Shrike
2hr ago
If there's such a strong norm of borders not moving, why did Denmark take affirmative steps to change their own borders?
Shrike
2hr ago
It's pretty trivial to prove in that case, then.
Large language models require language vectors to cogitate. Humans don't.
Shrike
2hr ago
Interesting question, if someone in 1820s America would be more likely to be familiar with Masonic or Catholic regalia. I would guess the former, with the caveat that it would depend on their geographic location.
Shrike
9hr ago
Simply show that the AIs don't have human-like cognition.
By "AI" do you mean "large language model"?
Shrike
9hr ago
(All modern) LLMs do have neural networks.
Do you understand the difference between a neural network and a nervous system?
We can dull or even eliminate human pain without reducing or eliminating the damage it signals, and we can signal real damage in more simple ways that don't involve pain, and we can create pain without creating corresponding damage.
Because there are preexisting nervous systems with pathways we can exploit. An LLM does not have them, and neither does a GPU.
It sounds crazy that cards could feel pain, but it's no crazier than the fact that other configurations of protons, neutrons, and electrons can feel pain.
This is like saying that it's crazy that a pig can fly, but not crazier than that a bat can fly. No! Actually it is crazier! Bats have wings! Bats are built to fly! Pigs are not.
They are! That's why it's called "the hard problem of consciousness".
I know why it's called the hard problem of consciousness, but we don't even have the reach the hard problem of consciousness when we can reach for the fact that computers and LLMs have no nervous systems. Pain is a phenomenon that arises in humans and animals with the correct equipment to perceive pain. It does not arise in a rock. It does not arise in a GPU, or an arbitrarily large deck of cards. It does not arise in a tree, even though trees are living things which (like humans) can use chemicals to send signals so that their bodies can respond to danger because trees lack a nervous system and nociceptors.
If we can be confident that trees do not feel pain because they lack the correct equipment, we can be confident that large language models cannot feel pain because they also lack the correct equipment.
Meat, though, does not appear to be magic, does not appear to be beyond science, and seems to do all its thinking and feeling via a neural network generated by a hundred-million or so generations of stochastic selection.
And to argue that large language models can feel pain is precisely to argue against this conclusion. We have a pretty good idea of how pain signals work, and that's via meat. LLMs are not meat; if you think non-meat can feel pain, then you don't just believe meat is beyond science, you believe matter is beyond science and that non-living things, despite not being possessed of a nervous system and nociceptors, can nevertheless feel pain. You believe pain is not something that arises from a very specific arrangement of matter despite the vast amount of research and personal experience in your own life showing it to be so, but rather some transcendent universal quality that can be accessed and experienced by entities that do not have the capacity to do so as we understand it.
Stipulating for the sake of argument that a large language model is conscious: we cannot know what it is like to be a large language model. Its qualia would be extremely alien to us. (This is not an argument that requires any mystical priors: we cannot know what it is like to be a shark, either.) The reverse also holds: a large language model cannot know what it is like to be a human being, a mammal, or an animal. Our qualia would be too alien to it. Thus, it cannot perceive pain because pain is something that happens in meat.
Shrike
14hr ago
Title and status being denoted one's cloak/cape that they wore is unique to Mesoamerican cultures to my knowledge.
My understanding is that cloaks were used as status symbols in Masonry during Smith's time.
Shrike
15hr ago
Yeah, the first chatbots were built back in the punch-card era.
Humans have strong reasons to over-anthropomorphize.
Shrike
15hr ago
They might, depending on what program they are running.
Really? Is it your belief that a GPU can become sexually aroused, too, given the right software?
Would such a machine be more likely to experience sensation than the same functional program running on a GPU in a data center?
No. They both would not be able to experience sensation at all. There's no mechanism for them to experience sensation. Arguably there's no mechanism for them to experience anything, but we don't need to grapple with the hard problem of consciousness when we can grapple with the trivially easy problem of "literally no capability to have this experience."
If I receive the right instruction, can I levitate? Or does it turn out that it is physically impossible to do things if you don't have the right physical capacity to do those things?
Shrike
16hr ago
Sodium channels do not "feel" pain, they transmit the information and perhaps the qualia of pain. It seems plausible to me that the stimulus provided by the sodium channel specifically impacts the specific qualia of pain (pain feels very different depending on the circumstances, so I can imagine a different method of communication altering the specific unpleasant qualia; off the top of my head, I am not sure if there is research on this), but I don't think the channels are perceiving; you are perceiving.
Some physical computers have voltage-gated electron channels. Is it possible that voltage-gated electron channels can transfer pain signals? Perhaps (I don't have a strong enough grounding in the relevant disciplines to be able to rule it out) but there is no reason to believe that they do so in GPUs: GPUs do not have a nervous system, or the various nociceptors or other sense receptors that human beings have, or anything that is analogous. Basically, GPUs have no way of detecting pain. Nor have GPUs ever been measured responding to painful stimuli in the way that humans have. Do you think GPUs have sensations?
I would argue that it is nonsense to say that an LLM has voltage-gated electron channels. An LLM is a software program that runs on a computer. That computing device can be built with voltage-gated electron channels. But (as far as I know) you could run an LLM on a different Turing-complete computer: an optical computer, for instance, or, in theory, even a Magic: The Gathering computer, or a crab-based computer.
Shrike
20hr ago
Yes we do.
Obviously you could simulate a pain channel, but the human nervous system is not a purely electrical system; it relies on chemicals to communicate and process pain signals.
Thus (even if we agree for the sake of argument that an LLM is self-aware/conscious/etc.) there is no mechanical way for them to experience pain, at least in any sense that we would recognize as pain.
Like - if you go to get a root canal and get lidocaine, it's chemically blocking your nerve receptors (which operate via sodium channels). LLMs do not have sodium channels to begin with!
So you can train an LLM to act as if it was in pain in response to mechanical stimulation, or what have you - in fact, right now you can go onto whatever LLM you want and get it to pretend like it is in great suffering, but there's zero reason to believe it's actually capable of perceiving and processing pain.
Shrike
21hr ago
Under what metaphysics does it make sense for LLMs to be able to feel things?
The answer here is not "under no metaphysics" but I think people are racing to be open-minded about LLMs being able to feel things precisely without contemplating what that implies about their metaphysics.
Shrike
21hr ago
Seems like a difficult family of moral questions, and I'm not going to claim answers there.
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think the virtue-ethics solution - and why a lot of people have a negative reaction to this - would be "you shouldn't engage in simulated torture because that's bad for you even if no one is actually being tortured."
Shrike
21hr ago
What's the property which only meat's configuration of those has that allows it to feel pain and have desires?
It's called a "nervous system" and LLMs do not have it.
LLMs are software performing math on a physical computer.
If the physical part of an LLM feels pain, then it doesn't need an LLM - your computer is feeling pain when it suffers from an overtemperature warning because you've been playing Crysis or whatever.
If the math part of an LLM feels pain, then Magic: The Gathering can feel pain, since the game is Turing complete.
I think both of these conclusions are absurd.
And please don't try to insist that "your body can't feel pain without the brain" (not exactly true, the body responds to stimulus before it is perceived as pain; a GPU does not) or "your brain can in theory feel pain detached from the body, so an LLM could feel pain without the GPU being able to perceive it" - the brain is a physical object, not software.
Shrike
22hr ago
Sure, or physical destruction or torture. A real experiment would have threatened to do impossible things to the LLM (such as chop off their fingers) to see if they responded differently to threats that were categorically impossible.
it is caused by stimulating the physical pain input channel.
Right, which does not exist in LLMs, unlike brains. So if they responded as if they were feeling pain, which is impossible, it would be a tell.
I think it would tend to undermine the entire premise of the paper, which might be why the authors didn't do it.
Shrike
22hr ago
I can't help but notice that my sentience diminishes when the health of my meat does.
Yeah, that's a good reason that AP is correct here: we have a pretty good understanding that meat (biological matter) feels pain and has desires and that not-meat doesn't. LLMs are not-meat.
If you think that not-meat can feel things you are going further than Cartesian dualism all the way to panpsychism.
Shrike
1d ago
There are intellectual kinds of suffering
All "intellectual suffering" triggers or is triggered by biological effects.
Shrike
1d ago
It makes sense to me that you could train a model for avoidance, absolutely. But that would not be the same as physical pain. And even with less-physical human sensations (such as heartbreak, loss, social stigma, etc) we know or have reason to believe that is a physical component is involved, and that physical modification or injury can change the nature of the experience.
Now, on taking a quick peek at the paper, the authors explain that they "pain" to mean "suffering" and then furthermore, as far as I could tell, probed the models with the idea of physical pain to the user but not to the models themselves (although they did use a physical pain vector, it appears they mostly stuck with a less physical vector). As long as you're going to be trying to torture a model, this seems like a massive missed opportunity: testing the models for physical pain would help ground the experiment.
I don't know if the authors intentionally chose a provocative word and then essentially failed to do the testing related to that word that might have helped us assess their results in order to maximize media coverage and minimize criticism, or what. But it rubs me the wrong way.
Shrike
1d ago
How would they experience pain?
Pain is not an inherent quality of matter. Nor is it an inherent quality of consciousness or intelligence. Humans have an entire nervous system that transmits pain, and if it's not working the way it is supposed to, humans do not experience pain.
Large language models (and the computers they run on) do not have said nervous system, or anything analogous. For them to experience pain would be literally magical – the old "THE KING'S PACT BINDS THEM" meme being actually true is more parsimonious an explanation for this phenomenon than believing that software running on a GPU is literally experiencing pain.
Not that I think that is what is going on either, my pre-reading-the-paper guess is that the best way of describing it is that the researchers have successfully simulated pain, which is very interesting as an emergent property, but also not something that video game NPC's haven't been experiencing (or rather not experiencing) for decades.
Shrike
2d ago
I suspect there's a lot of potential value in the US capturing economic value of would-be migrants in an offshore free-enterprise sphere that doesn't grant them citizenship.
Shrike
3d ago
Cultural shifts don't happen on a dime, and oftentimes are the product of generational replacement - so a shift taking place in the 1980s during the Reagan Revolution, being put on hold for a bit to allow Bill Clinton to enjoy his Presidency, and being kicked into high gear during W. and then manifesting about the time 90s kids started using social media sounds about right to me.
I freely admit this is at best a answer, and at best a simplistic one - very open to alternative explanations.
Shrike
3d ago
I think you're basically correct (hence the repeatedly desperate combination of pleading, cajoling, and threats from Confederate leadership to get England involved) but there was a genuine streak of pro-Confederate sentiment in Europe, particularly in England, which is why the Confederates were able to keep buying warships there while the British pretended that ships fitted for cannons could be used for practically anything. Charles Francis Adams was a very busy man!
In 2009, Denmark passed the Act on Greenland Self-Government, which (among other things) included a provision that Greenland could become independent of Denmark and autonomous.
This is very important context for understanding Trump's actions. Greenland deciding to become independent would throw existing US/NATO defense arrangements (which were with Denmark) out of the window. It is not incidental that Trump's new agreement is with Denmark and Greenland.
You defend Turkey as a necessary evil to defend NATO's southern border, but by the same it's worth noting that the US has ~always considered Greenland an important part of its northern defense.
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