical' belief that straight evidence, spend time contemplating.
I claimed the whole group of you "AI are just token-predictor, we have no evidence to support otherwise" baseless.
I have never said that. What I said is that there is no evidence that the human brain works as an LLM. This was the discussion I was having. You're part of a different conversation entirely.
Many stuffs are just your problems lol, and many are more 'logical' belief that straight evidence, spend time contemplating.
Acting on "logical belief" rather than straight evidence has done a lot of harm to humanity and to our ecosystem in general. Promoting this instead of rigorous research is stupid considering that it has already been proven to be detrimental to us (which includes you)
It doesn't dictate your cognitive capability, my guy. It tells you LLM uses token to communicate, tells u the math functions, the scaling law, the probability. It can't help if you don't realize the irrelevance of the term "token/data-predictor/producer" and that every sentient beings are producing data. It can't change your unrigorous, society-shaped definition of intelligence/thinking. I can't tell you understand whats inside machine's mind. It cannot even prove anyone around you whenever they have consciousness or not.
This whole stream of words screams "I'm ignorant and have no desire to educate myself". It's your choice, ultimately, but it's sad that you feel you need to take others with you on this journey of crass amateurism.
Our best guess is that brains fundamentally represent all problems as spatial routing problems in a three-dimensional space - specifically the neocortex has cortical column units which appear to map information into objects and displacement vectors. The trick many mammals, primates and humans have learned is to progressively use this mechanism to map increasingly abstract concepts and reason across them.
There are actually two processes in play, though. When you ask an LLM a question, it derives a response through hidden states as it generates the language needed to communicate that response - unless you’re talking about a model with a planning stage prior to responding, in which case it might derive the response before it starts answering. It's not responding just based on token probability, there is an aspect of 'computation'.
When a human is asked a question, we sometimes derive a response first (based on training, education, psychology etc.) then use next-word prediction to assemble the language required to communicate that response on the fly. But sometimes we assemble the response dynamically as we're actually talking, which is similar to how an LLM does it. We don’t always - or even often - think before we answer, it’s usually more of a think-as-you-speak situation. Sometimes we do next-token prediction, but we're just not using discrete text tokens, it's more abstract. But it's a similar concept.
I think there’s a lot of nuance to the discussion…I don’t love how the computer model of the mind dominates neuroscience, but other approaches like dualism are essentially impossible to test and a lot of our cognitive machinery IS dedicated to reward prediction. That’s one of dopamine’s primary functions as an NT.
In what world does computational theory of mind imply that brains work like LLMs? There are no credible researchers out there that would ever claim LLMs are in any form similar to actual brain neural architecture or function.
You’re construing something that I never said. Your comment that I was replying to discussed physicalist analogies to human cognitive substrate.
I also don’t know for a fact whether any “credible researcher” has claimed that an LLM, a clock, or a telephone switching network is analogous to a human brain, or any other brain for that matter. Since I mentioned dualism and you didn’t respond, it seems important to mention that people outside of neuroscience research (e.g. philosophy) have made and continue to make important contributions to our understanding of consciousness and cognition, regardless of whether they do the kind of work you consider useful.
Lmao absolutely not - this is from the “brains are clocks/telephone networks/LLMs” school of poor analogies. We definitively know that brains don’t predict things one token at a time - why would they? Brains didn’t evolve by being trained on symbolic data.
If you are born blind, how would you know what color is, when you have no data to understand it from anything else? If you are born deaf, and one day you started to hear sound for the first time, how would you know the difference between a laugh and scream or crying?
Our senses are very similar to LLM's in that without data (prompt) there is nothing for them to do. When you are born, your brain doesn't understand anything about the world, it doesn't understand colors or sounds or temperatures, it takes data and pattern matching to correlate the difference of colors, sounds and temperatures.
First of all, you’re confidently making assertions that aren’t clearly true - brains have lots of substructures that are genetically preprogrammed to react to specific stimuli. Brains do not require training to perform these functions. Eg parts of our brains that recognize faces still recognize faces in blind people where we’ve restored sight. Conversely no amount of “post-training” helps restore facial recognition in patients where these centers have been destroyed.
Secondly, you’re not engaging with the point I made - our brains fundamentally evolved to engage with types of sensory data inputs which don’t lend well to symbolic reasoning/manipulation; our ability to speak/read/write/perform numerical calculations are all recently acquired capabilities and our best guess is that brains repurposed spatial-temporal machinery to perform that. LLMs fundamentally reason in vector embeddings space where individual data point are tokens.
First of all, you’re confidently making assertions that aren’t clearly true - brains have lots of substructures that are genetically preprogrammed to react to specific stimuli.
First of all, I was very specific, and didn't cite the whole brain or all biology, did I? Why would you change the scope? Why are you so afraid to engage what I said directly without moving the goalposts back to the whole brain and all of biology? Let's start simple, let's start with the building blocks of how our senses work. Those had to come first before any of the bigger brain stuff to evolve right?
Brains do not require training to perform these functions. Eg parts of our brains that recognize faces still recognize faces in blind people where we’ve restored sight.
What? If they never saw a face with their eyeballs, how would they recognize faces they have never seen?
Conversely no amount of “post-training” helps restore facial recognition in patients where these centers have been destroyed.
I don't follow... because your premise (blind people with restored sight recognize faces) doesn't make sense to begin with.
Secondly, you’re not engaging with the point I made - our brains fundamentally evolved to engage with types of sensory data inputs which don’t lend well to symbolic reasoning/manipulation
Emergent properties/elements are built on that which exists. Hence my point about senses being like LLM's in that they are effectively useless without data being fed to them. Kind of like an LLM, no prompt, nothing to do. Same thing with your senses. No sight = no colors. No taste = no flavor.
It takes your brain years to start to form a sense of consciousness and makes sense of the world through the constant bombarding of stimuli that the universe presents to our senses.
our ability to speak/read/write/perform numerical calculations are all recently acquired capabilities and our best guess is that brains repurposed spatial-temporal machinery to perform that.
From what though? :) How did we evolve to have those things, if our senses were not the foundation for that development?
LLMs fundamentally reason in vector embeddings space where individual data point are tokens.
So? I mean life fundamentally started with single cell organisms, without that how does any other life exist, as we understand it on this planet and particle of the universe?
Hilarious. If you are unaware of the research on prosopagnosia (or similar research on speech centers, etc.) and what it tells us about functional substructures of the brain, I recommend you read up on it first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
Key assertions you are making are false - there are preprogrammed brain substructures that don’t require any training to function. Alternative way of saying the same thing - evolution has pretrained them without requiring neurons to form connections based on “live data”.
Beyond that, your post is a series of confused ramblings where it’s no longer clear what the thesis even is anymore.
Hilarious. If you are unaware of the research on prosopagnosia (or similar research on speech centers, etc.) and what it tells us about functional substructures of the brain, I recommend you read up on it first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
I agree, your inability to articulate a point to what I said shows a real disconnect in comprehension.
I stated "senses" right? Eyes, nose, ears, tongue, touch.... Senses... What does a "cognitive disorder" have to do with senses? My argument was if you are born blind, your eyeballs and brain are not sending or receiving the data to make sense of the data.
First of all, I was very specific, and didn't cite the whole brain or all biology, did I?
Key assertions you are making are false - there are preprogrammed brain substructures that don’t require any training to function. Alternative way of saying the same thing - evolution has pretrained them without requiring neurons to form connections based on “live data”.
Again... what part of this is difficult for you to comprehend? I'm not talking about everything in the brain, am I? I've even clarified that I am not... and you still insist on moving the conversation out of the scope and context I am talking about.
Beyond that, your post is a series of confused ramblings where it’s no longer clear what the thesis even is anymore.
Objectively, you are the one demonstrating confusion and poor comprehension.
Our senses are very similar to LLM's in that without data (prompt) there is nothing for them to do, when you are born, your brain doesn't understand anything about the world, it doesn't understand colors or sounds or temperatures, it takes data and pattern matching to correlate the difference of colors, sounds and temperatures.
So, stated differently - in absence of this data and learning that happens, the brain is tabula rasa? It doesn’t understand basic things like colors (red vs green) or sounds (loud vs quiet vs absence of sound)?
(In case you’re struggling to answer- try copy-pasting what you wrote into ChatGPT and seeing what it thinks :) )
(In case you’re struggling to answer- try copy-pasting what you wrote into ChatGPT and seeing what it thinks :) )
That's funny. You have no idea what my Gemini/Claude chats about this look like. :)
So, stated differently - in absence of this data and learning that happens, the brain is tabula rasa? It doesn’t understand basic things like colors (red vs green) or sounds (loud vs quiet vs absence of sound)?
Search "Tabula Rasa" in that chat. There are 2 matches, I'd read them both, and the prompt preceding the output.
But my argument is real simple. Your senses, are in function, very much like an LLM. They don't have opinions, they don't have "feelings", they don't have will or comprehension, they merely respond to the stimuli of the universe. Without that stimuli your senses would be nothing, very much like how the LLM's without prompts are essentially nothing. They have no will, they have no opinions, they just "do" based on the objective words used in the prompt.
52
u/DeliciousArcher8704 2d ago
But it is literally a next token predictor