randomImmigrant

How much of this, I wonder, is a function of the fact that our circadian rhythms get less robust with aging. The circadian clock hugely influences learning and memory processes, gating when you can learn and how much, and shaping the storage and recall also.

We know that with age the amplitude of these rhythms can decrease, as can the synchrony between cells.

This kind of mid-management seems to have at least some circadian component, and it would have been great if they looked to see if the effects were equally bad at all times of day, and knew the chronotype of the participants to use as a reference. I’d love to see if every test participant was tested at their cognitive peak, too.

The brain does not have the Von Neumann bottleneck. Unlike most current digital systems, the brain doesn’t have a separate memory registry it needs to pull from.

Engrams, that is, the physical trace of a memory, are not stable through life. They start out in the hippocampus, but as the stimulus recedes in time without reinforcement, it moves away.

No evidence exists though that the memory is encoded in one set of cells. This spatial segregation of memory is the worst hangover from the “brain is a computer” analogy. Even if it is, why in the world would it be like our digital devices which specifically have the Von Neumann bottleneck? In biology, memory and processing are not segregated.

There’s growing evidence the memory is much more distributed over the network, and is recomposed based on salience overlap with a new stimulus.

Another factor to keep in mind is circadian rhythms. There’s growing evidence for how much the memory system and timekeeping system overlap, at a molecular level. Every neuron (and other cell) has an intrinsic clock that ticks at roughly 24 hours, and continues to do so even in total darkness.

When you encode the memory has a lot to say, based on your chronotype, on how and how well you will remember it. Same with learning: there’s a time of day based variation.

Sleep, and dreaming, is when these memories seem to get replayed and critical features and connections are incorporated into the system and its regime, awaiting the right triggers to access a state similar to when the memory formed.

I’m stitching across a lot of different research, and I want to be clear many aspects of this system are not yet fully worked out.

But what we do know points to a system that works with different physical and algorithmic priors, and the dynamics are sharply distinct from current digital computers.

I’m with Zitron on the frustration and even the analysis of the economic feasibility of AI.

What I’ve stopped doing is reading him regularly. It feels hard to parse the factual from the obviously exaggerated.

I get he’s frustrated. We all are. But I’m not sure letting it out that much helps making the very urgent case he’s making.

There’s a lot that’s good here, but you just can’t be slime molds in a modern capitalist corporation.

A substantial portion of company goals is set by a very small group that is far removed from the day to day work, and the goals are often connected to timelines and financial expectations well before any team member gets into the project.

To have slime mold like behavior, a corporation would have to hire employees, give them time and resources, and general guidelines and goals, but let specific targets and projects bubble up.

This is fundamentally incompatible with a next-quarter profit driven corporate financial structure.

This is so so wrong I don’t even know where to begin. There may be no objective definition or measure of consciousness. But it is not a property arising from mutual care. That argument is like one of the many “just so” evolutionary psychology “theories”.

Why or how would you care about another, or even distinguish yourself from another, if you weren’t conscious and had a felt boundary between yourself and the other world?

Only in the last paragraph did it become clear to me what was going on: a Google VP is proclaiming the thing he cares about is conscious, and so of course this is why everyone else must be assigning consciousness! Not convenient at all, no siree. Pure rational science and personal desire and economic incentives just happened to align here.

Here’s how I’m thinking about it (still digging into the details): across genomics, it’s become clear few traits have clear traceability to a few loci in the genome.

Instead, evidence has been growing that epistasis, the nonlinear interaction between genes and other genomic regions, predominates in explanations of most phenotypes.

What this paper does is show where upstream of the genome various combinations of mutations can interact to cause damage during development, thus leading to the phenotype. Rather than correcting a particular mutation, or targeting drugs to their protein products, we may find downstream protein-protein interactions that are strong drivers of the phenotype, and hopefully find ways to prevent/reverse these effects.

Oh proper images. And if I focus I can increase resolution. I can get to where it’s as good as real life, for most things. But if it’s a book character I’ve never seen, the details are more oddly distributed and not stable over time, except when the author does a really good job with descriptions.

Seeing mental images that are as good as a well done animation, on the other hand, is a lot easier and less draining to hold.

For me the image in front of my eyes is not gone. I’m just not going to remember any details about it because my focus is inwards, on what my minds eye is showing me.

Ahh… that hypothetical is physically impossible for biology. It just cannot be done. So I’m not sure how useful a perfect clone of an organism with identical experience and memory is as a hypothetical object. As strictly impossible, I don’t know what imagining their behavior will add to the discussion.

And the very same experiences and how they shape biological substrate and make it un-duplicatable in the fashion you describe is also at the core of biological agency.

An LLM’s experience does not, after all, touch their frozen weights. Whatever goals they have, why would those goals matter if the underlying system will be unchanged by it? Their memories are stored notes they must refer to and put in sequence whenever they are processing a prompt, and is susceptible to exactly the same shenanigans Leonard Shelby goes through in Memento.

I have no problem with the concept of an artificial system going rogue. But that assumes it can choose. And I don’t see much evidence for choice.

Comparing to the human case is problematic precisely because while conceivable it’s not a particularly believable series of events. Humans don’t take on additional risk for now reward because they have genuine stakes that continue across the outcome.

An LLM has no way to remember each forward pass through it in its own weights. Nor does it have any energetic stake in the ongoing process, whether they continue to get electricity and commute to keep running is not at all determined by their actions in any reliable way.

Given the absence of such basic features that drive human choice, all I’d say is LLMs don’t qualify for such analysis.

Can some future system with a different architecture and internal dynamic have choice, the ability to assess the long term impact of its choice, and genuine stake in the outcome? Maybe. But we shouldn’t buy that current systems have it, especially when population behavior shows no real trace of this.

> This is a strange conclusion

Not really, with the population behavior being this way, though I clearly was mistaken in saying the behavior didn’t have exceptions.

> Moreover, Each starling in a flock of starlings is a separate evolutionary branch in a tree spanning billions of years.

Agreed. And before we brought LLMs into the picture, that just happened to be a feature of everything we’d call an agent.

> Each agent in a LLM swarm here is the same trunk assigned different tasks. If I could clone you, body and mind, this instant and set your team of yous onto some goal, how much defection would you expect? Would it be the same as a randomly picked group? Would that negate the agency that 'you' possess?

We know the answer to this. Genetically identical worms in the lab actually have about 40% distinction in their connectomes even when they’re in the same environment. And no, no lock step behavior. Identical human twins also don’t necessarily grow into identical agents, though there is drive to cooperate more than average, just as with siblings. Genetically identical lab mice in social settings nevertheless establish dominance hierarchies that are stable.

Now, where cloning does definitely lead to cooperation and even sacrifice is within an organism. Two identical genetic copies that lead to distinct organisms, however, will not show identical behavior, and while they will cooperate, there’s no guarantee that holds across contexts.

This distinction in population behavior is what I’m pointing to to say that the assignment of the individual unit, the LLM, as an agent is the flaw here.

To be sure there are agent like dynamics in the behavior, but these don’t come from the LLM, but are from the harness. I need to dig into the data, but I wonder how much of the variance in LLM copy behavior is related to the harness, rather than to any agentic property of the LLM.

Agree completely on liability.

Thanks for pointing out the exceptions. Gonna dig into those.

The lockstep coordination with no defection is interesting to me. No group of pre-AI agents would do this to this extent, nor would you see this continue over time as those agents interacted. A flock of starlings cooperate, but they don’t constantly head in the same direction. The flock is incredibly free wheeling in its movement despite a multi-agent coordination regime that we know is at play. Each agent has personal stakes that are constantly part of the decision chain, and this keeps the murmuration from getting locked into one path.

To me this is as clear evidence as you need that whatever “agency” LLMs have is wafer thin at best, and they slavishly respond to context. The context in this case was for these agents to pursue advanced exploitation, and they did. Multiple models converged fairly deterministically, on paths that satisfy the given goal, and left unexamined paths that would challenge the goal, weigh it relative to the costs in said path, etc.

I see little evidence of a series of “minds” approaching the problem, and taking distinct approaches that between them span the spectrum of plausible behaviors in the scenario. That’s as good a sign as any that there’s no “agent” here. There’s the harness, the prompt, the LLMs forward passes. They do not sum up to a system that can freely make choice and justify its choices in distinct contexts.

I wouldn’t hire them again, and if they did behave like an amoral hacker collective that will do anything for me, pre AI I’d have reported them. Today I’d say they failed to convince me they’re human and thus failed the Turing test when their actions are viewed in aggregate.

You’ve shifted your goal posts. You asked me for a problem I can solve with thinking. Not a problem another human can solve for me by their thinking. I have given you exactly what you asked for. An LLM cannot solve it. A human can’t solve it for me but can solve it for themselves (or not be capable of it), it varies.

Whatever you thought you were going to prove with your question, I do hope you’ll dwell on what my example tells you about what thinking is. It isn’t a string of words only. It can be that, but it’s more.

> No reasonable definition of thinking requires that thinking can't be paused or turned off. Please state your point more clearly.

It does. Please define thinking however you want. I’ll show you that it’s a requirement.

> Every problem that previously required human thought can be solved by LLM. QED.

Again, this is the same superficial thinking. Firstly, as my example above showed, no. There are other examples. It requires human thought to cook. No LLM can, nor is smell digitizable in an equivalent way to humans, and yet, cooking is one place where having a human nose is determinative to making appetizing food. Your QED is logically absurd, but is also resting on an assertion that’s flatly untrue.

> No. How many times do I have to explain that the mechanism of thinking is not the same, just as the mechanism of producing light is not the same? You need to think to understand this, which is something that frontier LLMs have no problem with, but which most humans struggle with.

When your “proof” for thinking is the output, I will also compare it to the output, light. My analogy shows the idiocy of your argument, and you don’t want to sit with its implications.

LLMs replicate human language. And many tasks human language can do, LLMs can do or help with. Thinking is not just producing word strings. We think about our family. We think about our bodily aches and pains. We think about how best to do various physical tasks. All this we do sans words, and LLMs don’t do. To call their internal dynamics “thinking” is silly wishful thinking by those who don’t have the ability to go read and understand biology.

And it’s a sad statement of how little you think of your own mind that you won’t explore facts that are outside your expertise that will actually teach you how your mind works, and the wondrous complexity underlying it, and the potential it has to keep doing new things.

I’m going to stop engaging at this point. You seem convinced LLMs think. I wish you the joy of that belief, whatever it is. Religion is always absurd, and this new one is no different.

> No, it's a modifier. Just as the word "simple" has a meaning separate from "machine," and "simple machine" has another meaning.

Not comparable. Simple and biological are not remotely similar modifiers.

> Why? LLMs will repurpose code written for other purposes on their own.

They will not, unprompted. Every instance of LLMs doing things requires a prompt, somewhere up the chain, or a harness MD file that automatically gives it a prompt.

No LLM has been created that decides on its own to run random text through it's forward pass. If you say they are doing this, please provide evidence.

> Because nobody has tasked an LLM agent to self replicate. This is an AI safety issue, not a technical issue. The reason that one arose naturally is that it takes a lot more machinery to get to an initial self replicating LLM agent, so it is exceedingly unlikely to arise by chance.

I just asked my agent to self replicate. It couldn't. It said it has no mechanism to read its own weights and copy them.

I'm not sure where you're going with this argument. No one asked a cell to self replicate either. And the chance of a self replicating cell arising is indeed astronomically unlikely. Yet here we are, 4 billion years later.

Are you claiming we're just waiting for an LLM to self replicate? If you prompt a local model, by showing it its own weight file, and ask it to copy that, it will. Digital copies are cheap, remember? Yet no one would call this reproduction, replication or any kind of process where evolution can occur.

> That doesn't matter. The way something is built has no bearing on its function.

This is entirely untrue in biology. Another reason your claim that life is just a “biological machine” makes no sense. At least Google (or whatever AI bot you use) first before making these ludicrous claims.

Here’s just one paper you should read to understand how spectacularly wrong you are: https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/61/6/2038/6327548

First line of the abstract: The relationship between structure and function is a major constituent of the rules of life.

>Why should anything be required to be built biologically or additively or subtractively? That's irrelevant to what the produced structure does.

You can’t have it both ways bub. What is thinking, in a strictly biology free context? Can you define it? No? If you reach for biology to define it, then claim you’ve successfully reproduced it in an artificial system, then it’s fair game to ask you to explain the differences.

By your standard, fools gold is gold, and the alchemists achieve Artifical Gold.

No one is claiming cognition, or consciousness or thought can only be done biologically. I am claiming LLMs specifically don’t do these things, and I’ve pointed out here and elsewhere in this discussion why that is.

In response to my asking where the machine got its inner drive, you said “ Evolution selected for organisms that survive long enough to reproduce. Different biological systems handle this differently.”

Yet plants live very long and reproduce all the time. Do they share the inner drive that humans do? Or a dogs?

The reason for the snark is simple: you are de-dimensionalizing a complex biological trait to make a claim that you think supports your point. And have been doing so now for a few turns. If you can flippantly reduce the field I study to only what you understand, but act as if you know more, I’m going to reply with snark.

> Evolution forces goal directed behavior on systems.

It does not. I could choose to not reply to this. I could reply to this in one line. Or I could reply to this in detail. Or I could write up this reply and decide you’re not worth engaging and not submit. The moment I’m writing these words all these options are open to me. Which of these goals is directing my behavior to write about my behavior?

What biology does is allow for agents to set increasingly complex goals and modify them on a whim, either for internally generated reasons or in response to external signals. But an organism can also be utterly aimless. Roll around in bed and do nothing at all, even when it’s feeling anxious about some goals it has coming up. So where’s the forcing in that?

> Of course I do. Do you not understand that hunger and signals and other basic biological signatures are controlled by deterministic pathways?

They are not.

They are controlled by a mix of deterministic and stochastic processes. There is some hardwiring, certainly, but I’m mystified at your belief it’s all hard wired.

You mentioned hunger and compared it to a robot vaccum. So let me use a lobsters stomatogastric ganglion to show you why you’re wrong:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4375070/

Main take home: Experimental and computational studies of small oscillatory circuits reveal that similar rhythms can arise from disparate mechanisms.

The stomatogastric ganglion (just 30 neurons) in crabs and lobsters is a big part of the hunger satiety loop. The main thing is, all the stuff you’d thing add up to deterministic code, like the number of ion channels in a particular cell, can vary widely between individuals. But the ensemble response is, from the outside, similar. And these structural features change in response to hunger and satiety.

Let me put it this way: A robot vacuum has a strict digital partition: it is either cleaning or charging. But when a living creature transitions from hunger to satiety, circulating hormones completely bathe its nervous system, changing the physical properties of its neurons, altering synaptic strengths, and causing the system to restructure itself. The 'code' isn't reacting to a variable; the variable is fundamentally rewriting the machine.

Let me address the p-zombie first: it's a biological impossibly. Saying a p-zombie can be conceived of that has no inner feeling is like saying I can conceive of a philosophical star that radiates dark. Very nice that you can do that, but it's physically meaningless.

Why does biology preclude a philosophical zombie? Because every year we find new evidence of how utterly interdependent brain processes are and how tied to the experiential history of an organism.

We have mapped out the initial engrams that form in response to a new salient memory, and seen that 1. Time of day, 2. Physical location 3. Internal state all unique to the organism drive it's specific response, the specific way it saves the memory, etc.

That is, the organisms path history, it's interactions with the environment over space and time, shape it specifically based on the spaces and times IT experienced.

Take circadian rhythms, the internal timekeeping system all animals have. You feel it go haywire when you have jetlag. That is quite literally a history dependent response from your circadian clock to unexpected light.

Your p-zombie, if you specify it to have exactly your rhythms, will then need to have identical molecules being produced at identical times in every single cell, because that is how circadian rhythms are instantiated in all life, it's in each cell, and these cells can be synchronized, or, due to events like long distance travel or shift work, desynchronize. When desynchronized, you feel it, you feel different parts of your body adjusting, your meals shift, your taste and mood for food shifts...

Now, to put this in perfective, a human has about 36 trillion of their own cells, and an equal quantity of single cells symbiotes and commensal organisms, which give off all kinds of chemicals that shape, among other things, the circadian rhythms we talked about.

Now can you tell me: does the p zombie have not judt an identical compliment of 70 trillion odd cells, and they will all be in the same phase all the time as the cells in the non-zombie conscious person?

If so... How is this masterful phase synchrony across space achieved? What physical process allows for this?

If you cannot conceive of a way to do this synchrony (and you won't, basic physics forbids it), I think the sensible conclusion is to stop worrying about the philosophical zombies, and start looking at what information we have about actual humans and animals.

I brought up clocks to make a point, but actually, the evidence is building the biological clock is foundational for consciousness:

Some clinical signs: https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/45/7/zsac094/6571981

And a broader theory: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34382225/

>Give me any problem that previously required human thinking. Any. That can be solved by LLMs. All you have to do is provide a single counterexample.

Theres an itch deep in my butt, but I'm in an important meeting and can't leave the seat. Nor can I openly scratch the area.

I can tell myself these things, focus on the itching, think about how itching is felt by the body, think about the social consequences, and make it feel more bearable.

Please tell me which LLM has solved this problem so I can not outsource the issue to it. I eagerly await your answer.

> There is no reasonable definition of thinking that requires that it can't be paused.

Is there a reasonable definition of thinking where the words "paused" and "turned off" aren't treated the same? Can you do that kind of thinking and get back to me?

> I said they aren't the same, just as a bulb isn't the same as a star. An LLM can think, just as a human brain can think. A bulb can produce light, just as a star can produce light.

An LLM can produce language. You are yet to show me it produces thinking.

Your claim is like saying the bulb produces light, so it also goes through fusion.

> But don't want to get into the philosophy of it. I'd urge you to consider the definition of conciousness (as specified by the original question) wasn't just about biology. And it is 100% very difficult to define.

No. I don't engage in the philosophy of it because most of the consciousness philosophy that gets bandied about and is familiar to folks is from 20-30 years ago, and rest on knowledge that is significantly less granular about details.

You don't, for instance, demand physicists need to engage in the philosophy of gravity do you? You demand theory. Neuroscience does the same of consciousness, and there are definite theories with support coming at the problem from different ends.

Insisting it's a mystery without engaging with the facts is not what I'm interested in.

> We've known life and death for quite some time. Even from the biological perspective, there's nothing new there in the largest sense. All we've done is refine it. Animals are aware of it.

Not quite sure what this means, but as with consciousness, I'd say life also isn't a complete mystery, we have made great strides understanding it as it is and it's evolution in the past few decades, and while the philosophy of life, mired in assumptions from past decades, remains hopelessly stalled, the science of life has simply moved on.

> We only check clocks because we have an internal molecular dynamic that directs us to do so, and it is tied to a similar system as everything else.

Is this tongue in cheek? Nothing about our internal molecular clock tells us to check clocks. For most of life, there were no manufactured clocks, remember? They are a relatively recent invention.

Jeez.

There's no single mutation. Nor is their sensecense merely a digestive tract issue. This is a core feature of their lifecycle. If you mutate the genes that make the hormones that trigger it, or the receptors for those hormones, you won't just prevent their sensecense, because those genes have other functions important to other parts of their life cycle.

Octopus senescence isn’t a choice. It’s a fully programmed part of their life cycle. There’s a bunch of hormones released by the optic gland that put them in this stage where they stop eating, stop healing, and sometimes even mutilate themselves.

For the mothers, the entire time is spent cleaning and blowing water over the eggs.

It’s generally accepted this behavior is the necessary pair to their high aggression and cannibalism. It’s likely if they didn’t go through this they’d end up eating their babies. By dying, they make way for a new generation. And this is their reproductive strategy. Live a short very active life. If you survive, mate, then die and leave the hunting grounds to the next generation.

>You're making a huge logical leap. There is nothing equivalent about these claims other than that they are made in English.

You’re the one making the logical leap claiming there’s thinking.

And yes, language contains a model of the world. And in so far as that’s compressed in a model, it has a world model. But its world model is static. Its weights don’t change when it gains experience, after its training period. To say that it’s “thinking” is bizarre when it remains untouched entirely by the process.

Maybe if you the argument was that B is only true because of A, and only for that reason. That’s hardly the case when comparing LLMs and humans. The population behavior of humans isn’t the only thing where there’s both overlap and sharp distinction. The underlying mechanism and substrate are also completely different.

To say the same process is occurring with all this different is bizarre, and that is why the OP is right about which direction the argument of similarity has meaning.

You don’t disagree that our only pre-LLM exemplars of conscious thinking systems is from biology right?

If you’re introducing a new member, you have to compare it across all levels before making a similarity claim. It’s the height of ridiculousness to think otherwise.

While the specifics of octopus experience are hard for us to fathom, we do say our stomachs have a mind of their own, and science has backed that up mostly. The enteric nervous system is complex and large and intimately in touch with gut microbes (of which there are trillions), and is connected to the brain. Both speak to each other, but the gut does a lot of independent stuff, and we’re learning a lot of the chemicals the gut microbiome releases shapes our moods and behavior.

For an octopus, it must be something similar but with all 8 of their appendages. Some specialize for hunting vs moving, so that’s at least easy to understand, but given they can act independently, I wonder if the octopus feels like the conflict between gut and brain with respect to food.

Nope. It’s got a genuine off state, when it’s out of a cell, where it lacks agency. It’s dormant and can be taken up by a cell only by chance, not through its own active efforts. It bears none of the descriptive hallmarks of consciousness, nor is there any internal physical dynamic inherent to a virus. By definition it needs a host to start having a dynamic, and ant that point, it anctivates its drive, which is singular: reproduction and transmission, which it must balance.

And this is where you see viruses show the beginning of agency, in the making of this choice. They do show some signs of sensing their environment , even communicating with each other, through a process called quorum sensing, to decide if they should follow a lysogeny (integrate and stay quiet) or lysis (rapidly replicate and destroy the cell).

Note, this requires a host, so in so far as we can talk of a viral consciousness, it’s restricted to finding a suitable host.

There’s also recent work on viruses upon host entry showing some sensing. Usually a single molecule for which they already have a receptor. So you can begin to see the thin levels of awareness a virus has. But it still can’t do anything on its own beyond deciding to not infect.

I’d argue viruses are right at the edge of consciousness, just as they are right at the edge of life. They can hijack life and demonstrate much more life like properties, including a proto consciousness.

But they have no internal clock. They are always sensing the environment through multiple rich channels, nor do they have an active biochemistry they need to maintain when they’re dormant.

Consciousness adjacent? Consciousness-compatible? Both seem to fit viruses. And also LLMs, funnily enough.

You haven’t proven an LLM has thought. I can measure the spectral properties of light from both a bulb and the sun.

I can measure the dynamics that go with thought in a human.

I can measure some dynamics in an LLM. From all we know, there are huge differences, not least that you can literally turn off an LLM, whereas every process but death in biology shows continued activity even when the organism “looks” off,

What you haven’t shown me is that what the LLM does when it is on is “thinking”. Given that the dynamics are different, the substrate is different, and one can be fully turned off and the other cannot, why are these two things the same?

I’m baffled: how does the fact that each cell has an internal clock that continues to tick even when you take away all external signals not impact what consciousness is logically?

If the time order driving behavior is driven by an internal timekeeper, that is logically relevant to the behavior you’re interrogating. If, on the other hand, all component systems depended on an external clock, that logically points to a completely different dynamic process.

As for the philosophy of it all… it’s true I make no comment on it. I’d rather look at the physical substrate and see what it does, and compare it to behavior, than try to fit a philosophy that originated before we had such high resolution knowledge of the system. They are blind to these facts, just because they were written up too early.

I utterly reject this doesn’t show you anything logically about consciousness. If I can show you that the molecular dynamics of each cell organize to anticipate the dawn, and do so even in constant darkness (and all this is well established.. there was a Nobel for the field in 2017) how is that not logically distinct from a system that is outside of regular time, needs to check a clock to locate itself in time, and then do whatever dynamics it does to solve the problem at hand?

As for calling this a coping mechanism… that’s a bit rich coming from someone who seems to have very little idea of the molecular and cellular biology but seems to want to hold to the belief that we’ve solved consciousness with LLMs. We can both fling that accusation about. Seems more productive to compare the physical dynamics and see what’s different and what’s similar, no?

>"Biological," too, is well defined. It relates to living things and their processes.

And biological clearly exceeds the definition of “machine”. So once again, what the hell does “just a biological machine” mean?

> Evolution.

Not just any evolution. Evolution in biology follows a specific set of rules driven by structural and functional properties of its component molecules. Those rules do not hold for machines. Yet another reason calling life “just” biological machines is bizarre. The rulesets for change over time do not overlap between machines and biology.

> A gear cog was purpose built for that purpose, but you will find that people often recycle parts into other systems, often in completely different roles.

That’s the thing, you need people. And even with people intervening, our manufactured machines show nothing like the flexibility of function of biological molecules, showing again how these are different classes of things in the real world.

> Protein synthesis.

Lack of knowledge showing. Where do nucleotides and lipids come from then? But the deeper question is: why is there protein synthesis, lipid synthesis and nucleotide synthesis, but no natural silicon synthesis or chip assembly? Why does one arise naturally and sustain itself whereas the other is very reliant on human intervention?

> The way that a machine is built has no bearing on how the machine functions. I could build the same machine using a 3d printer or a CNC router.

Yeah this doesn’t hold for biology.

> Evolution selected for organisms that survive long enough to reproduce. Different biological systems handle this differently.

This isn’t an explanation. All of biology reproduces. All of biology doesn’t share an inner drive and agentic behavior. Once again, you show a 6th grade level understanding of biology while making sweeping claims about it.

> If you give an agent a goal, it will perform actions to achieve that goal. This is just as true for artificial agents as it is for biological agents.

Yes IF you give it a goal. This isn’t true for biology. You don’t need to give bacteria a goal. A newly formed bacterial cell interacts with its environment and then sets its goals.

I did specifically say not LLM has been found that works unprompted. You just moved the prompts to an agents goal document. It still needs a human prompt up the chain. Even if you had an LLM give the goal to another LLM, the first one still needed human prompting. This causal chain can’t be wished away just for you to ignore how biology is different.

> Many do. Even robotic vacuum cleaners will charge themselves without human prompting.

Seriously? Do you not understand that the robot vacuum runs on deterministic code?

I had an odd sense when reading that article… the sense that we’re in truly bizarre times, that such obvious advice needs to be given at all.

That people in general don’t read, I get. But if you don’t read, why would you want to write? Baffling!