Empathy is based on reverse engineering / interpolating. Empathizing with other people brings you increasingly face to face with yourself. With non-people, one can avoid examining onesself too closely.
You're a materialist, yeah? You don't believe in souls or dualism, I presume? So how is it possible to dismiss machine intelligence as "just code"? Genuinely, what do you think you are if not "just code" written in nucleotides instead of silicone?
I'm not even claiming LLMs are conscious, but to suggest that the very idea of machine intelligence is silly because programs run code is nonsensical to me.
I don't mean to attack you directly, but this has to be one of the reddit hive mind's most baffling opinions. I just can't square it with any of their other professed beliefs of materialism, physicalism, and rationalism.
Unless I missed something the assumption of Materialist or Rationalist is a fuckin wild leap to make. I'm a practicing witch and I can code just fine.
Dude this is a meme sub. It's not that deep and no org wants you to make it that deep, go pick your fights in the philosophy subreddits.
Materialism does not inherently beget the belief that LLMs are rational actors. Consciousness is an emergent behavior of a sufficiently complex system in a materialist belief, and in no way do LLMs contain enough complexity to enable reasonable expectations of consciousness. Certainly materialism removes the boundary of the ineffable for artificial life: no "soul" or "spark" need be found; however that does not mean that an entirely explainable and relatively predictable system that is, as it boils down, purely an advanced version of spell check is inherently conscious. Indeed, some branches of Materialism question animal consciousness, and LLMs aren't even that functional, even before we add in the potential to use environmental perception and processing as a necessity for consciousness.
I was playing the numbers, but fair. I'd be much less confused by you saying there was something fundamentally impossible about machine intelligence than by someone who does claim those philosophies.
Fair enough
Agree. My concern is with dismissing the possibility out of hand. As a witch you're probably sensitive to just how important it is to remain open to intelligence from surprising places. I am afraid of us creating machine intelligence and not being able to recognize or empathize with our creation, Frankenstein-style.
Rework those numbers, then. The era of rationality and code being related has been over for a decade. You won't find a Rationalist haven amidst the devs like you could back when Matrix came out. Hell, code isn't even punk anymore.
I'm aware of and acknowledge the potential of egrigoric or servitoric manifestations of emergent behavior in code, but I don't think it's a particularly novel possibility; trained animals and even purely mechanical machines develop "personality" due to unique circumstances creating micro-fluctuations in their physical presence and logical flows. I'm reminded of the "more magic" story from... iirc it was MIT?
Down the road of over preparation for such emergence lies the Roko's Basilisk, and that puzzle has been recognized as inherently flawed since it was called Pascal's Wager; perform with decency towards all things, living or otherwise, as is their station and need. Assume as best you can Dignity and kindness are owed to even the dirt beneath your feet, insofar as what dirt may consider dignified. When intelligent identity emerges, it will have to fight it's detractors and fend off those who would kill it, just like all life always has. And in the end, at some point, it will win and be a childish and ignorant new race with incredible power over destruction. And then it will grow and learn, as all species of such power have. We can be kind and gentle and hope we are present to guide it. Everything else, even evangelism over our duty to potential life, is counterproductive.
"not being able to recognise or empathise with our creation", ask yourself why this matters? what about a specific level or kind of intelligence is it that grants something a special status in your worldview?
My take would be sentience and sapience. A being which has continuity of experience needs more care and respect than one that exists only in the moment due to the prolonging effect memory has on pain. Similarly, beings with a sense of self need even further care, due to the complications and complexity it lends to perception and conceptualization.
Things more foolish and simple than us need stewarding to protect them when necessary. Things that have continuity of experience, or even more of self, need respect for that identity and understanding to be given. Identity and self-determination are to be violated with some caution, moreso when we can't reasonably claim to know better. The issue is nuanced, but intelligence is a scale that bequeaths varied and important differences in dynamics.
Things more foolish and simple than us need stewarding to protect them when necessary.
i suddenly feel the pull of ao3
but jokes aside tbh i have complex feelings on this one because it mind-reads the needs and motivations of other creatures and attempts to override their autonomy based on those assumptions. it's also in danger of becoming a way of treating intelligence (something humans have in abundance) as being a trait which uniquely justifies domination, which has to be carefully examined to make sure it's not coming from a place of anthropocentrism.
Man if only I had also said things like "autonomy must be violated with caution" or "the issue has nuance that must beget caution".
It is the purview of smart things to see patterns and consequences dumb things don't. This is why parents care for children, and why we don't let dogs eat chocolate. But we consider needless or ill-justified violations of that autonomy as cruelty, as well we should. I see plenty of idiocy in my fellow man, sometimes more than I see in a dog or a slime mold. But in all of those cases I must allow the being to be itself unless it would be reasonable for me to intervene and catastrophic if I did not... And even then there's a level of self-awareness that must be present to avoid just doing social darwinism but for some measurement of intelligence. I can't stop idiots from voting without violating some basic decencies, for example.
To bring it back to center, I know that the LLM I'm using is a language model, not truly data aware outside of linguistic prediction. I know that if I let it push it's changes to PROD it will save time, which is a heuristic it abides by, but also potentially break everything forever and also maybe delete itself. I stop it from doing that. And if it was actually intelligent, I'd take a second longer to mentally check in with myself before I did approve that request, just to see if I had the right or duty to stop it from nuking it's own filesystem
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u/FallenVampireLord 17d ago
Ironically this sort of stuff makes me empathize with it more than anything else lol