The language that GPT generates is just a facade over statistics, mostly.

It's not clear that this analogy helps distinguish what humans do from what LLMs do at all.

Yes but a human being stuck behind a keyboard certainly has their thoughts reduced to language by necessity. The argument that an AI can’t be thinking because it’s producing language is just as silly, that’s the point

> The argument that an AI can’t be thinking because it’s producing language is just as silly

That is not the argument

I would be interested to know if ChatGPT would confirm that the flaw here is that the argument is a strawman.

Alright, that’s fine. Change it to:

You aren’t thinking, you are just “generating thoughts”.

The apparent “thought process” (e.g. chain of generated thoughts) is a post hoc observation, not a causal component.

However, to successfully function in the world, we have to play along with the illusion. Fortunately, that happens quite naturally :)

Thank you, a view of consciousness based in reality, not with a bleary-eyed religious or mystical outlook.

Something which oddly seems to be in shorter supply than I'd imagine in this forum.

There's lots of fingers-in-ears denial about what these models say about the (non special) nature of human cognition.

Odd when it seems like common sense, even pre-LLM, that our brains do some cool stuff, but it's all just probabilistic sparks following reinforcement too.

You are hand-waving just as much of not more than those you claim are in denial. What is a “probabilistic spark”? There seems to be something special in human cognition because it is clearly very different unless you think humans are organisms for which the laws of physics don’t apply.

By probabilistic spark I was referring to the firing of neurons in a network.

There "seems to be" something special? Maybe from the perspective of the sensing organ, yes.

However consider that an EEG can measure brain decision impulse before you're consciously aware of making a decision. You then retrospectively frame it as self awareness after the fact to make sense of cause and effect.

Human self awareness and consciousness is just an odd side effect of the fact you are the machine doing the thinking. It seems special to you. There's no evidence that it is, and in fact, given crows, dogs, dolphins and so on show similar (but diminished reasoning) while it may be true we have some unique capability ... unless you want to define "special" I'm going to read "mystical" where you said "special".

You over eager fuzzy pattern seeker you.

But what’s going on inside an LLM neural network isn’t ‘language’ - it is ‘language ingestion, processing and generation’. It’s happening in the form of a bunch of floating point numbers, not mechanical operations on tokens.

Who’s to say that in among that processing, there isn’t also ‘reasoning’ or ‘thinking’ going on. Over the top of which the output language is just a façade?

To me, all I know of you is words on the screen, which is the point the parent comment was making. How do we know that we’re both humans when the only means we have to communicate thoughts with each other is through written words?

It would be only a matter of time before a non-human would be found out for not understanding how to relate to a human fact-of-life.

Doesn't that happen all the time with actual humans?

That doesn't mean anything. If I'm judging if you or GPT-4 is more sentient, why would I choose you?