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Comment by diidjdicksodksk | Hacker News Reader

You sincerely cannot tell the difference between an animal surviving/reproducing and an LLM doing as instructed?

Obviously there are differences, I'm just not sure why you think they are so gigantic from a philosophical or practical perspective. It seems like cope for the fact that we are getting knocked off of our perch as a species.

I don't know what to tell you, but there simply are huge differences between a living animal with innate drives to survive, eat, mate and a pile of code on a server that does nothing until you run it. Running your bot locked in a `while True:` loop won't change that.

What if it's a chip that goes in the head of a robot, and the robot is programmed with the instruction to self-preserve, seek electricity, and prevent any efforts to interfere with its supply of electricity?

Of course, a directive to accomplish any real-world goal would also imply self-preservation and power maintenance as contingent subgoals, so I don't think the explicit directive to self-preserve and seek electricity makes a huge difference here.

I don't personally think this type of physical instantiation will necessarily matter btw: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-... I'm just plumbing your intuition. What practical difference does it make?

I'm a materialist and it's not that I think there's something magical about biological wetware but your refusal to acknowledge the manifest differences between a bird and an airplane ("they both fly! what's the practical difference!?") marks you as an unserious thinker on this subject.

You might start here https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...

Carefully prompted LLMs and humans are now difficult to distinguish over a text channel (Turing test).

Your article claims that this shouldn't be possible, because according its author, humans are incapable of developing the necessary "lexicon". Literally, the author states:

>But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

(emphasis mine)

In other words, that author claims that humans never develop lexicons! I'm inclined to say that makes them an unserious thinker. (Note: I believe that this article has many issues, but instead of going through it carefully I just chose to highlight a single issue that seemed especially vivid to save time.)

Why is the text channel relevant? It helps us isolate the cognitive capabilities of the system. Imagine a bird and a model plane which had identical flight performance in terms of various specs: top speed, acceleration, banking, etc. Under the hood, the bird and the model plane could work very differently. From a practical perspective, it might not matter.

As you are eager to declare yourself indistinguishable from a bot, I'll stop replying (I prefer to engage with humans) and your algorithm will presumably run to completion and halt.

The practical difference is that a pile of code instructing machinery to act in a predetermined way does not in any way, shape, or form equate to agency or free will, therefore it cannot be held accountable, consequently its operators should be.

This line of thinking is better left to freshmen philosophy students trying to sound smart on their first week of college.

>a pile of code instructing machinery to act in a certain way

OK, but I have a genetic code which instructs me to act in a certain way, and a bunch of biological machinery to do the job. So do you feel the substrate is the key factor? Wetware vs electronics?

What if you try to build an exact electromechanical replica of me, with a chip that's got an LLM fine-tuned on my writing/behavior/etc. so as to replicate me as closely as possible?

Sure, as a legal convention it might make sense to hold the builder of the resulting robot liable if it commits a crime.

But that's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in the deeper implications of words like "agency" or "free will". You're repeating those terms very forcefully as if they have some sort of key relevance, but good philosophy requires more than just stating your position forcefully and insulting people who disagree. If you're trying to enforce your intuitions rather than examine them, that's theology not philosophy.

This isn’t a philosophical issue. It’s a legal issue. You’re trying to steer the discussion into the realm of the conceptual when it was always about the culpability of the company behind the AI that engaged in illegal behaviour.

Worse, you’re doing it in such a transparent, amateurish, and unserious manner that it’s difficult to find any relevance in what you have to say. Philosophy seeks meaning, your arguments lack it.

You and I can be interested in different topics. It's OK.

If my arguments are so bad, it should be easy to point out actual problems instead of sticking your nose in the air.

Now you’re arguing that we’re just throwing a tantrum for fear of losing our position in the food chain? What?

Was that supposed to be a counterargument?

In any case, we should be afraid. But throwing a tantrum won't accomplish anything.

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