Connectionists: Can LLMs think?

Tue Mar 21 15:43:56 EDT 2023

The thing that I'm most interested in is how the human works. I believe it is possible to build an equivalent machine but we have not yet achieved that, mainly because we still have a ways to go in neuroscience. If what we've built so far turns out to resemble the human mind in structure, it is by accident.

One approach to AI is as a testbed for theories about how the human mind works. Few people share this view with me. Certainly in the present, driven by the funding sources, there is much more focus on applications. Will it sell more ads? Recognize more faces (or cats)? Etc.

The human mind is not the highest or only measure of "intelligence". There are certainly non-human or superhuman capabilities that we can give artificial agents. And someday when we do fully understand the human mind, we will be able to exceed it by applying a few tweaks to the model.

The human mind is, well, a mind-boggling mystery. A real scientific understanding would revolutionize philosophy, religion, and perhaps even how we live our lives and treat each other.

It is fascinating that something so cut and dried as a mathematical model, fed by an enormous amount of data, can force us to question basic notions about ourselves. This thing we call thinking, is it unique to us? Is it even real? Can something non-human (animal or artifact) have an internal mental life?

I suspect one thing that makes the scientific understanding of human mind difficult is the prior assumptions and cognitive biases we bring to the task. For example, that language (symbolic processing) is the core of intelligence. Or that everything is a hierarchy. Or that humans have some secret sauce distinct from other animals and machines.

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From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> on behalf of Ingo Bojak <i.bojak at reading.ac.uk>
Sent: Monday, March 20, 2023 8:04 AM
To: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu <connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Connectionists: Can LLMs think?

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Hi all,

I think an important point here is that one should not play a simplistic “subtraction game” concerning human intelligence.

To give an analogy: Animals eat. Humans eat. Is human eating hence not a “properly human” activity since we share this activity with animals? No. There is no equivalent to say “fine dining” in the animal kingdom. Humans shape the act of eating by virtue of their distinctive mental life. Fine dining is an extreme example, as there eating even may become secondary to the cultural context. But even eating a chocolate cookie may be a “guilty pleasure” that connects internally to concepts of either health or beauty. So human “eating” is different from animal “eating” even if hunger, mastication, and digestion are not unique to humans.

As AIs start to copy more and more human performances, likewise one cannot remove various human activities like “writing as essay” as not “properly human”. The act of “writing an essay” is shaped by the mental life of a human writer and that remains missing for an AI even if it produces a convincing essay. We know this because we have constructed the AI.

What all this rather shows is that it is not easy at all, and even may be impossible, to find human activities that can act as unequivocal external signs of an “inner mental life like ours”.

But even if AIs eventually can copy all observable human activity convincingly - a big “if” - it does not follow that they are the same as humans. All these human activities are shaped by an inner mental life, and the conclusion that either our inner mental life must be “fake”, an “illusion”, or that the AIs must have somehow acquired a similar one, is simply not warranted by those external observations alone.

Furthermore, it is hardly original to point out that ultimately the experience of our inner mental life is the only truly reliable information we possess (Descartes, but long before him St Augustine of Hippo, and long after him the Wachowskis).

The Turing test does not provide a touchstone for sapience / human-ness. It is rather a measure of our own ability to detect this status, i.e., it is just a version of CAPTCHA we like to play. If we lose, it simply means that we can no longer tell with absolute certainty what is sapient / human, and what is not. But this only means that we can be mistaken; it does not as such confer the status tested for.

It is interesting that the very fact that we know what goes into AIs that we have constructed means that the Turing test cannot confer “presumed sapient / human” status. We simply know better... Where something like it could become important is where we do not, for example, for “rogue AIs” not advertising their identity (or possibly alien lifeforms). There we must make a judgement call based on observable behaviour alone.

Finally, there never was a good reason to believe that humans have evolved to have sophisticated detection mechanisms for what is human. They never needed to. Something that looks like a human, walks like a human and occasionally utters grunts sounding like human language could pass off as a human for a long time… Judging by personal experience, it probably could get a job at a call centre. The Turing test always has been a somewhat academic exercise.

Best,

Ingo

From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu> On Behalf Of Thomas Nowotny
Sent: 20 March 2023 09:48
To: Gary Marcus <gary.marcus at nyu.edu>; Paul Cisek <paul.cisek at umontreal.ca>
Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Connectionists: Can LLMs think?

Hi Paul and Gary,

I think I am firmly in your camp & well summarised. However, there is this nagging doubt about how much of the human intelligence we attribute to each other and ourselves are the same “little strings and hidden compartments” and “how we just redirected the audience’s attention” that undoubtedly underlie LLMs abilities.

Best,

Thomas Nowotny

From: Connectionists <connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>> On Behalf Of Gary Marcus
Sent: 20 March 2023 08:01
To: Paul Cisek <paul.cisek at umontreal.ca<mailto:paul.cisek at umontreal.ca>>
Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: Connectionists: Can LLMs think?

bravo!

On Mar 20, 2023, at 07:55, Paul Cisek <paul.cisek at umontreal.ca<mailto:paul.cisek at umontreal.ca>> wrote:

I must say that I’m somewhat dismayed when I read these kinds of discussions, here or elsewhere. Sure, it’s understandable that many people are fooled into thinking that LLMs are intelligent, just like many people were fooled by Eliza and Eugene Goostman. Humans are predisposed into ascribing intention and purpose to events in the world, which helped them construct complex societies by (often correctly) interpreting the actions of other people around them. But this same predisposition also led them to believe that the volcano was angry when it erupted because they did something to offend the gods. Given how susceptible humans are to this false ascription of agency, it is not surprising that they get fooled when something acts in a complex way.

But (most of) the people on this list know what’s under the hood! We know that LLMs are very good at pattern matching and completion, we know about the universal approximation theorem, we know that there is a lot of structure in the pattern of human-written text, and we know that humans are predisposed to ascribe meaning and intention even where there are none. We should therefore not be surprised that LLMs can produce text patterns that generalize well within-distribution but not so well out-of-distribution, and that when the former happens, people may be fooled into thinking they are speaking with a thinking being. Again, they were fooled by Eliza, and Eugene Goostman, and the Heider-Simmel illusion (ascribing emotion to animated triangles and circles)… and the rumblings of volcanos. But we know how LLMs and volcanos do what they do, and can explain their behavior without any additional assumptions (of thinking, or sentience, or whatever). So why add them?

In a sense, we are like a bunch of professional magicians, who know where all of the little strings and hidden compartments are, and who know how we just redirected the audience’s attention to slip the card into our pocket… but then we are standing around backstage wondering: “Maybe there really is magic?”

I think it’s not that machines have passed the Turing Test, but rather that we failed it.

Paul Cisek

From: Rothganger, Fredrick <frothga at sandia.gov<mailto:frothga at sandia.gov>>
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2023 11:39 AM
To: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu<mailto:connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Connectionists: Can LLMs think?

Noting the examples that have come up on this list over the last week, it's interesting that it takes some of the most brilliant AI researchers in the world to devise questions that break LLMs. Chatbots have always been able to fool some people some of the time, ever since ELIZA. But we now have systems that can fool a lot of people a lot of the time, and even the occasional expert who loses their perspective and comes to believe the system is sentient. LLMs have either already passed the classic Turning test, or are about to in the next generation.

What does that mean exactly? Turing's expectation was that "the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted". The ongoing discussion here is an indication that we are approaching that threshold. For the average person, we've probably already passed it.

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