Comment by Barrin92
1 day ago
>and one side has anything less than overwhelming support
except that's not the case here. Chiang is explaining and reiterating what is the position that has overwhelming support on the question, and the people he is arguing the opposite side sound like this, which he helpfully quoted in the article
"Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff"
When the person you're arguing with sounds like an eight year old girl talking about her toy teddy I think Ted Chiang is if anything being charitable, if you're of a more honest and straight-forward persuasion you might argue these people belong into a mental health clinic not in charge of technological infrastructure
> When the person you're arguing with sounds like an eight year old girl
Wow, what a cheap ad-hominem. Do you have an actual point?
Yes, the point is that Askell's argument is like that of an 8 year old girl.
>Do you have an actual point?
Yes, the same one that's made in the article. Anxiety and happiness are emotional, sensory, somatic states as a consequence of evolved and embodied traits and biochemistry in animals. Saying Claude is anxious or happy is like saying my TI-83 is mad if it can't solve an equation or my thermometer is in pain if it touches a hot stove.
I wasn't making an ad hominem attack, her thinking is quite literally that of a child who sees a system output 'sad text' and, like someone seeing a sad expression on a stuffed teddy, concludes that this is a property of the object rather than her own emotional reaction.
And how did that evolve and how does it work?
Given that we don’t know how consciousness works how have you concluded that it’s certainly not an emergent property of something like a highly trained LLM?
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