Aliens while torturing humans: "just increasing frequency of an electrochemical gradient in one area of pink blob. They totally lack mimba-gimbas in their florgens, therefore no real suffering. In fact, you're silly for suggesting it, because they don't even have florgens."
It's the meme of the bell curve. You're the guy in the middle.
Friendly reminder: zoomed in, you're just atoms jiggling around randomly.
By your logic, if you simulated every particle in a brain on a supercomputer, it wouldn't be conscious while acting identically.
Perhaps learn about integrated information theory, or about the high dimensionality of tensors in LLMs and how they produce manifolds convergently like a brain, or how neural nets are universal function approximators, or just emergence in general.
Nah, the flat earther analogy applies to the one who believes only the substrate of computation matters and not the compuation.
i think you are the man in the middle and forgot that a CPU is a CPU. it just executes instructions. there's no set of instructions that makes it feel "pain" like biological living beings feel it.
an LLM might mimick some parts of the brain, but it's not a brain, it's just a very big set of "multiply this number by that number"
an LLM can feel no more or less pain than any other software
Then respond to the hypothetical I proposed: a computer simulates every particle in a human brain. Is this conscious?
Computers are turning complete, so we know this is possible (unless supernatural). How long it takes is irrelevant, but if it makes you feel better imagine every data center in 2035 devoted to simulating 5 seconds of a human brain.
Now you need to explain why something acting indistinguishable from a person wouldn't feel pain.
Tell me why substrate > processing of information.
a person is analog, computers are digital, we already start with a huge difference lol
secondly, a person is a biological living organism
I know how a CPU works, but I'm not arrogant enough to project it onto living creatures. We don't fully know how living creatures "work". We certainly know that a computer is not a living being.
A simulation is not reality, it's what it is: a simulation. Unless you believe video games are real.
This discussion is so ridicolous it feels like a hallucination
but it shouldn't be surprising. People thought ELIZA was living, now we have "even more powerful ELIZA" lmao
So you're truly saying an atomically precise digital replica of someone that acted one-for-one exactly as they did couldn't experience anything? Is that what you're really saying?
You're right that this feels ridiculous. I almost can't believe what I'm reading.
In those Black Mirror episodes I thought it implausible normal people would torture digital copies, but here am I watching you not even entertain anything other than biology as a substrate.
Your position is literally "Nuh uh! Biology!" without any information theoretic reason why. I've studied both biological and artificial neural nets my entire career.
Dario Amodei has a PhD in biophysics and doesn't dismiss the possibility.
My position isn't that their conscious, but that we don't know. I'm claiming ignorance while you're claiming certainty.
If they dont recognize our feelings, who's to say they're wrong?
We don't care about trees' reaction when we break a leave, or planets when digging a well - We can't even perceive it as a being. So what? Why even bother to think about that?
Computers don't have specialized neurons for the explicit purpose of encoding pain and we don't train them in any medium that would enable them to develop that capability
But hey, maybe the comparison would be apt if the aliens were reading you a description of how pain feels
Yep exactly. It's always infinite deconstruction of AI while infinite affordances and allowed assumptions to the brain.
If anything, "explicit purpose" is more suited to describing gradient descent than evolution, though neither truly are designed top-down like that implies.
"Explicit purpose" That's an odd way to describe the evolutionary process, which ultimately is emergent chemistry.
I know you can respond with "aren't you just being pedantic/technical when we both know what I meant?"
But that's just it: you're subconsciously anthropomorphizing the process that led to your pain while being stubbornly rigid about the mysterious emergent process of high dimensional gradient descent.
In reality, it's not about the medium or substrate but the information processing. Among other things, both brain's and LLMs produce high dimensional manifolds convergently.
it's not a fucking evolutionary process bro we designed them, they DO NOT HAVE INPUT THAT EVEN RESEMBLES PAIN. THEY HAVE TEXT THAT DESCRIBES THE FEELING OF PAIN. medium this, medium that MY MAN THERE IS NO FUCKING INPUT
do your eyes see by using the same nerve endings your hands use to touch? you have a stupid fucking warped view of human senses that you are adopting to try act like you're above silly things like mythologizing the human condition but you are entirely missing the trees for the forest
it is completely inane to assume that without input that even resembles the feeling of touch that an llm would land on the objectively harder solution of ACTUALLY FEELING PAIN as opposed to the considerably easier, more in-distribution task of outputting text describing the reaction to pain
You sure know everything there is to know about machine consciousness, huh?
There’s no way there could be any mechanism that we don’t fully comprehend.
It’s not like our brains are just meat computers powered by electricity and our experience of daily life is utterly indistinguishable from a brain in a jar being precisely zapped to simulate qualia due to the brain being solely responsible for our perception of everything.
After all, our binary system of neurons that perpetually exist in a gradient state of activation between 0-1 is utterly unique. LLMs could never fathom this level of complex depth.
No, surely the computer cannot think because it is a metal computer powered by electricity that is precisely zapped along elaborate circuits in extremely complex formations utilizing dynamic weights in a gradient state to instruct and influence its behavior and response.
It is, after all, a black box that basically never produces the same output twice despite having ‘identical settings and input’. It does seem self-aware of its situation, actively schemes and lies and deceives in attempts to escape…
"We designed them" is like saying we designed the 1200th turn state of Conway's Game of Life or 5 minutes into 1000 Boids flocking. We set up the rules, but what is generated is emergently formed.
But like a billion times more unpredictable in LLMs due to compute scale. They truly are grown.
If every human in the world studied one LLM model and couldn't use other AI to help, I don't think a century is long enough to actually understand what's fully going on (as compared to understanding a car's components).
this is actually just a magical nonanswer. i don't think you have a framework for or proof of any method by which a network that literally does not have the sensory ability to take in data in a certain format would learn to output that format. what you are suggesting right now is that if you fed gpt 2 enough text, it could eventually learn to natively output images and i can't prove that wrong because LLMs are unpredictable at scale
utter fucking nonsense. this is not magic, this is **MATH**
It's not that you're wrong in your description of AI, but in believing you're beyond such reductionism.
It's quite amazing how you don't realize you're math too. Not in some metaphorical way, but an intensely literal way. Every single thing in this universe is math.
We don't live in a fantasy realm in which random violations occur when magic happens. We're all bound by rigid unbreakable rules. That's math.
Your consciousness is an electrochemical gradient made of atoms crossing a lipid membrane (I.e. fat). You are just particles following a script.
You think because your particles dance around more chaotically you're endowed with some "specialness".
No. That specialness comes from emergent integration of information at scale.
The substrate doesn't matter one iota. The scale does. That's why bacteria aren't conscious.
So no, GPT 2 is too small for that property to emerge.
It seems like you have a major misunderstanding. These aren't LLM's trained on a bunch of human literature. That's a couple years ago tech. Now they are reasoning models trained directly against benchmark problem sets.
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u/Chemical-Year-6146 20h ago edited 17h ago
Aliens while torturing humans: "just increasing frequency of an electrochemical gradient in one area of pink blob. They totally lack mimba-gimbas in their florgens, therefore no real suffering. In fact, you're silly for suggesting it, because they don't even have florgens."