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I understood the quoted sentence to be saying, in essence "people claim LLMs aren't really and can't really be thinking or experiencing anything" which is certainly something people say and have written papers on.

by root_axis16 hours ago|

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The phenomenological quality of subjective experience is never described as "cognitive capacity".

That term is used to describe mental aptitude or skills, like the ability to learn new languages or do math.

by DangitBobby6 hours ago|

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It's never used as a description of that specific phenomenon, but depending on your beliefs you may or may not separate cognition from experience conceptually. Regardless, you are focusing on a very narrow part of what I said. The point is to help you get past your narrow interpretation of what people are saying so you can join them in the conversation they are trying to have instead of litigating the conversation they aren't trying to have.

by hodgehog1116 hours ago|

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As an example, "They're made out of weights" describes why the weight-based construction of neural networks should impact the way that you think about them and their outputs. I would argue that an offhand description of its microscopic formulation tells us nothing at all about how to think about these outputs, or the models themselves. Even if it is a cute story, I think it definitely classifies as succumbing to this fallacy, but maybe I missed some subtle point that you or someone would be happy to illuminate?

By the way, I know it's a parody of another story that makes this exact refutation. But I think this only serves to highlight the point.

by root_axis16 hours ago|

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> They're made out of weights" describes why the weight-based construction of neural networks should impact the way that you think about them and their outputs.

How do you connect that description to "LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity"?

by rerdavies12 hours ago|

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The false conclusion that's being drawn is "therefore LLMs could not be good models of consciousness" (consciousness being a cognitive capacity). Plus, I suppose a subtle implication that a good model of consciousness is not actually conscious. To which I would invoke the spirit of the Turing test: if you can't tell the difference, is it not more sensible to say that it is.

by miyoji4 hours ago|

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> (consciousness being a cognitive capacity)

I don't think it makes any sense to say that consciousness is a cognitive capacity. Cognition is one of many qualia that compose the experience of consciousness from the inside, but it's not the only one, and I can easily imagine consciousness without cognition at all.

So I don't think it's weird at all to say that LLMs can be good models of some cognitive capacities (particularly the ones embodied in language) but lacks others, and overall lacks consciousness.

by hodgehog1111 hours ago|

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"LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity because they are just a bunch of numbers guessing the next word. They have no linguistic module, so they cannot exhibit cognition". That's the argument. It's pretty clearly stated.

Look, this isn't necessarily directed at you, but I've been a researcher into the theory of deep learning for many years now. I've seen all the phases, heard all the criticism, had to constantly argue against this. Gary Marcus was one of the loudest voices of this argument, but every would-be philosopher came out of the woodwork to explain why LLMs are no more than stochastic parrots because of their design. Geoffrey Hinton famously had to debunk these arguments multiple times.

And now that LLMs start to clearly exhibit intelligent behavior and can be somewhat reliable, now "nobody ever thought that LLMs could not possibly be good models of some cognitive capacity because of next-token predictions, or linear algebra, etc."? No, that's not okay.