alt Hacker NewsI believe machines could be made that think. But not purely digital ones. The brain most certainly isn’t a thinking machine precisely because it doesn’t have the luxury of unlimited time. Its design is not based on executing best algorithms, but rather finding good enough solutions among many time constrained but interlinked signal cascades.
The brain and body instead construct time, a cohesive internal one,from the ground up, with nesting oscillators driving the sequence of all functions and behaviors, over long and short time closes.
What we call “thinking” is a filtered layer of it, a slice that the attention spotlight is focussed on, and in humans this process can be turned to cognition over multilayered abstractions, and using language or other symbolic communications to communicate some of the dynamics of this process, and even evoke them in others.
Turing machines, and modern digital computers with their Von Neumann bottleneck, and LLMs are outside of time. They do not experience time. They can check the clock. They can count steps. But they are not active and agentic in time. Till we change that we won’t make machines that “think”. We can certainly make machines that simulate thinking, and that’s often good enough. But make the problem a real time one, with several conflicting verbal streams to parse and respond to serially and LLMs on their own fail catastrophically.
I think so long as the memory-processing divide remains, the simulation has to break apart processes for thinking in a way that’s alright for some cases, but not for others. And this is why we have the jaggedness of LLM intelligence I believe. They do not have internal timekeeping like almost all biological agents do.
I'm probably way off the mark here, but my instinct tells me there's nothing intrinsic about the human condition that makes it the exclusive vessel of thought.
It is theoretically possible, after all, to simulate a human brain at a subatomic level. Sure, the complexity is absurd and interface required to measure it seems far fetched, but technically there's no restriction.
Because of this I believe what we know as "thought" or consciousness exists in the space between the physical world. It's just a way to represent the world around us, with the ability to reference the past and systems to predict the future.
LLMs to me are like a simplified version thats stretched across the domain of active memory. The "thought" process is the same, an active state (current token) guided by the past state (previous tokens).
I think the next step is to reduce what a token is. Right now they are vectors that are linked to words. If instead of words we fed it direct video and audio, and a way to translate the raw data into something resembling the information passed from our eyes and ears in real time, and train it like a child learns from its parents, it's hard to draw the line on where thought begins.
It's an interesting experiment, but I still consider it anti-human.
In the future, when we have "robot" rights for robots that identify as humans, you'll find me on the side of "they aren't a real human". We'll be called bigots, and I'm okay with that.