(Not a brain scientist btw)
Later research showed that models know that they don't know certain pieces of information, but the fine tuning constraint of providing answers did not give them the ability to express that they didn't know.
Asking the model questions against known information can produce a correct/incorrect map detailing a sample of facts that the model knows and does not know. Fine tuning a model to say "I don't know" in response to the those questions where it was incorrect can allow it to generalise the concept to its internal concept of unknown.
It is good to keep in mind that the models we have been playing with are just the first ones to appear. GPT 3.5 is like the Atari 2600. You can get it provide a limited experience for what you want and its cool that you can do it at all, but it is fundamentally limited and far from an ideal solution. I see the current proliferation of models to be like the Cambrian explosion of early 8 bit home computers. Exciting and interesting technology which can be used for real world purposes, but you still have to operate with the knowledge of the limitations forefront in your mind and tailor tasks to allow them to perform the bits they are good at. I have no-idea of the timeframe, but there is plenty more to come. There have been a lot of advances revealed in papers. A huge number of those advances have not yet coalesced into shipping models. When models cost millions to train you want to be using a set of enhancements that play nicely together. Some features will be mutually exclusive. By the time you have analysed the options to find an optimal combination, a whole lot of new papers will be suggesting more options.
We have not yet got the thing for AI that Unix was for computers. We are just now exposing people to the problems that drives the need to create such a thing.
LLMs don't get to make value judgements, because they don't "understand". They predict the subsequent points of a pattern given a starting point.
Humans do that, but they also jade their perception with emotive ethics, desires, optimism and pessimism.
It is impossible to say that two humans with the exact same experience would always come to the same conclusion, because two humans will never have the exact same experience. Inputs include emotional state triggered by hormones, physical or mental stress, and so forth, which are often not immediately relevant to any particular decision, but carried over from prior states and biological processes.
Seems pertinent, and now I will try to read it again. Perhaps it will be useful for reference by others.
I once provided an LLM the riddle of the goat, cabbage and wolf, and changed the rules a bit. I prompted that the wolf was allergic to goats (and hence would not eat them). Still the llm insisted on not leaving them together on the same river bank, because the wolf would otherwise sneeze and scare the goat away.
My conclusion was that the llm solved the riddle using prior knowledge plus creativity, instead of clever reasoning.
I feel this analogy confirmed by the fact that chain of thought works so well. That is what (most?) people do when they actively "think" about a problem. They have a kind of inner monologue.
Now, we have already reached the point that LLMs are much smarter than the language areas of humans - but not always smarter than the whole human. I think the next step towards AGI would be to add other "brain areas". A limbic system that remembers the current emotion and feeds it as an input into the other parts. We already have dedicated vision and audio AIs. Maybe we also need a system for logical reasoning.
That implies to me that a larger brain immediately benefited our ancestors. That is, going from 400 to 410 ccs had evolutionary advantage and so did 410 to 420, etc.
That implies that once the brain architecture was set, you could increase intelligence through scale.
I bet there are some parallels to current AI there.
Seems to me (not a neuroscientist) like there's a flaw in that experiment: how would the right hemisphere understand the meaning of the words, if language is only processed by the left? I also recall reading that the more "primitive" parts of our brains don't have a concept of negation.
But maybe they have been considering this and it's no issue?
Which also makes me consider: Is there some sort of consciousness in my own brain I'm not aware of? Sure, my brain does a lot I'm not conscious of—but is there a quiet, thinking awareness that exists in my skull, that I, the mind writing this, do not know of?
for our particular brain , the logical ones usually have immediate reactions that suck (like borderline personality disorder) and the emotional ones tend to have mish mash wordses feelings
(idk how to write that it's like words-es, the s at the end is very gender for emotional feelings words so all of them tend to have it)
This perspective fails to establish that the brain produces consciousness, as it relies on the mistaken assumption that "mind" and "consciousness" are interchangeable. While brain activity may influence the mind, consciousness itself could be a more fundamental aspect of reality. Rather than generating consciousness, the brain might function like a radio, merely receiving and processing information from an all-pervasive field of consciousness.
In this view, a split-brain condition would not create two separate consciousnesses but instead allow access to two distinct streams of an already-existing, universal consciousness.
I think consciousness arises from the brain.
I think the music I dance arises from the radio."
Postulate 2: The music was played by a band in the form of sound waves, some time in the past. The band recorded their music on to some storage medium so that it could be transmitted to the future. In the present, the storage medium is connected up to a piece of equipment that turns the recorded signal into some invisible power transmission that spreads throughout space in a way you can't experience directly with any of your natural senses. The radio however can sense these invisible power transmissions and can turn them back into audio that sounds like what the band played in the past. So we're saying that it is possible to create music in the form of sound waves (that's what the band did), and it is possible for the radio to output sound waves that sound like music (that's what the radio does), but the radio is curiously not the thing that is producing music and instead we have an enormous system of technology transmitting the music across space and time.
You'd need an awful lot of evidence to convince me that postulate 2 is true and postulate 1 is false.
On the one hand you have "consciousness can be created, and it is created by the brain". On the other hand you have "consciousness can be created, and it is created somewhere, but it's not created by the brain, instead it is created somewhere else and there is a system of consciousness transmission that gets it into the brain".
There's just no reason to prefer the second explanation. It is a more complicated story.
Yet, when I turn the radio on, music really does seem to come out of it.
And when I turn the radio off, the music stops (for me, but not for you).
Without the radio there is no sound, but the radio needs a signal.
Does the radio make the music? Quite an interesting metaphor.
I tend to agree, but it doesn't fully explain Benj Hellie's vertiginous question [1]. Everyone seems to have brains, but for some reason only I am me.
If we were able to make an atom-by-atom accurate replica of your brain (and optionally your body, too), with all the memories intact, would you suddenly start seeing the world from two different pair of eyes at the same time? If no, why? What would make you (the original) different from your replica?
The brain has inputs, internal processing, and outputs. The conscious experience happens within the internal processing.
If you make a second copy, then that second copy will also have conscious experience, but it won't share any inputs or outputs or internal state with the first copy.
If you were to duplicate your computer, would the second computer share a filesystem with the first one? No. It would have a copy of a snapshot-in-time of the first computer's filesystem, but henceforth they are different computers, each with their own internal state.
You could argue that there are ways to do it which make it unclear which is the "original" computer and which is the "copy". That's fine, that doesn't matter. They both have the same history up to the branching point, and then they diverge. I don't see the problem.
Both of you would be you, and you two would function separately, occupy separate spaces, and diverge slightly in ways that would only rarely make a difference to your personality.
But that's not the vertiginous question, which is "why am I me". I've wondered that before. However, it is nonsense. Naturally a person is that person, not some other person (and a tree is a tree, not some other tree). There's nothing strange about this. Why would it be otherwise? So the urge to ask the question really reveals some deep-seated misconception, or some other question that actually makes sense, and I wonder what that is.
You’d be in two different locations, have independent experiences, and your world lines would quickly diverge. Both of you would remember a common past.
How do you know when you wake up in the morning that you are the same “I” as you remember from the previous day? Who isn’t to say that the universe didn’t multiply while you were asleep, and now there are two or more of you waking up?
(You don’t actually need to go to sleep to do this: https://cheapuniverses.com/)
Don't push the argument. It's not coming from a place of rationality even though he's deliberately not using the word "spirit".
(Edit: Michael Graziano is who I was trying to remember - he uses the words "schematic" and "model")
Your view is called "pan-psychism". It's interesting, but there isn't anything that makes it necessary. Everything we're finding out is that most or all thinking happens outside of consciousness, and the results bubble up into it as perception. Consciousness does seem to be universal within the brain, though.
I find pan-psychism interesting just because of its popularity - people want something spiritual, knowingly or not. I would advise not to insist that consciousness==soul, however, as neuroscience seems to be rapidly converging on a more mundane view of consciousness. It's best to think of one's "true" self according to the maxim that there is much more to you than meets the mind's eye.
Secondly, it wouldn’t really explain anything. The “consciousness field” would presumably obey some kind of natural laws like the known fields do, but the subjective experience of consciousness would remain as mysterious as before (for those who do find it mysterious).
Experiments demonstrating an external source of consciousness would be very interesting.
Not a teapot in this case!
Suppose you do all kinds of studies and not show any telepathy, precog, or remote viewing. You could still say that the brain was only a receiver. None of that would disprove the "brain-as-consciousness-receiver" concept, you would just say that, I guess it is one way, no telepathy.
It's not disprovable. And so, kind of boring.
It's effectively akin to talking about mass. Despite the fact that mass is observable as a distinct phenomenon in any object, it's obviously not accurate to say that you "produce mass" or that it's "your mass" in some private, ontologically separated way, it just appears that way, by definition if we look at particular manifestations of it.
So that's very interesting that you mention that.
> LaSota believed that humans have two minds, a left and right hemisphere, and each hemisphere can be good or evil, according to posts on her blog. Eventually, LaSota came to believe that only very few people — she among them — are double good. [1]
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/19/zizian... [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/german-math-genius-get-...
