Comment by ofjcihen
12 hours ago
Incredibly confusing that people who are otherwise of sound mind seem to fall for this.
Especially confusing when it’s someone who knows how algorithms work.
Barring connectivity issues when’s the last time you messaged an LLM and it just decided to ignore you? Conversely when has it ever messaged you unprompted?
Never, because they’re incapable of doing anything independently because there is no sense of self.
I feel the same. So many smart people who see computation emulating a human close enough and providing actual beauty in their word-order choice, and boom they get all confused.
The discussions are great though, collectively we get better and better at communicating about our own consciousness, because these system push the limits of our definitions, like viruses push our definitions of life. And boy do we like our definitions!
When's the last time a friend said hello to you in person and you just ignored them?
When's the last time you messaged me unprompted?
These seems like bizzare objections, a system can only act in the way that it can act. A tree is never going to get up and start walking, why would a LLM ever start a conversation unprompted? That just isn't how the system can behave.
You are just as limited by deterministic physical processes in your brain as an LLM is in a cpu.
They are not. The challenge is the turing test, and due to these behaviours they fail. It is as easy as that, and the objections are valid.
This is the way! I also do not understand the awareness-cult. It seems they willingly want to be fooled by LLM:s.
That being said however, yes, we do not have any good definition of consciousness that is universally accepted, which makes the whole discussion useless or at risk of people talking past each other.
Try being rude to them, they will usually respond back politely.
If you've followed Dawkins' trajectory, I don't think it's clear that he's "otherwise of sound mind" anymore.
He's had some very strange output on biological gender, where he tries to handwave away the existence of intersex people. And he's a biologist.
"Intersex" is a misleading umbrella term for a whole bunch of different DSDs, each of which is 100% specific to one biological sex. And I don't think I've ever seen the term "biological gender"; about the only thing gender proponents seem to agree on is that it's NOT biological.
Biological gender exists. If you have a Y you're male, and if not, you're female. Easy as that. I, for one, am happy that wokeness and the post-truth ideology that tries to teach that there is no truth in math, is on its way to the garbage heap of history. It has done enough damage already, and must be thrown away quickly.