LLMs are not sentient, but this gimmick doesn’t prove that.
There’s nothing to indicate the human brain can’t be implemented in a Turing machine too.
I don’t think that is the case.
There’s nothing that indicates the human brain has super-turing computation
It is. There is limitations to a Turing machine that a human brain does not have. I expand on that on this other comment here.
it baffles me how many people in here apparently don’t have the reading comprehension to understand your second sentence. I swear Lemmy is even dumber than reddit.
Except … consciousness!
Which you can precisely define, right?
What a moronic take, we cannot prove consciousness (except our own of course) so it’d be you who must prove it can be implemented in a turing machine. Not me.
Statement: “There is no indication that the human brain cannot be modeled as a turing machine”
To disprove this, evidence to the contrary is required. It’s not at all the same as saying “The human brain can be modeled as a turing machine”. In that case they would need to prove that.
We simply do not know. Humans cling to their idea of somehow being “special” very hard with thought experiments like chinese room, and at all points neglect that there is no evidence that a human brain is actually different.
Generally I’d argue that the continuous nature of animal brains makes them quite fundamentally different from the very much discrete states of anything we program, but that still doesn’t mean it’d be impossible to simulate.
Except we have quala, consciousness. That’s a well recognised fact. How do you model something we cannot explain?
So yeah there are “indications” we cannot do it. Maybe we can and emerging properties is the way to go, but it might also not be that.
Do you believe we can?
Edit: the chinese room is a farce IMO, and won’t push anything either way.
Many abilities and properties we thought to be exclusive to human consciousness were later proven in animals. Such as the capacity for empathy, thinking ahead, and recognizing yourself in a mirror.
Does that mean animals are partially conscious? Or can we accept that the definition is fuzzy at best, making this a moving target?
That makes it probable I guess, but it absolutely does not prove it. We cannot prove humans are conscious (except ourselves).
There’s nothing to indicate the human brain can’t be implemented in a Turing machine too.
That is not true, this is a research branch from computer science and math, it is called Computability theory, it deals with the limits of expressiveness for different types of theoretical machines and expressions, and the most expressive of all is the Turing machine, and a Turing machine cannot do some stuff, the classic example is the Halting problem, a computer cannot definitely say if an algorithm ever stops (mathematica proven that it cannot do it), but a human can do so quite easily.
One may think that maybe a Turing Machine cannot do something but can simulate another machine that does, but that is also proven to be impossible, it cannot simulate something more expressive than itself.
You’re misunderstanding the halting problem.
You are refuting something that wasn’t said. of course Turing machines cannot compute everything.
I know computability theory, and I am very familiar with the halting problem. A human cannot solve it either. We made literal mathematical proof of it, and that proof is the halting problem.
The entire point of the halting problem is that if you assume that there is a black box that can answer whether a program halts, you then prove it can’t be the case by a proof of contradiction. You can replace the black box with a human brain and it works just as well, that’s the entire point of a black box.
Aren’t brains like orders of magnitude faster and more “powerful” than even the strongest supercomputers?
It’s complicated.
Computers can scale, you can make a computer much larger than a human brain.
Computers really just do binary math. For those who don’t know, it’s basically determining whether or not 1 or 0 should change, or stay the same, based on an algorithm. We don’t know (or at least, I haven’t read that we know) how brains actually store and process information.
Computers are very fast at doing “simple” calculations with definite answers. A pocket calculator can do math faster than you can with 100% accuracy. On the flip side, analyzing and reacting to incomplete information is the forte of the human brain. We still haven’t made a computer than can fit in a car and drive better than some of the dumbest people on the planet manage to do, while fucking around on their phones at the same time.
There may not be proof that LLMs aren’t sentient, but there is some evidence and reason to believe that consciousness is an emergent property of quantum effects, whereas turing machines are relegated to classical mechanics. The same evidence would indicate it is unlikely that a turing machine could replicate the human brain since it uses fundamentally different layers of reality to calculate/think.
There is no evidence as of now. There are scientific hypothesis regarding this exact thing that sound plausible as a standalone thing but there hasn’t been any observational evidence regarding it.
They are pretty much equivalent to our hypothesis regarding dark matter. We knowthere must be something we can’t see and them work backwards from there to fill the gaps.
I always forget that computers use those special non-quantum electrons. Thanks!
Quantum effects are literally one of the things that computers are designed specifically to avoid. We’re bumping up against the point where we can make conventional computer chips more dense the same ways we have previously since quantum tunneling causes some noticeable errors in computing when things get too much closer together.
Of course! This has been true for almost 30 years!
But if your argument amounts to, “the soul exists because the brain has got quantum hootnannies in it”; well… :gestures broadly:
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I said nothing about souls. If I’m talking about souls (without direct prompting), I’m deep in a psychotic episode.
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I don’t really get what you mean by the gestures broadly thing? I’m very open to an expansion on that thought, but have no current sense of what that means.
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It’s not just the vague idea of quantum hootnannies, it is the fact that intentionally inducing extra quantum hootnannies in the brain structure of animals has a noticeable impact on the effects of various anesthesia, i.e. the “anti-conciousness drugs”.
I’m not claiming there is definitive proof, I’m simply stating there is some real, empirical evidence that supports the notion that consciousness is an emergent property reliant upon a maybe narrow range of emergent effects from quantum mechanics that are inherently absent from Turing machine computational models.
I spent a couple days on and off reading about this theory, I read a few papers in the field and some of Penrose’s work (I didn’t go grab his books). So, thanks. It was interesting. I have had some physicists mention to me in passing that quantum consciousness was a junk field, but I hadn’t looked into it.
I agree, this is definitely bullshit.
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Penrose himself attempts to dodge this in the first paragraph, but why are we groping for a special theory of consciousness at all?
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Quantum mechanics is in everything, without it, fundamental processes (like light passing through your window) can not adequately be explained. Just because something has ‘got a quantum’ or whatever doesn’t instantly make it special from a physical perspective (you don’t see scientists tossing out conversation of energy or causality because stuff’s ‘got a quantum’ or whatever).
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You might be interested in some of the recent work demonstrating that anesthetics work on plants. Not a microtubule in sight.
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What evidence
These don’t appear to be peer-reviewed, but thanks.
By the same logic, you could prove that we are not sentient.
Engineers need to stop trying to do the job of philosophers. LLMs are not sentient, but that tells us nothing about what gives rise to sentience or whether silicon is a substrate that could host a sentient consciousness.
I’m still not convinced most people I speak to at work are sentient.
They are probably sentient. Now sapience… is another issue altogether.
I’m pretty sure many of them, when they get home and close the door behind them, they just stare at the wall until it’s time to go out again.
big issue is that “Scentience” is a vibes based definition. I don’t think we have a working definition that we can use.
in the past it was argued (engire global economy based on) that black people weren’t scientient.
The annoying part is that now, “what is scientience” isn’t an abstract esoteric philosophical question. but a material question we are ignoring with serious real life implications.
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I majored in Philosophy. Though I wouldn’t want to be an AI ethics consultant for one of these big companies because I imagine that whatever I write down would have to preserve profits (first and foremost) and then gaslight everyone into thinking it’s all perfectly ethical and okay and no one (including mother earth) is being harmed in the process.
You don’t need an ethicist if you don’t have ethics! /s
I just wish we could put this dumb sentient AI stuff to bed for now. Congrats, you guys built the most powerful (and wasteful) auto-complete. It’s not sentient and your marketing doesn’t have to be hyperbolic lies.
honest question to a philosophy major, why is it so clear cut to you that LLMs are not sentient? what is missing in current systems?
Protip, never ask a Phil major questions, unless you want them to pose more questions. I think the very question itself assumes we can even properly define sentience. If we can, why does it have value as a result? Your home computer may not be sentient, but it’s pretty smart, valuable, and could potentially have an equally large impact on the world (not sure about intentionality though). It’s not that I’m certain no LLM is sentient (though I’m pretty sure) as much as I see greedy people steering the hype to their benefit in order to exploit others. The whole thing is manufactured to cheapen humanity in comparison to tech. I am very opinionated so you may see it differently.
For the record, at least one Nobel Prize winner disagrees about LLM sentience
A lot of nobel laureates believe/believed a lot of unhinged nonsense. Some of my favorites:
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Linus Pauling thought overdosing on vitamin C could cure all kinds of medical problems
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James Watson and William Shockley were eugenicists
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Irving Langmuir believed large-scale weather manipulation was possible with the technology available in the 1970s
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Luc Montagnier was really into homeopathy and spread COVID vaccine/5G conspiracy theories
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Kary Mullis denied that HIV causes AIDS
Just winning a Nobel doesn’t automatically make someone right about everything, even in their own field.
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Can you build a human from goats in AOE2?
An average human? No. A lemmy.world user? Yes.
Yeah, fuck those idiots for joining when it was the only instance accepting new members
I have no knowledge of this drama or hard feelings for your instance in either direction.
But was that ever a thing? I joined a month after you and there where options plenty.
It was absolutely a thing right when the 3P app reddit fiasco happened. Everybody was scrambling, and I’m not surprised that there were tons more options even just a month later, but at the time everyone else was completely overloaded. I tried signing up for as many instances as I could find, and lemmy.world was the only one that wasn’t shitting the bed with new registrations.
Haha, I’m still trying to decide if the upvotes and downvotes here are going after the sarcasm or the dumb literal take. Snort
Are we discriminating against instances now? Is this a thing?
Sweetie, that was a thing before your instance existed.
That kind of sucks ngl
I just found out I’m scum on lemmy woot! Who knew people didn’t like certain instances, are some better than others? Like do you get better info faster? Or is this pure sarcasm?
No instances are liked in general, but the Canadian and Australian ones aren’t disliked by anyone in particular
For this proof to work, you’d have to prove that you can’t. And we can simulate whole worm brains and fly brains, and they behave like real in simulated worlds, so you’d have to prove that there’s something different about humans. This paper doesn’t offer anything like that.
Exactly!
The researcher didn’t make an LLM, he made a NAND gate, and in theory that could be expanded into an LLM
All computers are just a minimum of three layers of NAND gates
he made more than a NAND gate. he created a 1-bit perceptron and a perceptron-training circuit after figuring out how to make a NAND gate
“Man built brain out of simple particles, proving brains are not sentient.”
Speak for yourself. I’m a Boltzmann brain.
The chances of this comment originating from a coincidental radio emission just cruising through the universe are small but not zero!
HOLY SHIT, AGE OF EMPIRES II IS SENTIENT
Who knew age of empires was gonna one up the president? In this the year of our Lord 2026
Lord Henry Percy: Thou art human, with soul and wit! I am naught but clockwork!
Lord Henry Percy: No wonder thou wert victorious! I shall abdicate.
Lord Henry Percy has resigned.
The moderate difficulty computer I just beat disagrees.
I’m still waiting for a Goatse powered LLM.
I think theres a big hole in that plan.
Am I missing something, or is the point simply “I can build a computer program in a game that you may be surprised to learn is Turing complete, therefore ai is not sentient?”
I’m not here to argue that AI is sentient, but this is a really lousy argument.
The argument in the paper is a bit more nuanced - it’s mostly arguing that we over-anthropomorphise AI, and this taints out results on AI sentience by pre-biasing towards some human like qualities already. Part of this comes from the AI attempting to emulated a human notion of identity.
Using a contrived goat powered AoE II AI would likely yield less assumed human-like quality bias. It would also be hilarious.
It would also be hilarious.
Oh 100%.
Nobody is arguing it’s not hilarious
Lost me at Microslop
Does it matter who his employer is?
The fact that he did this and wrote a paper on it while MS continues to pour billions into LLMs actually commands respect.
Undermines credibility for me.
It is incredible how we forgotten the whole point of the Turning test the moment it became relevant rather than some abstract though experiment.
People it this thread does not know what the Turing test actually tests. It is Ok, I guess the blame fails on pop culture.
The Turing test is not a test of sentience, it is a test if a machine can fool a human being into thinking it is sentient. And machines have passed this test for decades already. Who would have thought that our predisposition to anthropomorphize everything would make us so susceptible to thinking stuff is sentient 🤷
it isn’t just a test of competency. but the philosophical questions that are brought up afterwards.
It’s like reducing Schrödinger’s cat into an animal abuse experiment and not what it means to have uncolapsed probably waves.
Hey, look, you can read the paper! I wonder if the paper tells us what it is about?
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To be fair, humans anthropomorphising everything, of course they do that with software that can fucking talk to them.
An article that just repeats the headline. What a waste of time.
Better than a headline leaving out the important bits
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John Searle is the GOAT?
