Doesn’t the concept of a subconscious, or inner voice, invalidate any tight analogies to Turing Machines? What logical process is putting the Fur Elise into my head (earworms etc)
I think this article is right that definitions really matter here cause one could argue “CTM is trivial, because we can describe almost any physical system as executing computations.” So we have a dual problem here—not just the difficult discussion of ‘what’s going on in minds’, but also ‘what is computation’.
Just as the amplitudes program suggests that spacetime itself may be an emergent structure rather than the fundamental substrate of reality [1], the computational theory of mind may be mistaking an emergent representation for the source of consciousness. A more fundamental theory must therefore treat neural computation as an emergent interface within conscious-agent relations, rather than as the mechanism that generates consciousness.
Even the loosest, "multiply realizable" version of computationalism this entry lays out still needs something physical to run on like neurons, silicon, spacetime, whatever. Problem is, natural selection was never selecting for accurate perception of that substrate, just for fitness payoffs [2].
So computationalism has the order backwards: you can't generate a mind by computing over a brain when the brain, like any object in spacetime, is just a species-specific icon evolution gave you to see, not the hardware underneath it.
I can prove things are the way they are outside my mind's perception of them, through the use of extra sensory devices.
Even in a Donald Hoffman esque icon:hardware situation - and I think he said - "I don't take the icon literally, but I do take it seriously" meaning that even though it's an illusion, it still performs the function, I have trouble with mind preceding matter.
It's the same trouble I have with human-like intelligence preceding worlds.
People come out of worlds, not the other way around.
This was the core premise behind my research during grad school and beyond. My favorite project — which ultimately became my dissertation — was a proposal to connect reinforcement learning algorithms, neuronal data, psychological behavior, and phenomenology. Specifically, the idea was the feeling of cognitive fatigue is a mathematical signal to ‘rest’, in which the value of rest is defined by offline mechanisms that contribute to decision-making. I proposed a connection to hippocampal replay, and was able to leverage fMRI and choice data to evaluate the hypothesis.
Zooming out of my specific work, the “best” success stories were connections across math/CS, neuro, and psych and the golden child is the dopamine model of reinforcement learning where firing patterns encode the TD prediction error
I believe machines could be made that think. But not purely digital ones. The brain most certainly isn’t a thinking machine precisely because it doesn’t have the luxury of unlimited time. Its design is not based on executing best algorithms, but rather finding good enough solutions among many time constrained but interlinked signal cascades.
The brain and body instead construct time, a cohesive internal one,from the ground up, with nesting oscillators driving the sequence of all functions and behaviors, over long and short time closes.
What we call “thinking” is a filtered layer of it, a slice that the attention spotlight is focussed on, and in humans this process can be turned to cognition over multilayered abstractions, and using language or other symbolic communications to communicate some of the dynamics of this process, and even evoke them in others.
Turing machines, and modern digital computers with their Von Neumann bottleneck, and LLMs are outside of time. They do not experience time. They can check the clock. They can count steps. But they are not active and agentic in time. Till we change that we won’t make
machines that “think”. We can certainly make machines that simulate thinking, and that’s often good enough. But make the problem a real time one, with several conflicting verbal streams to parse and respond to serially and LLMs on their own fail catastrophically.
I think so long as the memory-processing divide remains, the simulation has to break apart processes for thinking in a way that’s alright for some cases, but not for others. And this is why we have the jaggedness of LLM intelligence I believe. They do not have internal timekeeping like almost all biological agents do.
I'm probably way off the mark here, but my instinct tells me there's nothing intrinsic about the human condition that makes it the exclusive vessel of thought.
It is theoretically possible, after all, to simulate a human brain at a subatomic level. Sure, the complexity is absurd and interface required to measure it seems far fetched, but technically there's no restriction.
Because of this I believe what we know as "thought" or consciousness exists in the space between the physical world. It's just a way to represent the world around us, with the ability to reference the past and systems to predict the future.
LLMs to me are like a simplified version thats stretched across the domain of active memory. The "thought" process is the same, an active state (current token) guided by the past state (previous tokens).
I think the next step is to reduce what a token is. Right now they are vectors that are linked to words. If instead of words we fed it direct video and audio, and a way to translate the raw data into something resembling the information passed from our eyes and ears in real time, and train it like a child learns from its parents, it's hard to draw the line on where thought begins.
It's an interesting experiment, but I still consider it anti-human.
In the future, when we have "robot" rights for robots that identify as humans, you'll find me on the side of "they aren't a real human". We'll be called bigots, and I'm okay with that.
This is basically Christian apologetics. We've collectively thought we were special for so long that must now go through increasingly complex mental gymnastics to prove to ourselves that we are somehow uniquely sentient, despite increasing evidence to the contrary.
>Its design is not based on executing best algorithms, but rather finding good enough solutions among many time constrained but interlinked signal cascades.
That's known as optimization algorithm, and genetic algorithm is known to produce good enough results fast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna
Computers are time constrained too and cut such corners just like humans.
> They do not experience time. They can check the clock.
Humans experience time because they check biological clock. And sometimes humans forget about time just fine, when they don't check the clock.
Any reasonable definition of "thinking" includes what LLMs do. One would have to craft a rather arbitrary and tortured definition of "thinking" to include human thinking but exclude LLM thinking.
omg welcome philosophers trying to be noticed by frontier labs, lets see if you can set everyone straight (I point to Einstein deliberately looking to philosophy (Spinozian & Machian) to guide his views - and he did all right.)
For those interested in topic, our book Journey of the Mind would be a great introduction from a systems-thinking perspective. As you'll see on goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t... the reaction tends to be a bit bimodal, so at least some of you will find it absolutely fascinating.
We go from the simplest possible model of a mind (a single sensor and doer coupled together,separate from the world around them)to consciousness and beyond.
I am quoting a couple because I find it fascinating how readers have such widely differing reactions. (JoM actually does have an explanation for this: we are each a unique bundle of experiences cohering into an identity and a perspective)
"This book is both dense with biology and science as well as equally dense with a holistic philosophy that will genuinely shift your perspective on your place as a human, person and animal."
"Written in a cutesy, "fellow kids" tone that feels less like a serious exploration of the mind and more like someone trying to pander to what they imagine zoomers want. The style makes it almost unreadable and wastes your time. "
"We are all neurons in a (currently diseased) supermind. We are not just ourselves but collectively a Self, made of past and present (and artificial) intelligence. Collectively, a God that dictates the fate of other neurons, life forms, and ultimately, the universe at its whim. Without a doubt, this is one of the best books I have ever read."
21 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 23.5 ms ] threadI think this article is right that definitions really matter here cause one could argue “CTM is trivial, because we can describe almost any physical system as executing computations.” So we have a dual problem here—not just the difficult discussion of ‘what’s going on in minds’, but also ‘what is computation’.
Even the loosest, "multiply realizable" version of computationalism this entry lays out still needs something physical to run on like neurons, silicon, spacetime, whatever. Problem is, natural selection was never selecting for accurate perception of that substrate, just for fitness payoffs [2].
So computationalism has the order backwards: you can't generate a mind by computing over a brain when the brain, like any object in spacetime, is just a species-specific icon evolution gave you to see, not the hardware underneath it.
[1] https://vod.video.cornell.edu/media/1_sfv907qp
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4060643
Even in a Donald Hoffman esque icon:hardware situation - and I think he said - "I don't take the icon literally, but I do take it seriously" meaning that even though it's an illusion, it still performs the function, I have trouble with mind preceding matter.
It's the same trouble I have with human-like intelligence preceding worlds.
People come out of worlds, not the other way around.
Zooming out of my specific work, the “best” success stories were connections across math/CS, neuro, and psych and the golden child is the dopamine model of reinforcement learning where firing patterns encode the TD prediction error
The brain and body instead construct time, a cohesive internal one,from the ground up, with nesting oscillators driving the sequence of all functions and behaviors, over long and short time closes.
What we call “thinking” is a filtered layer of it, a slice that the attention spotlight is focussed on, and in humans this process can be turned to cognition over multilayered abstractions, and using language or other symbolic communications to communicate some of the dynamics of this process, and even evoke them in others.
Turing machines, and modern digital computers with their Von Neumann bottleneck, and LLMs are outside of time. They do not experience time. They can check the clock. They can count steps. But they are not active and agentic in time. Till we change that we won’t make machines that “think”. We can certainly make machines that simulate thinking, and that’s often good enough. But make the problem a real time one, with several conflicting verbal streams to parse and respond to serially and LLMs on their own fail catastrophically.
I think so long as the memory-processing divide remains, the simulation has to break apart processes for thinking in a way that’s alright for some cases, but not for others. And this is why we have the jaggedness of LLM intelligence I believe. They do not have internal timekeeping like almost all biological agents do.
It is theoretically possible, after all, to simulate a human brain at a subatomic level. Sure, the complexity is absurd and interface required to measure it seems far fetched, but technically there's no restriction.
Because of this I believe what we know as "thought" or consciousness exists in the space between the physical world. It's just a way to represent the world around us, with the ability to reference the past and systems to predict the future.
LLMs to me are like a simplified version thats stretched across the domain of active memory. The "thought" process is the same, an active state (current token) guided by the past state (previous tokens).
I think the next step is to reduce what a token is. Right now they are vectors that are linked to words. If instead of words we fed it direct video and audio, and a way to translate the raw data into something resembling the information passed from our eyes and ears in real time, and train it like a child learns from its parents, it's hard to draw the line on where thought begins.
It's an interesting experiment, but I still consider it anti-human.
In the future, when we have "robot" rights for robots that identify as humans, you'll find me on the side of "they aren't a real human". We'll be called bigots, and I'm okay with that.
That's known as optimization algorithm, and genetic algorithm is known to produce good enough results fast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna Computers are time constrained too and cut such corners just like humans.
> They do not experience time. They can check the clock.
Humans experience time because they check biological clock. And sometimes humans forget about time just fine, when they don't check the clock.
Any reasonable definition of "thinking" includes what LLMs do. One would have to craft a rather arbitrary and tortured definition of "thinking" to include human thinking but exclude LLM thinking.
https://creatingintelligence.org
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fplato.stanford.edu%2...
1. instantaneous and faithful, at the cost of depending upon substrate-specific persistence parameters;
2. faithful and substrate-neutral, at the cost of requiring historical information;
3. instantaneous and substrate-neutral, at the cost of losing faithfulness.
No implementation map can satisfy all three simultaneously.
https://philarchive.org/rec/GIOTIT
Then execute it as a program.
For those interested in topic, our book Journey of the Mind would be a great introduction from a systems-thinking perspective. As you'll see on goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t... the reaction tends to be a bit bimodal, so at least some of you will find it absolutely fascinating.
We go from the simplest possible model of a mind (a single sensor and doer coupled together,separate from the world around them)to consciousness and beyond.
I am quoting a couple because I find it fascinating how readers have such widely differing reactions. (JoM actually does have an explanation for this: we are each a unique bundle of experiences cohering into an identity and a perspective)
"This book is both dense with biology and science as well as equally dense with a holistic philosophy that will genuinely shift your perspective on your place as a human, person and animal."
"Written in a cutesy, "fellow kids" tone that feels less like a serious exploration of the mind and more like someone trying to pander to what they imagine zoomers want. The style makes it almost unreadable and wastes your time. "
"We are all neurons in a (currently diseased) supermind. We are not just ourselves but collectively a Self, made of past and present (and artificial) intelligence. Collectively, a God that dictates the fate of other neurons, life forms, and ultimately, the universe at its whim. Without a doubt, this is one of the best books I have ever read."