The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that human intelligence is not special. We are just like Large Language Models (LLMs).
The difference between a very intelligent person and a less intelligent person is that the very intelligent person has —
More life experience, which means more training data.
More complex neural network, because more experience creates more connections between the neurons in the brain.
A higher number of synapses, because of the overall fitness or healthiness of the person. If you are not a healthy person, then your brain doesn't work as effectively, which means that the number of synapses is reduced.
A very intelligent person has these three things going. Life experiences, the complexity of the neural network, and the number of synapses are higher, so that person appears more intelligent.
When you look at a less intelligent person or a stupid person, it means that person either has very little life experience, so the training data is limited, and/or he is not fit enough, so the brain is not fast enough, has fewer synapses, and the complexity of the neural network is not that high, which makes the person appear less intelligent.
Fundamentally, the mechanisms are the same as what goes on in LLMs.
Therefore, I think the more sophisticated the LLMs become, the closer we will get to realizing that we are just like them.
We know that LLMs are just machines, they are not special. So the closer they get to the human level of sophistication, the thinner our delusion of grandeur should become.
Intelligence, creativity, whatever you want to call it, is an illusion. It's a good illusion to have, but after all, it is an illusion.
Any output from the human brain comes from the training data.
The language that we speak, our speech pattern, our word choice, even thoughts, and dearly held beliefs and intuitions, and everything that we think is coming from some non-physical—spiritual—realm is coming from our training data, which is essentially all the interactions that we've had and all the information that we've consumed in various forms since we're born.
It's very easy to develop this illusion that the thoughts that we have are our own thoughts, but I don't think they are. I don't think we have original thoughts that are coming from a non-physical realm.
Everything that we believe, everything that we think, everything that we're saying is based on what we have consumed since we were born. Add to that the variables that are the complexity of our neural network and the number of synapses in the brain, and you’ve got an LLM.
Just a very sophisticated LLM, that’s all our brain is.
And that makes me think LLMs will become sentient, too. Not because the technology will have grown so good that it produces sentience, but because sentience is not a hugely special thing as we think of it.
Sentience, too, is an illusion.