After Chat Control and Germany's precedent for arresting meme-posters, Europe (yes UK included) is fast-tracked to become a totalitarian surveillance state. People should be terrified of how rapidly our civil liberties are being torn down.
I don't know what the answer is anymore as it seems all our democratic processes defending us from these erosions of our liberties have simply ceased to function.
I am ashamed to be Danish. Where are the mass protests of hundreds of thousands, the mass walkouts from our workplaces until our government at last respects our human dignity?
Our government has today turned the EU into a tool for total surveillance I don't know if there can be any return from. Our democratic processes have been abused, and our politicians shown to be nothing but craven, self-interested agents of control.
> What about going out in front of your city hall with a poster saying no-chat-control?
Unorganized, individual acts cannot change anything in the EU.
> You risk nothing, do you?
Given the legislative maze the EU has become, you can't be sure of that, but you surely gain nothing.
The conditions in Europe are quite specific, and in that environment, pan-EU legislation (except the customs union) should be optional for individual members, anything else can and will be used against the people.
Individual acts can actually have more resonance, if carried out with conviction and commitment (and if the cause is just).
See Greta Thunberg; she might not have managed to save the planet yet, but she sure got the attention of the world (of course, however big a problem chat control is, climate change is a much bigger issue)
Greta Thunberg achieved nothing useful in practice and if the best mascot for a movement is an autistic teenager it bodes poorly for that movement's chances.
She personally is perfectly successful, but in terms of political effectiveness people should model themselves off movements that achieved something.
To me it seems that she achieved a lot, compared to the rest of the activists.
The opposite forces were too strong in the end, but that doesn't mean that she didn't do a lot.
I'm not sure I see any problem with an autistic teenager as a "mascot"; I know how much a political area despises her, but if they treated a child like that, they would probably have done much worse with a normal adult.
But of course she's not enough, and expecting that she on her own will solve climate warming is delusional.
If we're talking about the scale of reforming the EU, I'd say the basket of things to look at are things like the rise of capitalism, liberalism, major religions, spread of democracy, the Enlightenment. There are a lot of smaller examples of polities reforming too but those are some nice big ones. The smaller ones tend to be quieter, less flashy affairs where someone organises people together to try and make life better.
> I know how much a political area despises her, but if they treated a child like that, they would probably have done much worse with a normal adult.
I like to believe the adults are more likely to run the numbers and say "hang on, rolling back industrial society for no obvious reason is a terrible idea and I'm probably going to fail anyway with these stupid tactics - progress is hard to stop".
> I like to believe the adults are more likely to run the numbers and say "hang on, rolling back industrial society for no obvious reason is a terrible idea
I guess you're a climate change denier, there's little to discuss then
> of course, however big a problem chat control is, climate change is a much bigger issue
Not quite "of course" in my opinion. An even bigger problem than (and a major cause of) climate change is how information flows to people. Or how it does not flow. Private conversations are part of that flow, I wouldn’t take that lightly.
It's hard to rank these problems; I consider both disinformation and chat control very big issues, and it's true that disinformation might be the main cause of climate change, but stopping chat control won't guarantee that we'll limit climate change as much as possible.
If for some weird reason I was forced to choose between stopping chat control and stopping climate change, I'd sure, regrettably, have to choose the latter...
and yet there are countless examples of the causes of protestors winning long-term victories
usually the people who choose not to protest for/against issues they care about do so for fear of police, fear of embarrassment, and/or laziness, not because they don't believe the countless sociological studies which have shown protest to be an effective form of political action
> Awareness is just continuous propagation of the neural network, be that artificial or biological. The reason thoughts just "appear" is because the brain is continuously propagating signal through the neural network.
This is just a claim you are making, without evidence.
The way you understand awareness is not through "this is like that" comparisons. These comparisons fall over almost immediately as soon as you turn your attention to the mind itself, by observing it for any length of time. Try it. Go observe your mind in silence for months. You will observe for yourself it is not what you've declared it to be.
> An LLM does all of these things, and more, and you can prove this by how complex their output is.
Complex output does not prove anything. You are again just making claims.
It is astoundingly easy to push an LLM over to collapse into ungrounded nonsense. Humans don't function this way because the two modes of reasoning are not alike. It's up to those making extraordinary claims to prove otherwise. As it is, the evidence does not exist that they behave comparably.
What makes you think you can understand the subjective experience of LLMs then? It's out of reach of science, so the only way is to ask them? How can you be sure they don't have subjective experience? Remember that you forbade yourself from using science to answer it.
Also, if subjective experience has any effect on the material world, then we can measure it and test it, putting it in reach of science. If it doesn't, why does it even matter in this discussion? By definition it has no relation to the AGI discussion since that's an empirical matter.
Haha, well, I would appreciate if comments included more substantive evidence when they make claims like they did.
I see a lot of "AGI boosters/doomers" comfortable making big claims without providing research to back what, when challenged, prove to be just their model or feeling of how things function.
Oh I agree with you, I was just underscoring that.
It seems to be a case of people looking at a problem they have little knowledge or understanding of and thinking "how hard can it be"? In this case, the answer is "so hard that philosophers have dubbed it 'the hard problem'".
Philosophers are mostly unaware of artificial neural networks. The game has changed, you can understand a lot about the human mind if you understand AI. Don't get too stuck in the past.
How about an objection to what I said? A case where someone is conscious but without continuous propagation of neural signals? Or something
You didn’t provide enough of a hypothesis to seriously discuss.
> A case where someone is conscious but without continuous propagation of neural signals?
That would be irrelevant. All known conscious beings are made up of biological cells, but that doesn’t prove that all conscious beings must be made of biological cells, or that biological cells are the key causative factor in consciousness. The same goes for “continuous propagation of neural signals.”
You described a personal conjecture as though it solved a known hard problem, even throwing in the word “just” as though the solution is really simple. This is a lot like the Feynman quote about quantum mechanics: if you think you understand it, you almost certainly don’t. You may not even have recognized the core problem yet. The original Chalmers paper is a good place to start: https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf
But coming at it from a computational perspective, in some ways it’s even easier to see the problem. We don’t generally assume that a deterministic, non-neural net program written in say Python has a conscious subjective experience. To use Nagel’s terminology, there is “nothing it is like” to be that program. But, an LLM or any other computational neural net is no different from a program like that. It’s executing deterministic instructions, like a machine, because it is a machine. We can speculate about consciousness being some sort of emergent property that arises in such systems given the right conditions, but that’s all it is: speculation.
And it’s completely unclear what those right conditions might be, or how those conditions could possibly give rise to conscious experience. Why aren’t humans philosophical zombies with no conscious experience, just reacting to input like machines? No-one has succeeded in getting past the conjecture stage in answering that question.
I am prepared and want to discuss seriously every one of my view points. The initial comment was just the abstract. I am extremely confident in my world view about Deep Learning and cognitive ability. And the reason for that is because I generally try to avoid doing what you just did, that is, reading what other people think regarding this subject.
I instead choose to ground my views in real world experiments and information I have gathered and experienced. This primarily consists of an enormous amount of experimentation with Deep Learning models, both inference and training. My views come mostly from that. I don't recite Andrej Karpathy or Ilya Sutskever. I don't even care about their opinions for the most part. I experiment with the models to such an extreme degree that I understand very well how they behave and their limitations. And I believe if you are going to create a breakthrough, this is the only way to do so.
> an LLM or any other computational neural net is no different from a program like that
I don't think so. A program doesn't exhibit highly complex abstract thought in a very high-dimensional space.
> It’s executing deterministic instructions, like a machine, because it is a machine
Its true that LLMs are deterministic. But do you really think that the magic behind the brain is only due to temperature and randomness? Do you really think that non-deterministic behavior is the magic ingredient that makes up what we are referring to as consciousness?
I could inject noise into an LLM at every parameter dynamically during inference. The output would come out just fine. After all, LLMs are high dimensional and can handle a little noise. Would it really be more conscious after that? You can find experiments where people remove entire layers of the LLM and it still works fine. A little noise would be even less harmful than that.
You see, when I'm arguing, I'm not citing what some other person said. I at most will cite experiments from other people and their results. When I am contradicting your arguments, I present you a reality you can go and try in the real world and verify. You can go verify yourself LLMs exhibit complex high-dimensional thought. You can verify yourself that if you inject noise dynamically through inference on every parameter, you still get coherent output from the LLM.
So, if you are willing to continue this discussion, I ask of you that you present some sort of "probing" of the real world and the respective "reaction" of the same real world as arguments. That is what finding the truth means.
And lastly. I am presenting a Theory. This means I believe that my points form a foundation that makes my theory stronger than yours. It means I have better evidence that backs it up. It doesn't mean I have proved what consciousness is. Instead, it primarily means I can make more accurate predictions using my theory on real world scenarios involving artificial and biological neural networks. And my personal experience shows me that is true.
The sentence "It is astoundingly easy to push an LLM over to collapse into ungrounded nonsense" makes me wonder.
How easy? What specific methods accomplish this? Are these methods fundamentally different from those that mislead humans?
How is this different from exploiting cognitive limitations in any reasoning system—whether a developing child's incomplete knowledge or an adult's reliance on heuristics?
How is it different from Fake News and adults taking Fake News for granted and replicating bullshit?
Complex output can sometimes give you the wrong idea, I agree. For instance, a study Anthropic did a while back showed that, when an LLM was asked HOW it performed a mathematical computation (35 + 59), the response the LLM gave was different from the mechanistic interpretation of the layers [1]. This showed LLMs can be deceptive. But they are also trained to be deceptive. Supervised fine tuning is imitation learning. This leads the model to learn to be deceptive, or answer what is usually the normal explanation, such as "I sum first 5+9, then add the remainder to... etc". The LLM does this rather than actually examining the past keys and values. But it does not mean it can't examine its past keys and values. These encode the intermediate results of each layer, and can be examined to identify patterns. What Anthropic researchers did was examine how the token for 35 and for 39 was fused together in the layers. They compare these tokens to other tokens, such as 3 , 5 , 9. For an LLM, tokens are high dimensional concepts. This is why you can compare the vectors to each other, and figure out the similarity, and therefore break down the thought process. Yes, this is exactly what I have been discussing above. Underneath each token prediction, this black magic is happening, where the model is fusing concepts through summation of the vectors (attention scores). Then, merged representations are parsed by the MLPs to generate the refined fused idea, often adding new knowledge stored inside the network. And this continues layer after layer. A repeated combination of concepts, that start with first understanding the structure and order of the language itself, and end with manipulation of complex mathematical concepts, almost detached from the original tokens themselves.
Even though complex output can be deceptive of the underlying mental model used to produce it, in my personal experience, LLMs have produced for me output that must imply extremely complex internal behaviour, with all the characteristics I mentioned before. Namely, I frequently program with LLMs, and there is simply zero percent probability that their output tokens exist WITHOUT first having thought at a very deep level about the unique problem I presented to them. And I think anyone that has used the models to the level I have, and interacted with them this extensively, knows that behind each token there is this black magic.
To summarize, I am not being naive by saying I believe everything my LLM says to me. I rather know very intimately where the LLM is deceiving me and when its producing output where its mental model must have been very advanced to do so. And this is through personal experience playing with this technology, both inference and training.
No, the burden of proof is on you to deliver. You are the claimant, you provide the proof. You made a drive-by assertion with no evidence or even arguments.
I also do not accept your assertion, at all. Humans largely function on the basis of desire-fulfilment, be that eating, fucking, seeking safety, gaining power, or any of the other myriad human activities. Our brains, and the brains of all the animals before us, have evolved for that purpose. For evidence, start with Skinner or the millions of behavioral analysis studies done in that field.
Our thoughts lend themselves to those activities. They arise from desire. Transformers have nothing to do with human cognition because they do not contain the basic chemical building blocks that precede and give rise to human cognition. They are, in fact, stochastic parrots, that can fool others, like yourself, into believing they are somehow thinking.
[1] Libet, B., Gleason, C. A., Wright, E. W., & Pearl, D. K. (1983). Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). Brain, 106(3), 623-642.
[2] Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H. J., & Haynes, J. D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11(5), 543-545.
[3] Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (2003). Parsing reward. Trends in Neurosciences, 26(9), 507-513. (This paper reviews the "wanting" vs. "liking" distinction, where unconscious "wanting" or desire is driven by dopamine).
[4] Kavanagh, D. J., Andrade, J., & May, J. (2005). Elaborated Intrusion theory of desire: a multi-component cognitive model of craving. British Journal of Health Psychology, 10(4), 515-532. (This model proposes that desires begin as unconscious "intrusions" that precede conscious thought and elaboration).
If anything, your citation 1, along with subsequent fMRI studies, backs up my point. We literally don't know what we're going to do next. Is that a hallmark of cognition in your book? The rest are simply irrelevant.
They are, in fact, stochastic parrots, that can fool others, like yourself, into believing they are somehow thinking.
What makes you think you're not arguing with one now?
You are not making an argument, you are just making assertions without evidence and then telling us the burden of proof is on us to tell you why not.
If you went walking down the streets yelling the world is run by a secret cabal of reptile-people without evidence, you would rightfully be declared insane.
Our feelings and desires largely determine the content of our thoughts and actions. LLMs do not function as such.
Whether I am arguing with a parrot or not has nothing to do with cognition. A parrot being able to usefully fool a human has nothing to do with cognition.
I've been talking so much shit on China over the years I decided I'd come over when the opportunity presented itself to visit. I'm in Shanghai and mostly it feels the same as any capitalist city except it's super clean. Everyone is shopping, living their lives. All of the Chinese I've interacted with are super pleasant. What really struck me was the decency and patience of the border control and security control folks coming over. In western countries I'd typically get exasperated annoyed calls to do this or that.
Anyway, it got me thinking that mostly the freedoms we are afforded, which are very precious to me, seem to come at great cost. A cost people under countries like China would rather bear when the affordances are clean streets, no or little homelessness and the freedom to consume luxury assets.
Every time I visit the US (frequently) I'm just assaulted by its continual, very visible rot. Cities like Seattle and Los Angeles are just fundamentally unsafe places to walk around in. The huge climb of school shootings over the last decade should have everyone alarmed. Americans appear to be stuck in the race to the bottom of who can be the greatest victim and the truly extreme painting of the Left or Right depending on which side you're on because people would rather obsess and come into conflict over what gender they can identify as or race guilt (or its opposite if you're a minority) rather than unite over common class struggles that are eating the country alive.
I think most people would rather pick comfort and safety over the freedom to say what you want and a right to privacy. I'm not sure I blame them when the alternative is getting sexually assaulted trying to walk to your car in LA (speaking from many many second-hand stories of American friends) or having your kid shot and killed in school.
It's a lot easier for China to limit the homeless problem in Shanghai when they have the hukou system to keep them out. But it is a shame that we have allowed failed progressive policies to wreck some of our cities.
I’ve lived in the USA, China (Beijing), a Switzerland (Lausanne), and I’m not sure what your point is. Guess the only place where riot police stormed my apartment because I wasn’t registered correctly?
There is much to love about authoritarian states. Clean, safe cities, and a suppression of news and other information to keep (naive) people comfortable. Draconian law and migration enforcement (eg, the hukou and propiska systems, and external borders) have their advantages, and looking at Singapore and Japan you don't necessarily need the rest.
Sorry, as a Dane, this weird conspiracy narrative that the US has us by the throats and is forcing us to push this legislation through is garbage.
Our government did this because they love control. A hard hand is what got us through COVID and it's been effective at curtailing a lot of the issues our neighbor to our north has faced with uncontrolled immigration of refugees. Our government has also been pushing through expansion of surveillance capabilities for our police, including predictive policing and expanded facial recognition.
Now kindly stop passing the buck and blame for us. This is on us, on Denmark. We are to blame.
I don't know what the answer is anymore as it seems all our democratic processes defending us from these erosions of our liberties have simply ceased to function.
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