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Comment by esikich | Hacker News Reader

"Philosophy is an intrinsically human thing. It has to be."

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.

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I suggest you print out this exchange and spend a week away from the computer, then re-read what was printed.

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

I’d respectfully disagree here. All phenomena are defined not just by what they are but also by what they are not. I can tell something is relatively tall because I can compare its size to something small. In a fully isolated environment with no reference points, the concept of a given object being small or tall is meaningless.

If we apply that same thought process to philosophy and reason, how can you define it without creating boundaries of what it is not?

I think that's kind of what I'm trying to say.

"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.

> irrelevant to us because we're not

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.

Yes, because they are human and that is the whole point.

An LLM can't find anything interesting except that it parroted the word interesting from prior written human text.

"Alien philosophy is irrelevant to us because we're not aliens"

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.

Chinese are human.

Our only reference point with an alien philosophy would be that we can only approach it from human basis

These discussions are older than computers. I suggest you take a beginner level philosophy course.

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