Comment by coldtea
18 hours ago
Not having yet read the original story, this reads fine on its own.
And I didn't see it as much as a literary attempt for art's sake, but more of a dialogue-based technical parable trying to convey a real-world insight. Kind of like the ones in Godel Escher Bach.
>You could perform exactly the same rhetorical trick with a toaster or anything else.
Not sure which rhetorical trick is that. The point of the story, as I read it, is the technical insight (and some social implications of it).
P.S. Read the original too. Seems like the exact same could have been written about us instead of the original, if the focus wasn't on our substrate, but on our brain processing. Which, after all, is also about weights.
> Not sure which rhetorical trick is that. The point of the story, as I read it, is the technical insight (and some social implications of it).
Take a simple mechanism which has exceedingly low number of inputs and states and create a narrative around it to convey it as intelligent.
For a toaster, I can rewrite the think as "They're made of metal strips!", pointing out that their thermostat is a bimetal strip, and extrapolate from there.
I can even write one about a ruler, if I can bend it enough, no pun intended.
>Take a simple mechanism which has exceedingly low number of inputs and states and create a narrative around it to convey it as intelligent. (...) For a toaster, I can rewrite the think as "They're made of metal strips!", pointing out that their thermostat is a bimetal strip, and extrapolate from there.
Doesn't that miss the whole point?
You could write "They're made of metal strips!". You wouldn't be able to write much else, as toasters don't have showcase in the way of human-level intelligent behavior. Which is the whole point in the meat and weights versions.
At best you could write "They're made of metal strips!" for toasters AND other metallic devices, and use some analogies of features BOTH have in common. But they wouldn't be intelligence related behaviors.
Oh, no. When you add thermal sensing and offsetting ambient temperature, you can add all kind of "seemingly" intelligent features like feeling the emotions of the bread, and creating the perfect toast without hurting the cute little bread slices, making them perfectly blonde while not showing cruelty to them.
They can even adapt to their environment and the characteristics of the bread even with simplest of mechanisms because the text will be overglossing the fact that different types of breads have different thermal characteristics and this will deeply affect the behavior of the metal strips, bordering near a sentient being even more thoughtful and considerate than a human which is rushing through house to catch the bus in the morning.
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> Not knowing the original story, this reads fine on its own.
Yes. Because it's heavily based on the original story. The existence of the original story is kind of a critical piece here.
Might be. But after having read the original, it could just as well be the weights version and still be about us to begin with.
I don't see how "you could do that with a toaster" still. The whole point between the original and this, is that you can't do that with a toaster or a sofa, but you can do it with meat and weights, because both share all the other analogies in the story, as well as the basic premise: the improbability of something like thinking, feeling, etc arising from a lowly substrate.
And having read both now, I see how the existence of the original is a plus for this story, not a minus. Instead of making look like mere copy (as would be the case for a typical story modelled after another), in this case, it adds a meta layer, and enriches it.
The key point here, I think, and why it's necessary to have read the original story, is that being able to express an idea is not the same as that idea being correct.
You could go through and change all the points in the original story to be about a toaster instead. It would require you to edit text, but there is no barrier to doing that.
What I think a lot of people are getting stuck on is that editing the text to say 'toaster' would not mean that toasters were conscious, and that editing the text to say 'weights' doesn't mean that weights are conscious either. Stories aren't factual just because they are written.
The original story was written by the thing claiming to be conscious; the LLM and toaster ones would not be, which undermines the claim to consciousness a lot.
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