One of my favorites is the “ladder paradox” in special relativity, although I originally learned is as a pole vaulter rather than a ladder:

A pole vaulter is running carrying a pole that is 12m long at rest, holding it parallel to the ground. He is running at relativistic speed, such that lengths dilate by 50% (this would be (√3/2)c). And he runs through a barn that is 10m long that has open doors in the front and back.

Imagine standing inside barn. The pole vaulter is running so fast that the length of the pole, in your frame of reference, has contracted to 6m. So while the pole is entirely inside the barn you press a button the briefly closes the doors, so that for just a moment the pole is entirely closed inside the barn.

The question is, what does the pole vaulter see? For him, the pole has not contracted; instead the barn has. He’s running with a 12m pole through what, in his frame of reference, is a 5m barn. What happens when the doors shut? How can both the doors shut?

I will admit that I have never used this thought experiment for any practical end.

Maybe a jersey knit sheet?

and will we ever return to this singular state?

This is the “big crunch” question, and I think the current theory is that no, there’s enough energy, and space is curved in such a way that it won’t crunch back down. At least not all at once? We do have black holes that are sort of similar in that they pack so much stuff into small spaces that the current laws of physics are unable to completely describe them.

How do we know that this was the actual beginning of the universe?

We don’t. It is “the beginning” in that it is the farthest back the laws of physics can be “rewound” before they break down (in the sense that once you rewind the clock back far enough, there’s enough matter and energy in a small enough space that the interactions between quantum mechanics and gravity become increasingly relevant, and we just don’t know how those play together; see Quantum gravity)

We know that space is expanding faster than light can travel. How do we know that the Universe isn’t trillions of years old, but we just can’t ever see it because it’s beyond the distance that the faintest detectable light can travel?

We don’t. But there’s no evidence to suggest that the universe outside of what we can see might be different from the parts we do see. We can’t really speak much about what’s outside of our light cone (what we can see). All we can say is that the parts we do see all looks basically the same (homogeneous, astronomically speaking).

43% of people:

4: English, Spanish, French, and Japanese Bonus: Yes

I installed linux on my PC a couple months ago. The other day I wanted to log back into my windows partition for the first time in a while in order to clean up some of the files on that partition (even though the drive is mounted in linux, the windows “fast boot” option apparently leaves it in a state that linux considers read-only). Windows apparently wouldn’t let me log in without a microsoft account, instead of just using my regular windows username.

So yeah, that partition’s gone now. No going back!

Cherry-picking a couple of points I want to respond to together

It is somewhat like a memory buffer but, there is no analysis being linguistics. Short-term memory in biological systems that we know have multi-sensory processing and analysis that occurs inline with “storing”. The chat session is more like RAM than short-term memory that we see in biological systems.

It is also purely linguistic analysis without other inputs out understanding of abstract meaning. In vacuum, it’s a dead-end towards an AGI.

I have trouble with this line of reasoning for a couple of reasons. First, it feels overly simplistic to me to write what LLMs do off as purely linguistic analysis. Language is the input and the output, by all means, but the same could be said in a case where you were communicating with a person over email, and I don’t think you’d say that that person wasn’t sentient. And the way that LLMs embed tokens into multidimensional space is, I think, very much analogous to how a person interprets the ideas behind words that they read.

As a component of a system, it becomes much more promising.

It sounds to me like you’re more strict about what you’d consider to be “the LLM” than I am; I tend to think of the whole system as the LLM. I feel like drawing lines around a specific part of the system is sort of like asking whether a particular piece of someone’s brain is sentient.

Conversely, if the afflicted individual has already developed sufficiently to have abstract and synthetic thought, the inability to store long-term memory would not dampen their sentience.

I’m not sure how to make a philosophical distinction between an amnesiac person with a sufficiently developed psyche, and an LLM with a sufficiently trained model. For now, at least, it just seems that the LLMs are not sufficiently complex to pass scrutiny compared to a person.

LLMs, fundamentally, are incapable of sentience as we know it based on studies of neurobiology

Do you have an example I could check out? I’m curious how a study would show a process to be “fundamentally incapable” in this way.

LLMs do not synthesize. They do not have persistent context.

That seems like a really rigid way of putting it. LLMs do synthesize during their initial training. And they do have persistent context if you consider the way that “conversations” with an LLM are really just including all previous parts of the conversation in a new prompt. Isn’t this analagous to short term memory? Now suppose you were to take all of an LLM’s conversations throughout the day, and then retrain it overnight using those conversations as additional training data? There’s no technical reason that this can’t be done, although in practice it’s computationally expensive. Would you consider that LLM system to have persistent context?

On the flip side, would you consider a person with anterograde amnesia, who is unable to form new memories, to lack sentience?

lol, yeah, I guess the Socratic method is pretty widely frowned upon. My bad. =D

I don’t think it’s just a question of whether AGI can exist. I think AGI is possible, but I don’t think current LLMs can be considered sentient. But I’m also not sure how I’d draw a line between something that is sentient and something that isn’t (or something that “writes” rather than “generates”). That’s kinda why I asked in the first place. I think it’s too easy to say “this program is not sentient because we know that everything it does is just math; weights and values passing through layered matrices; it’s not real thought”. I haven’t heard any good answers to why numbers passing through matrices isn’t thought, but electrical charges passing through neurons is.

Sure, I’m not entitled to anything. And I appreciate your original reply. I’m just saying that your subsequent comments have been useless and condescending. If you didn’t have time to discuss further then… you could have just not replied.

“You’re wrong, but I’m just too busy to say why!”

Still useless.

I’m a software developer, and have worked plenty with LLMs. If you don’t want to address the content of my post, then fine. But “go research” is a pretty useless answer. An LLM could do better!

The only humans with no training (in this sense) are babies. So no, they can’t.

So, I will grant that right now humans are better writers than LLMs. And fundamentally, I don’t think the way that LLMs work right now is capable of mimicking actual human writing, especially as the complexity of the topic increases. But I have trouble with some of these kinds of distinctions.

So, not to be pedantic, but:

AI can’t create something all on its own from scratch like a human. It can only mimic the data it has been trained on.

Couldn’t you say the same thing about a person? A person couldn’t write something without having learned to read first. And without having read things similar to what they want to write.

LLMs like ChatGP operate on probability. They don’t actually understand anything and aren’t intelligent.

This is kind of the classic chinese room philosophical question, though, right? Can you prove to someone that you are intelligent, and that you think? As LLMs improve and become better at sounding like a real, thinking person, does there come a point at which we’d say that the LLM is actually thinking? And if you say no, the LLM is just an algorithm, generating probabilities based on training data or whatever techniques might be used in the future, how can you show that your own thoughts aren’t just some algorithm, formed out of neurons that have been trained based on data passed to them over the course of your lifetime?

And when they start hallucinating, it’s because they don’t understand how they sound…

People do this too, though… It’s just that LLMs do it more frequently right now.

I guess I’m a bit wary about drawing a line in the sand between what humans do and what LLMs do. As I see it, the difference is how good the results are.

What’s the difference?

Oh Brother Where Art Thou is a good one.

I’m rooting for you, Canada. The US needs to reap the consequences of what we’ve sown.

climate change denial