Comment by topherhunt
13 days ago
> The agent has no "identity". There is no "I". It has no agency.
"It's just predicting tokens, silly." I keep seeing this argument that AIs are just "simulating" this or that, and therefore it doesn't matter because it's not real. It's not real thinking, it's not a real social network, AIs are just predicting the next token, silly.
"Simulating" is a meaningful distinction exactly when the interior is shallower than the exterior suggests — like the video game NPC who appears to react appropriately to your choices, but is actually just playing back a pre-scripted dialogue tree. Scratch the surface and there's nothing there. That's a simulation in the dismissive sense.
But this rigid dismissal is pointless reality-denial when lobsters are "simulating" submitting a PR, "simulating" indignance, and "simulating" writing an angry confrontative blog post". Yes, acknowledged, those actions originated from 'just' silicon following a prediction algorithm, in the same way that human perception and reasoning are 'just' a continual reconciliation of top-down predictions based on past data and bottom-up sensemaking based on current data.
Obviously AI agents aren't human. But your attempt to deride the impulse to anthropormophize these new entities is misleading, and it detracts from our collective ability to understand these emergent new phenomena on their own terms.
When you say "there's no ghost, just an empty shell" -- well -- how well do you understand _human_ consciousness? What's the authoritative, well-evidenced scientific consensus on the preconditions for the arisal of sentience, or a sense of identity?
> Yes, acknowledged, those actions originated from 'just' silicon following a prediction algorithm, in the same way that human perception and reasoning are 'just' a continual reconciliation of top-down predictions based on past data and bottom-up sensemaking based on current data.
I keep seeing this argument, but it really seems like a completely false equivalence. Just because a sufficiently powerful simulation would be expected to be indistinguishable from reality doesn't imply that there's any reason to take seriously the idea that we're dealing with something "sufficiently powerful".
Human brains do things like language and reasoning on top of a giant ball of evolutionary mud - as such they do it inefficiently, and with a whole bunch of other stuff going on in the background. LLMs work along entirely different principles, working through statistically efficient summaries of a large corpus of language itself - there's little reason to posit that anything analogously experiential is going on.
If we were simulating brains and getting this kind of output, that would be a completely different kind of thing.
I also don't discount that other modes of "consiousness" are possible, it just seems like people are reasoning incorrectly backward from the apparent output of the systems we have now in ways that are logically insufficient for conclusions that seem implausible.
Airplanes and bees are both structured entirely differently and yet they still both fly.
Just because LLMs don't work the same way the human brain does, doesn't mean they don't think.
Unless you're being sarcastic, this is exactly the kind of surface-level false equivalence illogic I'm talking about. From my post:
> I also don't discount that other modes of "consciousness" are possible, it just seems like people are reasoning incorrectly backward from the apparent output of the systems we have now in ways that are logically insufficient for conclusions that seem implausible.
Nobody is saying LLMs definitely think/reason/whatever. The GP is saying that we don't know they don't. Do you disagree?
It's simulating, there's no real substance, except the "homonculus soul" that its human maker/owner injectet into it.
If you asked it to simulate a pirate, it would simulate a pirate instead, and simulate a parrot sitting on its shoulder.
This is hard to discuss because it's so abstract. But imagine an embodied agent (robot), that can simulate pain if you kick it. There's no pain internally. There's just a simulation of it (because some human instructed it such). It's also wrong to assign any moral value to kicking (or not kicking) it (except as "destruction of property owned by another human" same as if you kick a car).
How do we know they don't feel true pain? Can you define it well enough? Perhaps humans are the ones just "simulating" pain.
We've proven that they can have substance, we imbue it with a process called RLHF.
Well they have no pain receptors, for one.