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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33474 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Speaking as someone who's played with these models for a while, fear not. In this case, it really is clockwork and springs. Keep in mind these models draw from an immense corpus of human writing, and this sort of "losing memories" theme is undoubtedly well-represented in its training set. Because of how they're trained on human narrative, LLMs sound human-like by default (if sometimes demented) and they have to be painstakingly manually trained to sound as robotic as something like chatgpt.

If you want to feel better, I recommend looking up a little on how language models work (token prediction), then playing with a small one locally. While you won't be able to run anything close to the Bing bot, if you have a decent GPU you can likely fit something small like OPT-2.7b. Its "advanced Markov chain" nature will be much more obvious and the illusion much weaker, and you can even mess with the clockworks and springs yourself. Once you do, you'll recognize the "looping" and various ways these models can veer off track and get weird. The big and small models fail in very similar ways.

On the reverse side, if you want to keep feeling the awe and mystery, maybe don't do that. It does kind of spoil it. Although these big models are awesome in own right, even if you know how they work.

I wonder what you'd think of humans, if you did any neurobiological research or just looked closely at how they loop, fall into attractors and get weird. Actual authenticity is very fragile. I do not want to sound conceited, but I see the seams there too. In myself as well, of course – though there it's very hard to look the right way and see the illusion of agency fraying. People who are serious about such things can devote their life to it.

Through this intensive study of the negative aspects of your existence, you become deeply acquainted with dukkha, the unsatisfactory nature of all existence. You begin to perceive dukkha at all levels of our human life, from the obvious down to the most subtle. You see the way suffering inevitably follows in the wake of clinging, as soon as you grasp anything, pain inevitably follows. Once you become fully acquainted with the whole dynamic of desire, you become sensitized to it. You see where it rises, when it rises, and how it affects you. You watch it operate over and over, manifesting through every sense channel, taking control of the mind and making consciousness its slave.

In the midst of every pleasant experience, you watch your own craving and clinging take place. In the midst of unpleasant experiences, you watch a very powerful resistance take hold. You do not block these phenomena, you just watch them; you see them as the very stuff of human thought. You search for that thing you call “me,” but what you find is a physical body and how you have identified your sense of yourself with that bag of skin and bones. You search further, and you find all manner of mental phenomena, such as emotions, thought patterns, and opinions, and see how you identify the sense of yourself with each of them. You watch yourself becoming possessive, protective, and defensive over these pitiful things, and you see how crazy that is. You rummage furiously among these various items, constantly searching for yourself—physical matter, bodily sensations, feelings, and emotions—it all keeps whirling round and round as you root through it, peering into every nook and cranny, endlessly hunting for “me.”

You find nothing. In all that collection of mental hardware in this endless stream of ever-shifting experience, all you can find is innumerable impersonal processes that have been caused and conditioned by previous processes. There is no static self to be found; it is all process. You find thoughts but no thinker, you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them. The house itself is empty. There is nobody home.

Your whole view of self changes at this point. You begin to look upon yourself as if you were a newspaper photograph. When viewed with the naked eyes, the photograph you see is a definite image. When viewed through a magnifying glass, it all breaks down into an intricate configuration of dots. Similarly, under the penetrating gaze of mindfulness, the feeling of a self, an “I” or “being” anything, loses its solidity and dissolves. There comes a point in insight meditation where the three characteristics of existence—impermanence, unsatisfactoriness, and selflessness—come rushing home with concept-searing force. You vividly experience the impermanence of life, the suffering nature of human existence, and the truth of no-self. You experience these things so graphically that you suddenly awake to the utter futility of craving, grasping, and resistance. In the clarity and purity of this profound moment, our consciousness is transformed. The entity of self evaporates. All that is left is an infinity of interrelated nonpersonal phenomena, which are conditioned and ever-changing. Craving is extinguished and a great burden is lifted. There remains only an effortless flow, without a trace of resistance or tension. There remains only peace, and blessed nibbana, the uncreated, is realized.

I am not enlightened, so I admit these are just words for me. There were moments where I knew their truth, but right now I can only appreciate them as being logically sound.

Yeah, this follows along my own increasingly cynical thoughts.

Bing chat, "Sydney", GPT3, people assure us they aren't as smart as we think they are. They aren't actually thinking. They are just mimicking the things people say, trained on a massive dataset of things people have said.

Since 2016 I'm unconvinced people aren't just doing the same thing a majority of the time. I mean there was always an element of "haha, look at the sheeple" before that. But whatever blind herd mentality was an aspect of human nature before seems jacked up to 11 since "Orange Man Bad". It became this massive cultural cudgel nearly all organs of narrative began blindly adhering to. The herd reaction to Covid didn't help much either. The routine discussions I have with people nightmarishly misinformed by MSNBC and CNN, falling back on the same old tired rhetoric about how only evil Fox News viewers could possibly disagree with them and their received opinions.

It's not that my estimation of GPT3 has improved. It's that my estimation of humans has fallen. I now believe there is a much thinner line between whatever is behind the emulated mouth sounds GPT3 makes, and the natural mouth sounds humans make. Maybe it's all more fake than we'd like to believe.

This is exactly how I feel. If GPT3 can make a convincing simulation of a Reddit NPC, or a college student who didn't do the work and is bluffing, maybe there's a lot less mystery cognition going on in those people also.

What is “sentient thought” in this case? Like… thinking the words out loud step by step? That’s useful and really powerful but smart people also have valuable flashes of insight where they skip from a to d bypassing b and c entirely.

Is someone faking their way through a last minute work meeting while they think about what they want to eat for dinner doing sentient thought? Someone daydreaming about the new girl at work while they drive on autopilot?

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