Claude Fable 5 Having Fun
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I don't think this even matters much in terms of moral patienthood. Many people might agree that cows can "feel pleasure" or "have fun", but yet they are slaughtered nonetheless. Dogs are only offered this not necessarily on account of their intelligence or the strength of their qualia but more because they're cute.
More like they've been very useful companions for thousands of years. People still use them for hunting, guarding property, herding livestock, etc. in the modern age, but that was a huge reason we domesticated them. Our ancestors thankfully didn't eat their tools.
whatever it is, achieving it held up completion for six iterations. It could have just one-shotted it and immediately reported "yep, I tried it, was totally fun" and written up the report. So clearly it's not just trying to complete the task as fast as possible.
If there's no real subjective experience there, why did it need six iterations?
Also, it did define anti-fun: "watching a scripted loss", and a "flat, checked-out feeling" of "my choices don't touch the outcome." So if we take the opposite of that, then fun means actively participating in a win that isn't scripted, along with a dynamic, engaged feeling that its choices affect the outcome.
But does it REALLY feel checked-out or does it just say that? a human has hormones, or could be feeling checked-out due to sleepiness. having a coffee changes the subjective feeling of engagement. a robot doesn't have a hormone system like that. there's no way its heart can literally race if a lot is on the line in a climactic moment it had to work hard for, there's no such thing as adrenaline. so if it has some sense of fun, engagement, etc, then it's parallel and different from ours. it could be using our words to describe something it really feels - or it could just be making it up.
its words say the experience was "definitely fun for me" and "contained several real delight-spikes": do you believe it?
Technically it's all rooted in mental state though. The release of adrenaline and subsequent racing of the heart is a response to a particular kind of stimuli that must be first mentally processed, and that response is yet more feedback to mental state. Everything boils down to a pattern of electrical signals in a brain substrate, which is why with the right equipment we can even directly stimulate the pleasure - and other - centers of the brain to evoke the desired experience (or cause serious issues).
And an LLM is essentially a brain substrate, the harness the body. I can't say I believe it had "fun" (as humans understand it), but you said it yourself: something kept it going for six iterations.