> Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect.

https://scentofdawn.blogspot.com/2011/07/before-soul-dawn-he...

Is there a correct way to cognize? And although he feels cognizing works in a very specific direction, his brain is basically doing a very similar guessing game on a deep level with training of pathways that started at birth. Basing the argument in a feeling about consciousness is not convincing.

The author thinks they are describing a unique human magic, forgetting Augustine's insight that human thought doesn't precede the word, but is brought into consciousness by it.

There are reams of grown up scientific research and philosophy on the relationship between language, thought, neurobiology, and inference. It's nice to hear how one person feels they think, but there is no weight to it if they don't know page one of the syllabus.

And Islam the first verse was ‘read’

The first time I heard about emergent behavior in llms I thought about that.

Maybe thought is too much because I don’t have anything coherent in mind but it feels so captivating like the premise of sci-fi story.

For instance, you can dream words.

[1] https://youtu.be/gQddtTdmG_8 (around 14:00)

I see the temporal disconnected strong here. The author is young-ish, and appears to be exploring ideas of many that have come before him. And, that he'll likely continue to explore on his journey. You can see his thoughts and see echos of long debated thoughts about consciousness, language, meaning, bottom-Up/top-down processing, not being our thoughts, etc..

Thanks to those who are leaving their knowledge, book references, quotes, and etc., to help myself and others who are somewhere along the continuum of understanding ourselves more thoroughly!

In (at least once school of) Tibetan Buddhist meditation you observe the part of the mind that is producing ideas, and then suppress it in order to explore deeper layers of consciousness. The "lights on" "you" that is observing is _not_ the idea producing part of the mind, which to me at least seems to be more mechanical.

I do agree with the author of course that a concept isn't necessarily wrapped with language from the start, and can be a skin; but equally it is possible to think in a verbal mode.

LLMs don’t need to think, they just need to be a more efficient data retrieval system than what already exists (and what has already been sold to the highest bidder). With LLMs, I’ve find I’ve started reaching the corners of the internet, where the true lovers of knowledge are doing the work they have always been doing. Quality does eventually speak for itself, at least once we’re able to strip away the marketing (you mentioned Apple, do you believe they are truly a cut above, or is it just hype?)

If LLMs can filter the noise, build it and they will come might return as a valid way to be.

In "Notes on the Synthesis of Form", Christopher Alexander talks about how we can know something is wrong even when we do not know how to make something right. He was talking about this I think

=z==

as opposed to

+|+|+

or

+|+|+|

I happened upon the word "entanglement" and it seems an interesting alternative to the order that is inherent in words.

Our language is all about Actor-verb-object. Entanglement provides a fundamentally different concept. I cannot say "I drove my car on the road" with entanglement. Or at least with entanglement I can say something equally valid like "the road moved my car with me inside."

And entanglement works for the + and | things, at least for me. There is some kind of entanglement (degree) that creates a gestalt.

At least that is the best I can come up with.

"Let me rephrase these last couple of sentences without using the slightly technical term "isomorphism". When a system of "meaningless" symbols has patterns in it that accurately track, or mirror, various phenomena in the world, then that tracking or mirroring imbues the symbols with some degree of meaning - indeed, such tracking or mirroring is no less and no more than what meaning is. Depending on how complex and subtle and reliable the tracking is, different degrees of meaningfulness arise." - P-3

EDIT: I initially wrote "G.E.B." instead of "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" which was too cryptic.

How many of us would independently reinvent language with specific tenses, the diatonic scale, the number zero, perspective drawing, geometry, calculus, atomic theory, quantum mechanics etc. if left on our own from childhood?

So to me, the question becomes, can human language encode the sum of all human thought? The answer might be no. But it might be good enough to get close.

Have the last-generation LLM pre-screen new training data for the next generation LLM.

Writing is a shadow of thought. The better the writing, the more clearly the shadow represents the shape of the original thought. Even the best writing can never perfectly capture the original thought. Writing is one of the best tools we have to share thoughts across space and time.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about context and whether an LLM actually creates a true representation of a concept within its vectors. And for our current usage of LLMs, does it even matter? As models become so large, will the difference even be perceivable to us?

I am actually using LLMs to perform controlled experiments to determine if the opposite is true, and that consciousness is a byproduct of language as Jaynes might have agreed.

After this I can't take the essay seriously- this sort of blanket statement about the one true hierarchy of consciousness and knowledge is BS.

While it seems to have been disproven that words in other languages cause people to speak and think differently, that also doesn't mean that words don't have any effect on the way we think, or that the concept of a word always has to come before the word itself.

The reason why we experience the uncanny valley of LLMs is because they don't represent a true consciousness, BUT it's also clear that the architecture represents certain qualities of consciousness- as the models have scaled we can see that it has some other non-word related understanding.

The evidence points to consciousness as a set of interlocking systems- attention, long term memory, short term memory, emotions, etc.

No!! This is misinformation.

An LLM predicts the next words (tokens) based on the words before it *and* on the internal representations it has learned from training.

Processing language can lead to internal representations that capture patterns and relationships; LLMs can exhibit emergent abilities, including reasoning-like (stress on "-like") behavior, even when they weren't explicitly trained for that.

Making reductionist claims about LLMs, based on next-word prediction, is similar to making such claims about biology, based on amino acids.

Computers didn't "figure out the maths". People did the math, the computers did the calculations.

Human knowledge is nowhere complete, it's silly to think so, and by extension it's silly to think the LLM's have anything near a complete knowledge set.

They don't even have access to all of current human knowledge, much less so future knowledge. A lot of text and information is locked away from the public internet and the internet altogether.

Not all types of useful ideas for applications have been invented, that's ridiculous, there are plenty of ideas that people haven't had yet. There are however a massive amount of shitty copies of the same shitty ideas.

  Did I not, then, as I grew out of infancy, come next to boyhood, or rather did it not come to me and succeed my infancy? My infancy did not go away (for where would it go?). It was simply no longer present; and I was no longer an infant who could not speak, but now a chattering boy. I remember this, and I have since observed how I learned to speak. My elders did not teach me words by rote, as they taught me my letters afterward. But I myself, when I was unable to communicate all I wished to say to whomever I wished by means of whimperings and grunts and various gestures of my limbs (which I used to reinforce my demands), I myself repeated the sounds already stored in my memory by the mind which thou, O my God, hadst given me. When they called some thing by name and pointed it out while they spoke, I saw it and realized that the thing they wished to indicate was called by the name they then uttered. And what they meant was made plain by the gestures of their bodies, by a kind of natural language, common to all nations, which expresses itself through changes of countenance, glances of the eye, gestures and intonations which indicate a disposition and attitude--either to seek or to possess, to reject or to avoid. So it was that by frequently hearing words, in different phrases, I gradually identified the objects which the words stood for and, having formed my mouth to repeat these signs, I was thereby able to express my will. Thus I exchanged with those about me the verbal signs by which we express our wishes and advanced deeper into the stormy fellowship of human life, depending all the while upon the authority of my parents and the behest of my elders.

When you speak, what comes first, the idea or the word? Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it? I think we all do. The word is never the start. The word is just the skin. The idea, the consciousness, is the thing sitting under it.

Nope. Concepts, feelings and ideas do not exist independent of expression (words, sounds, responses). Humans have the same process as LlMs have. And that's precisely why LMs are able to succeed. Similar to how camera works based on the working of an eye, or how aeroplane works based on a birds wing.

If you still believe that concepts exist independently, imagine a creature that can't express, make sounds, or respond with actions. What exactly is a "concept or feeling" to such creature? Do trees have concepts and feelings? Infact trees could, because they can respond to stimulants.

If you can't describe or perceive a thing, that thing doesn't exist in your world. It's that simple.

What you are describing as "translating thoughts into words" is actually, refining your expression. The expression already exists at the same time as the thought.

Let's take a feral human, do they achieve the same with language powered humans? No, obviously. It means language does something we can't replace with "consciousness". Maybe something life preserving, putting consciousness downstream of language use.

But more generally - how can 8B humans make a living on this planet? Not without language, that is for sure! We long passed the stage where we could exist without language at our consumption rate. We can't even exist without math, population collapse would be the outcome.

Minds are downstream from language & math. For example, is music downstream of piano or piano downstream of music? I think you can't cut this cleanly. They developed in relation to the other, recursion between tool and art form is already old.

"An LLM predicts the next word based on all the words before it. That is the whole story. There is no idea sitting underneath. The words are everything."

This is just flat out wrong.

Words are used as training data, to build a system of vector embeddings. The LLM contains no words. That was the training data long discarded.

Vector embeddings are groupings of meanings derived from the relationship between the words in its training data. This entire system is modelled after human neural mechanisms in a way that machines can emulate.

"But your brain works the other way around. First there is a concept, a feeling, an image, and then the words come out to describe it. (At least, this is how I feel my own brain working.) For us, words are the byproduct of consciousness."

It's working the same way around (you are not saying Ai has consciousness that is derived from words!). And you make a huge jump from the concept that 'words come from concepts' to 'words are the byproduct of consciousness'. Because 'concepts' are not equal to 'consciousness'.

In fact you do not define consciousness at all, making it hard to determine what argument you are actually making at all. You seem to think humans have this trait of 'consciousness' but can't explain or evidence it beyond 'feeling it'.

Consciousness it defined by many as the ability to experience events and process thoughts or qualia. It's hard to test this, and we can see why that is with an AI - it may claim to be conscious, or even claim not to be, but how can we trust either answer? Philosophers aren't even sure to trust another human who claims to be conscious, and we struggle constantly to determine at what point creatures the animal kingdom are conscious or not. Cats? Lobsters? Snails? or even across the plants?

Before you can refute the consciousness of AI, first establish the consciousness of humans. A better question to ask is what does the uncanny emergent ability of an AI to mimic a human say about consciousness?

I don't think that's right. What makes LLMs (and other forms of "AI") work is the very fact that they hold a statistical model underneath and put words on top of it. That statistical model, at least to me, appears to be somewhat akin to what a human would call a "concept".

Like a stable diffusion model has a statistical model of what a "chair" is. Not one exact chair, but all chairs. They all have backs, 4 legs, a flat area to sit on. It can then carve an image of a chair out of noise using this concept. Take a music model like Suno as another example. If you tell it to make a rock song, it has a statistical idea of what this would looks like. The harmonic progression, the tempo, the types of instruments used. It then attaches sounds to this statistical model and you get a "song". LLMs also appear to do this. If you ask it for a paragraph of a specific flavor of prose, it has that as a statistical model, and it attaches words to it.

I am not a big believer in LLMs delivering on even half the hype they've generated. However, this very idea of human concepts vs AI's statistical models is the one thing makes me wonder, sometimes, if they're on the right track, even if we are a long way off from AGI. It's kind of funny that the author of the above article landed on the opposite conclusion.

Most people don't actively think when they are talking or writing most of the time. Only during period of thinking that we do think. Most of the time, we just talk words. There is evidence is that we just observe ourselves talking and that the thinking itself is not conscious but it's still a theory.

> Now ask the same question about an LLM. For an LLM, it is exactly the opposite.

No one has any idea how an LLM come to correct words. LLMs produce numbers (tokens) that end up to coherent words.

> So what is an LLM, really? At its core, it is a big pile of words that predicts the next word, using some maths the computers figured out.

No, not really.

> The words are everything. For an LLM, words are the source, and any meaning is just a byproduct that falls out by accident.

The author provides no proof for this and there are very good reasons to think that LLMs have inherent thinking.

The rest of the article was just some random thoughts the OP jotted down? I just don't see their coherence to the beginning of the article.

You can perhaps have a consciousness without words, but not without language.

If you don't believe me, learn how to meditate, meditate for literally just 10 minutes, and come back to me.