alt Hacker NewsIs a brain not a token prediction machine?
Tokens in form of neural impulses go in, tokens in the form of neural impulses go out.
We would like to believe that there is something profound happening inside and we call that consciousness. Unfortunately when reading about split-brain patient experiments or agenesis of the corpus callosum cases I feel like we are all deceived, every moment of every day. I came to realization that the confabulation that is observed is just a more pronounced effect of the normal.
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> Is a brain not a token prediction machine?
I would say that, token prediction is one of the things a brain does. And in a lot of people, most of what it does. But I dont think its the whole story. Possibly it is the whole story since the development of language.
We know that consciousness exists because we constantly experience it. It’s really the only thing we can ever know with certainty.
That’s the point of “I think therefore I am.”
Could an LLM trained on nothing and looped upon itself eventually develop language, more complex concepts, and everything else, based on nothing? If you loop LLMs on each other, training them so they "learn" over time, will they eventually form and develop new concepts, cultures, and languages organically over time? I don't have an answer to that question, but I strongly doubt it.
There's clearly more going on in the human mind than just token prediction.