you randomly sample letters from the alphabet and those letters make up actual words, then actual sentences
That sounds like a decently apt description of how I (a human) communicate. The only thing is that I suppose you implied a uniform distribution, while my sampling approach is significantly more complicated and path-dependent.
But yes, to the extent that I have some introspective visibility into my cognitive processes, it does seem like I'm asking myself "which of the possible next letters/words I could choose would be appropriate grammatically, fit with my previous words, and help advance my goals" and then I sample from these with some non-zero temperature, to avoid being too boring/predictable.
"it" is also not "thinking". It is still randomly (though not all words are equal probabilities) sampling from a distribution of words that have been stolen and it been trained on
If "randomly sampling from a trained distribution" can't produce useful, meaningful output, then deterministic computation is even more suspect. After all, it's a strict subset. You're sampling with temperature zero from a handcrafted distribution.
(this post directionality ok, but there's many a devil in the details)
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If you randomly sample letters from the alphabet and those letters make up actual words, then actual sentences. Did you think about it? Probably not
That sounds like a decently apt description of how I (a human) communicate. The only thing is that I suppose you implied a uniform distribution, while my sampling approach is significantly more complicated and path-dependent.
But yes, to the extent that I have some introspective visibility into my cognitive processes, it does seem like I'm asking myself "which of the possible next letters/words I could choose would be appropriate grammatically, fit with my previous words, and help advance my goals" and then I sample from these with some non-zero temperature, to avoid being too boring/predictable.
It's not sampling randomly though.
"it" is also not "thinking". It is still randomly (though not all words are equal probabilities) sampling from a distribution of words that have been stolen and it been trained on
If "randomly sampling from a trained distribution" can't produce useful, meaningful output, then deterministic computation is even more suspect. After all, it's a strict subset. You're sampling with temperature zero from a handcrafted distribution.
(this post directionality ok, but there's many a devil in the details)
How do we know we're not doing that based on our memories and reaction to external stimuli though?