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People like to, ahem, parrot this view, that we are not much more than parrots ourselves. But it's nonsense. There is something it is like to be me. I might be

People like to, ahem, parrot this view, that we are not much more than parrots ourselves. But it's nonsense. There is something it is like to be me. I might be doing some things "on autopilot" but while I'm doing that I'm having dreams, nostalgia, dealing with suffering, and so on.

bloomca 8mo ago
All your thoughts are and experiences are real and pretty unique in some ways. However, the circumstances are usually well-defined and expected (our life is generally very standardized), so the responses can be generalized successfully. You can see it here as well -- discussions under similar topics often touch the same topics again and again, so you can predict what will be discussed when the next similar idea comes to the front page.
- ccppurcell 8mo ago
  So what if we are quite predictable. That doesn't mean we are "trying" to predict the next word, or "trying" to be predictable, which is what llms are doing. Over a large population, trends emerge. An LLM is not a member of the population, it is a replicator of trends in a population, not a population of souls but of sentences, a corpus.
JohnMakin 8mo ago
It’s a weird product of this hype cycle that inevitably involves denying the crazy power of the human brain - every second you are awake or asleep the brain is processing enormous amounts of information available to it without you even realizing it, and even when you abuse the crap out of the brain, or damage it, it still will adapt and keep working as long as it has energy. No current ai technology could come close to what even the dumbest human brain does already.
- djeastm 8mo ago
  A lot of that behind-the-scenes processing is keeping our meatbags alive, though, and is shared with a lot of other animals. Language and higher-order reasoning (that AI seems better and better at) has only evolved quite recently.

bloomca 8mo ago

All your thoughts are and experiences are real and pretty unique in some ways. However, the circumstances are usually well-defined and expected (our life is generally very standardized), so the responses can be generalized successfully. You can see it here as well -- discussions under similar topics often touch the same topics again and again, so you can predict what will be discussed when the next similar idea comes to the front page.

ccppurcell 8mo ago
So what if we are quite predictable. That doesn't mean we are "trying" to predict the next word, or "trying" to be predictable, which is what llms are doing. Over a large population, trends emerge. An LLM is not a member of the population, it is a replicator of trends in a population, not a population of souls but of sentences, a corpus.

JohnMakin 8mo ago

It’s a weird product of this hype cycle that inevitably involves denying the crazy power of the human brain - every second you are awake or asleep the brain is processing enormous amounts of information available to it without you even realizing it, and even when you abuse the crap out of the brain, or damage it, it still will adapt and keep working as long as it has energy. No current ai technology could come close to what even the dumbest human brain does already.

djeastm 8mo ago
A lot of that behind-the-scenes processing is keeping our meatbags alive, though, and is shared with a lot of other animals. Language and higher-order reasoning (that AI seems better and better at) has only evolved quite recently.