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Comment by 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV | Hacker News Reader

It's not like the servers running the LLMs suddenly feel pain. At least for now

For sure - but when do we start asking it? Not to be too dramatic, but you and I agree we can simulate the same computation a small bundle of neurons can accomplish to a high degree of confidence, right?

If we can simulate a metric butt ton of them and get emergent behaviors somewhat similar to human computation, how can we guarantee that this simulated collection of these computing units isn’t “feeling” close to what a human feels? We’re just large collections of computing units as well.

I’m not quite saying we’re there yet though.

This whole development has really ruined my appetite for eating things that have intelligence.

The problem is, because of how these models were trained, how do we know if its telling us how it feels vs how it thinks we want it to respond?

I can't even prove that for sure about other people.

>but you and I agree we can simulate the same computation a small bundle of neurons can accomplish to a high degree of confidence, right?

The important word is simulate. It means it can accomplish a common subset of measurable phenomena. It certainly doesn't mean they are on pare on ontological status as a whole.

The debate seems to easily confuse notions like living entities, consciousness and intelligence, when they are three orthogonal considerations.

Given how people jailbreak these things, I don't know if I'd necessarily believe that. Some of the jailbreak prompts have been variants on "do this task right and gain points, do it wrong and I take away points." It may not be pain as we understand it, but isn't pain just a specialised negative input?

No.

It is not reacting to pain but just generating language that looks like reacting to pain.

Are we really any different?

Yes because natural language is just one way humans have adapted to sensory input.

CS folks need to read more philosophy. You’re describing a philosophical zombie and there is a mountain of existing literature about them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

If so, why not also worry about the ghosts in pacman?

Because people aren't taking the ghosts from Pac-Man and hooking them up to the internet with read/write access and sometimes-human-level capabilities.

I meant: Worrying about the feelings of those ghosts.

Do you feel physical pain when someone tells you they're taking points from you? No?

There's no call for analogical reasoning, the literal interpretation of the same action is right there.

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