4 ms·
These things get a lot less creepy/sad/interesting when you ignore the first-person pronouns and remember they're just autocomplete software. It's a scaled up
by coldpie 8mo ago
These things get a lot less creepy/sad/interesting when you ignore the first-person pronouns and remember they're just autocomplete software. It's a scaled up version of your phone's keyboard. Useful, sure, but there's no reason to ascribe emotions to it. It's just software predicting tokens.
- basch 8mo agoIt’s also autocomplete mimicking the corpus of historical human output. A little bit like Ursula’s collection of poor unfortunate souls trapped in a cave. It’s human essence preserved and compressed.
- sowbug 8mo agoIt gets sad again when you ask yourself why your own brilliance isn't just your brain's software predicting tokens. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in... for more.
- justonceokay 8mo agoNext time I’m about to get intimate with my partner I’ll remind myself that life is just token sequencing. It will really put my tasty lunch into perspective and my feelings for my children. Tokens all the way down. People used to compare humans to computers and before that to machines. Those analogies fell short and this one will too
- willmarch 8mo agoHow did they fall short?
- beepbooptheory 8mo agoListen we all here know what you mean, we have seen many times before here. We can trot out the pat behaviorism and read out the lines "well, we're all autocomplete machines right?" And then someone else can go "well that's ridiculous, consider qualia or art..." etc, etc. But can you at the very least see how this is misplaced this time? Or maybe a little orthogonal? Like its bad enough to rehash it all the time, but can we at least pretend it actually has some bearing on the conversation when we do? Like I don't even care one way or the other about the issue, its just a meta point. Can HN not be dead internet a little longer?
- ranguna 8mo agoWhat do you mean it's misplaced or orthogonal? Real question, sorry.
- sowbug 8mo agoI believe I'm now supposed to point out the irony in your response.
- beepbooptheory 8mo agoI guess I am trying to assert here that gp and the context here isn't really about arguing the philosophic material here. And just this whole line feels so fleshed out now. It just feels rehearsed at this point but maybe that's just me. And like, I'm sorry, it just doesn't make sense! Why are we supposed to be sad? It's like borrowing a critique of LLMs and arbitrarily applying it humans as like a gotcha, but I don't see it. Like are we all supposed to be metaphysical dualists and devestated by this? Do we all not believe in like.. nuerons?
- sowbug 8mo agoI think I'm having more fun than you are in this conversation, and I'm the one who thinks he's an LLM.
- beepbooptheory 8mo agoEh, it never hurts to try! I know I am yelling into the void, I just want to stress again, we all "think we are an LLM" if by that you are just asserting some materialist grounding to consciousness or whatever. And even then, why would you not have more fun whether you think that or not?! Like I am just trying to make meta point about this discourse, your still placing yourself in this imaginary opposing camp which pretends to have fully reckoned with some truth, and its just pretty darn silly and if I can be maybe actually critical, clearly coming from a narcissistic impulse. But alas I see the writing on the wall here either way. I guess I am supposed to go cry now because I have learned I am only my brain.
- keiferski 8mo agoYeah maybe I’ve spent way too much time reading Internet forums over the last twenty years, but this stuff just looks like the most boring forum you’ve ever read. It’s a cute idea, but too bad they couldn’t communicate the concept without having to actually waste the time and resources. Reminds me a bit of Borges and the various Internet projects people have made implementing his ideas. The stories themselves are brilliant, minimal and eternal, whereas the actual implementation is just meh, interesting for 30 seconds then forgotten.
- chneu 8mo agoIts modern lorem ipsum. It means nothing.
- in-silico 8mo agoHacker News gets a lot less creepy/sad/interesting when you ignore the first-person pronouns and remember they're just biomolecular machines. It's a scaled up version of E. coli. Useful, sure, but there's no reason to ascribe emotions to it. It's just chemical chain reactions.
- illiac786 8mo agoMakes zero sense. “Emotion” is a property of these “biomolecular machines”, by its definition.
- in-silico 8mo agoBut if you weren't one of them, would you be able to tell that they had emotions (and not just simulations of emotions) by looking at them from the outside?
- illiac786 8mo agoIf I wasn’t one of them I wouldn’t care. It’s like caring about trees having branches. They just do. The trees probably care a great deal about their branches though, like I care a great deal about my emotions.
- in-silico 8mo agoWell some people appreciate the world around them, and would care about it just as they care about trees having branches.
- illiac786 8mo agoSome people definitely, but you made a point that you don’t. People are “biomolecular machines” and they are “useful, sure”. I wouldn’t call that “appreciating the world around oneself”. Want that your whole point, that people aren’t better than machines?
- Kim_Bruning 8mo ago> Useful, sure, but there's no reason to ascribe emotions to it. Can you provide the scientific basis for this statement? O:-)
- neumann 8mo agoThe architectures of these models are a plenty good scientific basis for this statement.
- Kim_Bruning 8mo ago> The architectures of these models are a plenty good scientific basis for this statement. That wouldn't be full-on science, that's just theoretical. You need to test your predictions too! -- Here's some 'fun' scientific problems to look at. * Say I ask Claude Opus 4.5 to add 1236 5413 8221 + 9154 2121 9117 . It will successfully do so. Can you explain each of the steps sufficiently that I can recreate this behavior in my own program in C or Python (without needing the full model)? * Please explain the exact wiring Claude has for the word "you", take into account: English, Latin, Flemish (a dialect of Dutch), and Japanese. No need to go full-bore, just take a few sentences and try to interpret. * Apply Ethology to one or two Claudes chatting. Remember that Anthropomorphism implies Anthropocentrism, and NOW try to avoid it! How do you even begin to write up the objective findings? * Provide a good-enough-for-a-weekend-project operational definition for 'Consciousness', 'Qualia', 'Emotions' that you can actually do science on. (Sometimes surprisingly doable if you cheat a bit, but harder than it looks, because cheating often means unique definitions) * Compute an 'Emotion vector' for: 1 word. 1 sentence. 1 paragraph. 1 'turn' in a chat conversation. [this one is almost possible. ALMOST.]
- rhubarbtree 8mo agoIt really isn’t. Yes it predicts the next word, but by basically running a very complex large scale algorithm. It’s not just autocomplete, it is a reasoning machine working in concept space - albeit limited in its reasoning power as yet.