Fwd: what chatGPT is and is not

[Brent Meeker]

On 5/23/2023 6:33 AM, Terren Suydam wrote:

On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 7:09 AM Jason Resch <jason...@gmail.com> wrote:

As I see this thread, Terren and Stathis are both talking past each other. Please either of you correct me if i am wrong, but in an effort to clarify and perhaps resolve this situation:

I believe Stathis is saying the functional substitution having the same fine-grained causal organization *would* have the same phenomenology, the same experience, and the same qualia as the brain with the same fine-grained causal organization.

Therefore, there is no disagreement between your positions with regards to symbols groundings, mappings, etc.

When you both discuss the problem of symbology, or bits, etc. I believe this is partly responsible for why you are both talking past each other, because there are many levels involved in brains (and computational systems). I believe you were discussing completely different levels in the hierarchical organization.

There are high-level parts of minds, such as ideas, thoughts, feelings, quale, etc. and there are low-level, be they neurons, neurotransmitters, atoms, quantum fields, and laws of physics as in human brains, or circuits, logic gates, bits, and instructions as in computers.

I think when Terren mentions a "symbol for the smell of grandmother's kitchen" (GMK) the trouble is we are crossing a myriad of levels. The quale or idea or memory of the smell of GMK is a very high-level feature of a mind. When Terren asks for or discusses a symbol for it, a complete answer/description for it can only be supplied in terms of a vast amount of information concerning low level structures, be they patterns of neuron firings, or patterns of bits being processed. When we consider things down at this low level, however, we lose all context for what the meaning, idea, and quale are or where or how they come in. We cannot see or find the idea of GMK in any neuron, no more than we can see or find it in any neuron.

Of course then it should seem deeply mysterious, if not impossible, how we get "it" (GMK or otherwise) from "bit", but to me, this is no greater a leap from how we get "it" from a bunch of cells squirting ions back and forth. Trying to understand a smartphone by looking at the flows of electrons is a similar kind of problem, it would seem just as difficult or impossible to explain and understand the high-level features and complexity out of the low-level simplicity.

This is why it's crucial to bear in mind and explicitly discuss the level one is operation on when one discusses symbols, substrates, or quale. In summary, I think a chief reason you have been talking past each other is because you are each operating on different assumed levels.

Please correct me if you believe I am mistaken and know I only offer my perspective in the hope it might help the conversation.

I appreciate the callout, but it is necessary to talk at both the micro and the macro for this discussion. We're talking about symbol grounding. I should make it clear that I don't believe symbols can be grounded in other symbols (i.e. symbols all the way down as Stathis put it), that leads to infinite regress and the illusion of meaning.  Symbols ultimately must stand for something. The only thing they can stand for, ultimately, is something that cannot be communicated by other symbols: conscious experience. There is no concept in our brains that is not ultimately connected to something we've seen, heard, felt, smelled, or tasted.

Right.  That's why children learn words by ostensive definition.  You point to a stop sign and say "red".  You point to their foot and say "foot".  The amazing thing is how a child learns this so easily and doesn't think "red" means octagon or "foot" means toes.  I think we have evolution to thank for this.

I personally think consciousness is waaay over rated.  Most thinking, even abstruse thinking like mathematical proofs are subconscious (c.f. Poincare' effect).  I think consciousness is an effect of language; an internalization of communication with others (c.f. Julian Jaynes),

Brent

In my experience with conversations like this, you usually have people on one side who take consciousness seriously as the only thing that is actually undeniable, and you have people who'd rather not talk about it, hand-wave it away, or outright deny it. That's the talking-past that usually happens, and that's what's happening here.

Terren

 

Jason 

On Tue, May 23, 2023, 2:47 AM Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 15:58, Terren Suydam <terren...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 12:32 AM Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 14:23, Terren Suydam <terren...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 12:14 AM Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 13:37, Terren Suydam <terren...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 11:13 PM Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 10:48, Terren Suydam <terren...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 8:42 PM Stathis Papaioannou <stat...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 23 May 2023 at 10:03, Terren Suydam <terren...@gmail.com> wrote:

it is true that my brain has been trained on a large amount of data - data that contains intelligence outside of my own. But when I introspect, I notice that my understanding of things is ultimately rooted/grounded in my phenomenal experience. Ultimately, everything we know, we know either by our experience, or by analogy to experiences we've had. This is in opposition to how LLMs train on data, which is strictly about how words/symbols relate to one another.

The functionalist position is that phenomenal experience supervenes on behaviour, such that if the behaviour is replicated (same output for same input) the phenomenal experience will also be replicated. This is what philosophers like Searle (and many laypeople) can’t stomach.

I think the kind of phenomenal supervenience you're talking about is typically asserted for behavior at the level of the neuron, not the level of the whole agent. Is that what you're saying?  That chatGPT must be having a phenomenal experience if it talks like a human?   If so, that is stretching the explanatory domain of functionalism past its breaking point.

The best justification for functionalism is David Chalmers' "Fading Qualia" argument. The paper considers replacing neurons with functionally equivalent silicon chips, but it could be generalised to replacing any part of the brain with a functionally equivalent black box, the whole brain, the whole person.

You're saying that an algorithm that provably does not have experiences of rabbits and lollipops - but can still talk about them in a way that's indistinguishable from a human - essentially has the same phenomenology as a human talking about rabbits and lollipops. That's just absurd on its face. You're essentially hand-waving away the grounding problem. Is that your position? That symbols don't need to be grounded in any sort of phenomenal experience?

It's not just talking about them in a way that is indistinguishable from a human, in order to have human-like consciousness the entire I/O behaviour of the human would need to be replicated. But in principle, I don't see why a LLM could not have some other type of phenomenal experience. And I don't think the grounding problem is a problem: I was never grounded in anything, I just grew up associating one symbol with another symbol, it's symbols all the way down.

Is the smell of your grandmother's kitchen a symbol?

Yes, I can't pull away the facade to check that there was a real grandmother and a real kitchen against which I can check that the sense data matches.

The ground problem is about associating symbols with a phenomenal experience, or the memory of one - which is not the same thing as the functional equivalent or the neural correlate. It's the feeling, what it's like to experience the thing the symbol stands for. The experience of redness. The shock of plunging into cold water. The smell of coffee. etc.

Take a migraine headache - if that's just a symbol, then why does that symbol feel bad while others feel good?  Why does any symbol feel like anything? If you say evolution did it, that doesn't actually answer the question, because evolution doesn't do anything except select for traits, roughly speaking. So it just pushes the question to: how did the subjective feeling of pain or pleasure emerge from some genetic mutation, when it wasn't there before?

Without a functionalist explanation of the origin of aesthetic valence, then I don't think you can "get it from bit".

That seems more like the hard problem of consciousness. There is no solution to it.

--

Stathis Papaioannou

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