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So what?
@self_made_human proceeds to generate a lot of prose, but all he really needed to do was press for some substantiation of this argument. «Weights» is a word. What LLMs really are is information. Why exactly is this specific mode of information incompatible with having high-level properties like «personality flaws»? You accuse him of incoherence in the inane tiger side debate, but «models are weights, ergo anthropomorphized traits don't apply except as a loose metaphor» is basically schizophrenic in my book. What's the actual claim here? That anthropomorphic properties are substrate-dependent, that functionalism is wrong? Just say so instead of snarking and appealing to incredulity. Ideally with some defense for this opinion.
That "AI", more specifically, LLMs, shouldn't be thought of as minds or cognitively aware "beings" or any other such "conceptions" because we know exactly, precisely, specifically what they are.
I don't understand why this is so hard to understand.
Again, let's use a toy analogy. You see a house and say "That house is really a landscape for a family to build dreams. It's a compassion and bonding machine" Well, that's fine if it works for you, but what the house really is is a house. It's made of lumber, sheetrock, shingles, and various bits of metal and plastic. I have no problem with you dressing it up with whatever emotive map you like. But it's just a house. These other responses seem to be arguing that the basic definition of "house" should be discarded in favor of these highly subjective mappings.
Because it's either a non sequitur or a completely bizarre theory of cognitive awareness.
In other words, only things for which we do not have this exact, precise, specific understanding can be minds or cognitively aware beings? So cognitive awareness intrinsic to X is conditional on our ignorance of the nation of X? Or a mind is inherently not-knowable? Or what?
I repeat, what's your actual argument here? I gave you some options.
This condescension is not helping. You are apparently vastly overestimating the quality of your ontology and epistemology. I hope you realize how frankly childish it is, using my helpful examples. A house is a house rather than a landscape not because we can precisely define a house, but because we can precisely define both a house and a landscape – or at least train an LLM to investigate embedding similarity – and see how the definitions do not intersect, and so applying the token "house" to a "landscape" or vice versa is purely metaphorical speech. We have a definition of an LLM. Do you have a rigorous definition of a mind that excludes LLMs on principled grounds?
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