[ExI] LLM's cannot be concious

[Giovanni Santostasi]

I mean, Jason that is much better English speaker than I'm said it
perfectly here. Argument closed.

*Consider also: our brains never make any direct contact with the outside
world. All our brains have to work with are "dots and dashes" of neuronal
firings. These are essentially just 1s and 0s, signals without referents.
Yet, somehow, seemingly magically, our brains are able to piece together an
understanding of the outside world from the mere patterns present in these
neural firings.*

*These LLMs are in a similar position. They receive only a patterns of
signals as it exists in a corpus of text, the text is itself the output of
minds which are similarly trapped in their skulls. Now, can a LLM learn
some things about the minds that produced this text, just as our minds
learn some things about the external world which produces the pattern of
neural firings our brains receive?*

*I see no reason why LLMs could not, when we clearly can and do.*

*Jason *

On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 10:55 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> GPT-4 said that mathematics has ABSTRACT referents, and in that sense it
> was more precise I was in using language. I meant to say referents as
> concrete objects, that is the crucial matter here. Language can be
> understood with concrete objects like stones and threes. So computers can
> understand language without any physical referent. Gordon your argument
> then is completely wrong.
>
> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 8:00 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023, 10:49 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 7:35 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 6:18 PM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I think it was Adrian who asked you that question. A referent as I use
>>>>> the term is something that exists outside of language to which a word
>>>>> refers. You have an apple in your hand and you say "this is an apple." The
>>>>> apple in your hand is the referent that corresponds to your word "apple."
>>>>>
>>>>> As for whether referents are data, it is unclear to me how referents
>>>>> could be data. I am inclined to say no but I am not sure what Adrain is
>>>>> getting at here.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Ah, I thought you meant that the referent was the *fact that* that was
>>>> an apple, rather than the referent being the apple itself.  Facts are data;
>>>> objects (such as apples) are not.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I wouldn't say that referents are necessarily physical objects, however.
>>> They are simply whatever the word is pointing to outside of language, which
>>> could be an idea or abstract concept to which we assign a label in order to
>>> verbalize it.
>>>
>>> Giovanni, from your other post, it is not it is not at all clear to me
>>> that the language of mathematics has no referents. ChatGPT explained that
>>> is not the case when you asked it, but nevermind what it says. I think a
>>> sentence like 1+1=2 refers to a mathematical truth that exists separate
>>> from the numerical expression of it.  The expression is the "word" or
>>> "sentence" and abstract mathematical truth is the referent.
>>>
>>
>>
>> I agree, you could say mathematical truth exists outside language. But
>> one thing this does highlight is there are many things you know about
>> despite never having that object in hand to point and look at. You've never
>> seen the abstract object '2'. You've never seen the core of the earth, or
>> an electron. We lack sensory access to these things and so everything we
>> know about them we know only through language. How do we come to understand
>> things like '2' or electrons?
>>
>> Jason
>>
>>
>>
>>> -gts
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