> How do you know we’re not just completing the next token
Because we (humans) weren't born into a world with computers, internet, airplanes, satellites, etc
"Complete next token" means that everything is already in the data set. It can remix things in interesting ways, sure. But that isn't the same as creating something new
Edit: I would love to hear someone's idea about how you could "parrot" your way into landing people on the moon without any novel discovery or invention
Everything is made out of just Protons, Neutrons, Electrons, along with some fields that allow interaction. (and Muons, Neutrinos, and a few others)
Everything that is physical is nothing but remixes and recombinations of a very small set of tokens.
> Everything that is physical is nothing but remixes and recombinations of a very small set of tokens.
We're not talking about "physical" with LLMs, we're talking about knowledge and creativity and reasoning, which are metaphysical.
The sum total of human knowledge cannot possibly be purely composed of remixes and recombinations, there has to be some baseline that humans invented for there to even be something to remix!
All of that is rooted in physics though.
Lnowledge and creativity absolutely are physical things. It's clear from brain injury studies that there are very localized and specific functions to this creativity.
Drugs also clearly have a very physical affect on these attributes.
You're conflating symbolic descriptions for the physical stuff itself.
You're right to flag the distinction between symbols and substance, but I think you're misapplying it here.
I'm not conflating symbolic systems with the physical substrate: they're obviously different levels of abstraction. What I am saying is that symbolic reasoning, language, creativity, and knowledge all emerge from the same underlying physical processes. They're not magic. They're not floating in some Platonic realm. They’re instantiated in real, measurable patterns, whether in neurons or silicon.
You can't have metaphysics without physics. And we have solid evidence, from neuroscience, from pharmacology, from evolutionary biology, that the brain's symbolic output is fundamentally a physical phenomenon. Injuries, chemicals, electrical stimulation, they all modulate “metaphysical” experience in completely physical ways.
Emergence matters here. Yes, atoms aren’t thoughts, but enough atoms arranged the right way do start behaving like a thinking system. That’s the whole point of complex systems theory, chaos theory, and even early AI work like Hofstadter and Dennett. I recommend "Gödel, Escher, Bach", or Melanie Mitchell's "Complexity: A Guided Tour", if you're curious.
If you're arguing there's something else, some kind of unphysical or non-emergent component to knowledge or creativity, I'd honestly love to hear more, because that's a bold claim. But waving away the physical substrate as irrelevant doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.