I often find the egotistical viewpoint to be banal. I don’t mean egotistical in a demeaning way - I mean it just to frame the types of thinking that revolve around the self, inner world or “my individual experience”. It’s an obvious, but not provably correct, conclusion that the human experience, consciousness and reasoning are special because I’m experiencing it in the same way that the earth is the center of the universe because look around you.
It frustrates me in these conversations to hear things like “it’s a text generator, it has no senses”. What even is a sense? For those of us who are software engineers, who live in the abstract, I do not understand why it’s so hard to take the leap to abstract over our own senses as inputs/outputs. Hell, we commonly understand that we have 5 senses but what do I make of the apple I’m visualizing in my brain or the full orchestra I can summon in my “minds eye”? Isn’t that an input just as much as an apple I see with my eyes?
What biologists find frustrating is folks looking at one kind of dancer in the field and ignoring the rest of the spectacle, and calling it done.
Philosophy is a intrinsically human thing. It has to be. That is the whole point. There really is nothing else.
Plants feel and experience things too. But there's no philosophy of the plant experience from the point of view of the plant, because why would there be?
The fact that we have a pattern recognizing word generator print out the words "I am alive" does not lead to some broader philosophical point, except for hysteria and delusions, which probably fit more along sociology instead.
What is philosophy? Thinking? Reasoning? Thinking about thinking?
You're asserting that only a human brain can think and reason? Surely other animals can as well. Couldn't aliens as well? Why can't this crazy electronic box?
Where do we draw the line? Do dolphins not have internal experiences? Dogs? Cats? Mice? Fish? Worms? Bugs? Amoebas?
We don't even really know what thinking or experience is. You can train a caterpillar to do tricks. That's pattern recognition. You can train a human to spike their heart rate when you get a Teams notification.
I mean, I'm watching an LLM run benchmarks on my caching strategy for a webpage right now. It's certainly doing something.
I'm not trying to be rude but I gave you the answers. Alien philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not aliens. Tree philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not trees. Dolphin philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not dolphins, etc.
Everything else you mentioned is "hallucinatory" and you need to probably have a break from screens for a while.
As a legitimate exercise, go ponder the philosophy of a bash script. Think about philosophy of trees in a forest vs trees in a plantation. You'll find it and see how silly you're being
If we apply that same thought process to philosophy and reason, how can you define it without creating boundaries of what it is not?
"A philosophy of LLMs" - has no reference point without being grounded in human experience.
It is only meaningful when we apply what it means to humans.
"a philosophy of a bash script." does not make sense. Only "philosophy of the action of writing the bash script, of which this is an artifact of" - the human who wrote it intentionally.
LLMs apply statistics to mash inputs and produce outputs, almost like `cat` with extra steps: We can't ask for "what was the philosophy behind the action `cat` applied" - why would we bother asking about the philosophy of an LLM? Better questions would be the philosophy of those who prompt it, built it, the material that went into it, the people who write the safeguards, the people who architected it. Etc.
It is not an isolated environment without reference points.
What an unnecessarily dismissive "argument". I'm certainly not a CPU, nor a painting, nor a bird, yet plenty of people find these topics and many others interesting.
An LLM can't find anything interesting except that it parroted the word interesting from prior written human text.
Plenty of non-Chinese people study Chinese philosophy. It isn't at all irrelevant if the goal is to understand the Chinese (not to mention that some of their ideas may be relevant to us as well). If we learned that aliens existed, I'm sure plenty of humans would want to study their philosophy too.
Our only reference point with an alien philosophy would be that we can only approach it from human basis