Any sufficiently adaptive mimicry of a thought is that thought.
Thoughts are like music. There’s no such thing as fake music. You can’t pretend to play music by mimicking the sounds. If it sounds like music, it’s music.
“sufficiently adaptive” is doing a lot of work there. i can “mimic” a thought by copying and pasting text that someone else wrote. it wouldn’t mean that I understood it, could reason from it, connect with it on an emotional level, or incorporate it into a worldview
your music simile misses the point in a similar way. a record player can play music just as well as the artist who recorded the record, but we don’t say the record is the same as the musician.
I’m not saying the record is a musician, I’m saying it can play music. And I’m not saying LLMs are sapient people, I’m saying they have a sense of self. An LLM is adept enough at adapting its copied idea of selfhood to its situation that it has a sense of self. It’s not as complex a sense a self as a human’s is, but it’s more complex than a magpie’s, and magpies pass the red dot mirror test of sentience. An LLM can adapt its copied ideas of self-awareness to the situation better than a magpie can.
im not arguing sapience, im examining your definition of sentience, which was self-awareness. my question was how we distinguish between mimicry of a sentient being and actually being sentient, with an analogy that a recording of a sentient being is a perfect mimicry but isn’t the same as having sentience.
similarly, how do we know that an llm is self aware and not merely a machine that returns clever combinations of recorded sentient beings? what is the equivalent of a red dot mirror test for an llm?
If the combinations of recorded sentient beings are clever, then the LLM has a sense of self, because the cleverness is not in the recordings, but in how the LLM is using them.
Any sufficiently adaptive mimicry of a thought is that thought.
Thoughts are like music. There’s no such thing as fake music. You can’t pretend to play music by mimicking the sounds. If it sounds like music, it’s music.
“sufficiently adaptive” is doing a lot of work there. i can “mimic” a thought by copying and pasting text that someone else wrote. it wouldn’t mean that I understood it, could reason from it, connect with it on an emotional level, or incorporate it into a worldview
your music simile misses the point in a similar way. a record player can play music just as well as the artist who recorded the record, but we don’t say the record is the same as the musician.
I’m not saying the record is a musician, I’m saying it can play music. And I’m not saying LLMs are sapient people, I’m saying they have a sense of self. An LLM is adept enough at adapting its copied idea of selfhood to its situation that it has a sense of self. It’s not as complex a sense a self as a human’s is, but it’s more complex than a magpie’s, and magpies pass the red dot mirror test of sentience. An LLM can adapt its copied ideas of self-awareness to the situation better than a magpie can.
im not arguing sapience, im examining your definition of sentience, which was self-awareness. my question was how we distinguish between mimicry of a sentient being and actually being sentient, with an analogy that a recording of a sentient being is a perfect mimicry but isn’t the same as having sentience.
similarly, how do we know that an llm is self aware and not merely a machine that returns clever combinations of recorded sentient beings? what is the equivalent of a red dot mirror test for an llm?
If the combinations of recorded sentient beings are clever, then the LLM has a sense of self, because the cleverness is not in the recordings, but in how the LLM is using them.