• 25 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I don’t feel like LLMs are conscious and I act accordingly as though they aren’t, but I do wonder about the confidence with which you can totally dismiss the notion. Assuming that they are seems like a leap, but since we don’t really know exactly what consciousness is, it seems difficult to rigorously decide upon what does and doesn’t get to be in the category. The usual means by which LLMs are explained not to be conscious, and indeed what I usually say myself, is something like your “they just output probability based on current context” or some variation of “they’re just guessing the next word”, but… is that definitely nothing like what we ourselves do and then call consciousness? Or if indeed that is definitively quite unlike anything we do, does that dissimilarity alone suffice to declare LLMs not conscious? Is ours the only possible example of consciousness, or is the process that drives the behaviour with LLMs possibly just another form or another way of arriving at consciousness? There’s evidently something that triggers an instinctual categorising, most wouldn’t classify a rock as conscious and would find my suggestion that ‘maybe it’s just consciousness in another form than ours’ a pretty weak way to assert that it is, but then again there’s quite a long way between a literal rock and these models running on specific rocks arranged in a particular way and which produce text in a way that’s really similar to the human beings that we all collectively tend to agree are conscious. Is being able to summarise the mechanisms that underpin the behaviour who’s output or manifestation looks like consciousness, enough on it’s own to explain why it definitely isn’t consciousness? Because, what if our endeavours to understand consciousness and understand a biological basis for it in ourselves bear fruit and we can explain deterministically how brains and human consciousness work? In that case, we could, if not totally predict human behaviours deterministically, then at least still give a pretty good and similar summarisation of how we produce those behaviours that look like consciousness. Would we at that point declare that human beings are not conscious either, or would we need a new basis upon which to exclude these current machine approximations of it?

    I always felt that things such as the Chinese Room thought experiment didn’t adequately deal with what I was driving at in the previous paragraph and it seems to me that dismissals of machine consciousness on the grounds that LLMs are just statistical models that don’t know what they are doing are missing a similar point. Are we sure that we ourselves are not mechanistically following complicated rules just as neural networks and LLMs are and that’s simply what the experience of consciousness actually is - an unconscious execution of rulesets? Before the current crop of technology that has renewed interest in these questions, when it all seemed a lot more theoretical and perennially decades off, I was comfortable with this uncomfortable thought. Now that we actually have these impressive models that have people wondering about the topic, I seem to be skewing more skeptical and less generous about ascribing consciousness. Suddenly now the Chinese Room thought experiment as a counter to whether these conscious-looking LLMs are really conscious looks more convincing, but that’s not because of any new or better understanding on my part. I seem to be just goal post shifting when faced with something that does a better job of looking conscious than any technology I’d seen previously.





  • I still don’t understand how you arrive at the big heavy ball attached to the handle with a sturdy metal chain. If you’re a poor farmer and you don’t have anything better than your two little spindly wooden sticks attached by a little hinge in the middle, where do you get a heavy spiky iron ball? And a complicated chain, and how does your threshing flail built only to support the weight of another wooden stick not snap when you use it? And if you had access to a spiky metal ball, couldn’t you just attach it to the end of a longer thicker wooden stick and make a standby spear? Or moreover if our had to have some parts made despite your limited means, surely the capacity to have any of the constituent weaponised flail parts made would put you in a position to have something way better forged. It seems like almost anything would make more sense than that. Hell even a big iron club to bash people with at least wouldn’t involve trying to deal with a swinging chain.









  • I think the problem op had with this situation and boss’ approach was that it definitely had shades of admonishment, or at least potentially so, hence wanting to know op’s the thought process. I don’t manage people professionally and never have so I’m not speaking from knowledge of best practice, but I do know that in general this isn’t going to be conducive to good outcomes. Necessary or otherwise, if admonishment or at least finding of fault with the behaviour of the person is on the cards doing so publicly is embarrassing and unlikely to foster the goodwill required for that person to think or behave differently since it moves the whole situation out of the framing of learning a lesson about how to do your job in future and in to something adversarial, with the boss now a malign influence to be resented or feared or both and the humiliation in front of peers now also means that person is more likely to feel isolated from them too with their peers are now to be viewed with apprehension as well as the boss. It’s hard to work well and to avoid making mistakes with such factors at play. One such occasion alone, probably not, but if it’s something boss wants to do a lot as a general management strategy, it’s hard to see that going well for anyone involved.


  • I’ve always felt KFC is just rated. Obviously the ads by KFC for KFC will claim it to be the best food ever invented but in terms of how people seem to perceive it and how I perceive it, the experience tastes and feels like what it is. It’s mostly enjoyable, fatty salty meat and it’s deep fried which is kinda the fast food signature taste and texture. It’s got a lot going for it, in the way that fried chicken generally as a food does, but it’s also extremely poor quality fried chicken and rarely very fresh but that all balances out to something that pretty much works for what you want out of it and it doesn’t seem to me like anyone expects much more of it.





  • It sounds a lot like they took something their psychologist said, in context, misremembered the exact wording and intended meaning, selectively reconstructed it, disregarded the original context and then applied it universally to all people in all situations instead of specifically for her in her particular circumstances as part of a sentence deeply embedded in a lot of conversation that took place before and after to try and help her understand why people act certain ways.