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Comment by kthejoker2 | Hacker News Reader

> Nor does our tendency to personify and get theatrically mad at things like malfunctioning devices (“the printer hates me”). Those are all flavors of ironic personhood attribution. At some level, we know we’re operating in the context of an I-it relationship. Just because it’s satisfying to pretend there’s an I-you process going on doesn’t mean we entirely believe our own pretense. We can stop believing, and switch to I-it mode if necessary. The I-you element, even if satisfying, is a voluntary act we can choose to not do.

> These chatbots are different.

Strong disagree, it's very easy to step back and say this is a program, input, output, the end.

All the people claiming this is some exhibition of personhood or whatever just don't want to spoil the illusion.

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I think what the author is pointing at (with the wrong end of the stick, admittedly) is that there is nothing magical about human personhood.

It's not that these are magical machines, and TFA shouldn't have gone that direction, it's that "what if we are also just a repeated, recursive, story that endlessly drolls in our own minds"

> Seeing and being seen is apparently just neurotic streams of interleaved text flowing across a screen.

... Sounds to me a clunky analogy of how our own minds work.

It only takes a little bit of introspection (and perhaps reading a few case studies) to realize that the thing that is you is not the same as the thing that generates thoughts and uses/is made of language.

I think that's a useful meme that the network learned, to create coherent stories that alleviate suffering, and it's effective, but it's not real. But it's useful because beliefs and perceptions are all we really have. It's why CBT works.

Without the language to express "thoughts" and not-self in that level of abstraction, one cannot form the thought at all that it might not be those thoughts.

That's an interesting thought but language comprehension and language production are physically separate in the human brain and damage to one does not cause damage to the other. People with damage to Broca's area may not be able to speak or write or even gesture comprehensibly but they can still understand what others say to them or what they read. With Wernicke’s Aphasia a person may not be able to understand words said to them but they can still speak although the words they speak are largely gibberish but they still maintain correct intonation, rhythm and even grammar. Importantly, they also maintain the ability to function normally in their lives. They can still make decisions about what to do, they can plan, they can understand events that don't involve language, in all other aspects besides language they are normal.

That should be all you need to know to see that a human being doesn't solely consist of language. If you do a deeper dive into this you'll also find other cases such as Genie[0] where people with intact brains didn't initially acquire language and yet were still able to develop cognitively. We are fully capable of functioning without having a language, which makes sense if you think about it. The ability to understand language must necessarily precede the invention of a language in the same way that the ability to grasp a tool must precede the invention of the tool.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_development_of_Geni...

>> I think what the author is pointing at (with the wrong end of the stick, admittedly) is that there is nothing magical about human personhood.

If so, then the author is absolutely, terribly wrong. The human personality, how it develops, why it develops, the mechanisms by which it operates- those are some of the greatest unsolved mysteries, some of the most interesting questions in science. The nature of the world, perhaps, comes first, in the list of scientific questions; then, the nature of ourselves, of humanity.

If the authors is saying that there is nothing special about being a person, that's because they, like the rest of us, all, do not understand what it means to be a person.

You know, despite being one, and everything.