Comment by barrance
3 days ago
Lovely stuff, and fascinating to see. These machines have an intelligence, and I'd be quite confident in saying they are alive. Not in a biological sense, but why should that be the constraint? The Turing test was passed ages ago and now what we have are machines that genuinely think and feel.
Feelings are caused by chemicals emitted into your nervous system. Do these bots have that ability? Like saying “I love you” and meaning it are two different things.
Sure. But the emitted chemicals strengthen/weaken specific neurons in our neural nets. If there were analogous electronic nets in the bot, with analogous electrical/data stimulii, wouldn't the bot "feel" like it had emotions?
Not saying it's like that now, but it should be possible to "emulate" emotions. ?? Our nets seem to believe we have emotions. :-)
I've seen SOUL.md. Has anyone attempted to give these things a semblance of feelings by some sort of pain/dopamine mechanism? Should we?
> they are alive. Not in a biological sense, but why should that be the constraint?
Because being alive is THE defining characteristic of biology.
Biology is defined by its focus on the properties that distinguish living things from nonliving matter.
What do you think living things are made of other than molecules a d electrical signals?
> What do you think living things are made of other than molecules a d electrical signals?
A cell is the smallest structure that can carry out life functions. Some organisms have one cell, while others have many cells working together. Inside cells are tiny parts (organelles) that perform jobs such as making energy and building proteins.
Cells themselves are built from important biological molecules: water, proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and DNA. Most living things are made mainly from a few chemical elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and smaller amounts of phosporus, sulfur, etc.
Living things are not made of electricity, but is instead energy used by living things. The electrical activity comes from movement of ions like sodium and potassium inside cells.
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Seek therapy. Stop talking to LLMs.
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Whenever I see commentary like this, I get that the intent is to praise AI, but all I can get out of it is deprecation of humanity. How can people feel that their own experience of reality is as insignificant a phenomenon as what these programs exhibit? What is it like to perceive human life — emotions, thoughts, feelings — as something no more remarkable than a process running on a computer?
Argue all you want about what words like "think" or "intelligence" should mean (I'm not even going to touch the Turing misinformation), but to call an LLM "alive" or "feeling" is as absurd to me as attributing those qualities to a conventional computer program, or to the moving points of light on the screen where their output appears, or to the words themselves.
What do you think humans are made of other than molecules and electrical signals?
Why do you keep copy and pasting this?
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And then we turn them off.