> A LM doesn't understand "truthfulness". It has no concept of a sequence being true or not, only of a sequence being probable.
I claim that the human brain doesn't understand "truthfulness" either. It merely creates the impression that understanding is taking place, by adapting to social and environmental pressures. The brain has no "concepts" at all, it just generates output based on its input, its internal wiring, and a variety of essentially random factors, quite analogous to how LLMs operate.
Do you have any evidence that contradicts that claim?
> Do you have any evidence that contradicts that claim?
Empirical evidence? Yes I do.
The brain commands an entity that has to exist and function in the context of objective reality. Being unable to verify it's internal state against that, would have been negatively selected some time ago, because stating: "I'm sure that rumbling cave bear with those big sharp teeth is a peaceful herbivore" won't change the objective reality that the caveman is about to become dinner.
How that works in detail is, to the best of my knowledge, still the subject of research in the realm of neurobiology.
Wouldn't that type of response fit in with how LMs work though? That caveman likely learned a lot of things over time, like: large animals can end life more likely than small ones, animals making loud noises are likely more dangerous, sharp teeth/claws are dangerous, or I saw one of those kill another caveman. All of those things tilt the probability of associating that loud cave bear with a high risk of death. That doesn't mean there's some inherit 'truth' that the caveman brain 'knows', it's just a high probability that it's a correct assessment of the input. Every true thing is really just an evaluation of probability in the end.
I think this is incomplete on a number of levels. For a start, to be interesting, “truth” has to be something than just whatever your eyes can see. There have been wars (culture, economic, kinetic, etc) fought to define something as a truth.
The concept of truth is notoriously hard for humans to grapple with. How do we know something is true isn’t just a neurobiological question, it’s been grappled with throughout the history of philosophy — including major revisions of our understanding in the past 80 years.
And for the record, rumbling cave bears are mostly peaceful herbivores.
> And for the record, rumbling cave bears are mostly peaceful herbivores.
For the record, all members of the Genus Ursus belong to the Order Carnivora, which literally translates to "Meat Eaters". And that includes Ursus spelaeus, aka. the Cave Bear.
And while it most likely, like many modern bears, was an Omnivore, that "Omni" very much included small, hairless monkey-esque creatures with no natural defenses other than ridiculously small teeth and pathetic excuses for claws, if they happened to stumble into their cave.
> The concept of truth is notoriously hard for humans to grapple with.
I am not talking about the philosophical questions of what truth is as a concept, nor am I talking about the many capabilities of humans to purposefully reshape others perceptions of truth for their own ends.
I am talking about truth as the observable state of the objective reality, aka. the Universe we exist in and interact with. A meter is longer than a centimeter, and boiling water is warmer than frozen water at the same pressure, whether any given philosophy or fabrication agrees with that or not, is irrelevant.
It's empirical evidence, since we exist and are very much capable of selecting the correct statement from a bunch of stochstically likely, but untruthful statements about objective reality.
I'm not trying to demonstrate that my claims are true. I'm trying to demonstrate that it is meaningless to discuss these topics in the first place, because we don't understand the workings of the mind nearly well enough to distinguish things like "truthfulness" and "concepts".
The fact that we don't know exactly how our brains work, doesn't mean we cannot observe the results of their work.
And as I have demonstrated above, humans, and for that matter other species on this planet featuring capable brains like Corvidae or Cetaceans, do in fact have a concept of truth: They are capable of recognizing false or misleading information as being incongruous with objective reality: A raven that sees me putting food into my left hand, will not jump to a patch of ground where I pretend to put food with my right hand.
This is despite the fact that my actions of "hiding the food" with the empty hand are stochastically indistinguishable from an action of actually hiding food from with my left hand.
I claim that the human brain doesn't understand "truthfulness" either. It merely creates the impression that understanding is taking place, by adapting to social and environmental pressures. The brain has no "concepts" at all, it just generates output based on its input, its internal wiring, and a variety of essentially random factors, quite analogous to how LLMs operate.
Do you have any evidence that contradicts that claim?